AI Agents vs Human CSRs

Dennis Ayotte 0:00
Pop an Alani So

Dennis Ayotte 0:04
Alright, everybody, welcome to talk of the trades. I think this is episode 12. We're just going to run with it because I think the last one was 11. So shout out to Bianca for keeping count. We appreciate you.

Dennis Ayotte 0:16
Today on the show, we're talking about a couple SEO topics. So some stuff about Google, AI mode updates on referral traffic from jet TPT, and then we'll talk about some stuff on the paid media side. So Google's rolling out a new verified badge, which is which is interesting, but before we get into that, I see it says, what's new on here? Yeah, do we have anything that's new? Um,

Aaron Watters 0:44
Allie comes home tonight. Oh, yeah, I've been without her for four days. It's gonna be great, excited, even that single dad life. Yeah, it's been good. Okay, a lot, a lot of swimming, I'm assuming, a lot of swimming, a lot of story reading, a lot of fake gymnastics. It's good. Okay, nice. Well, I've been a traveling man as you Yeah. So we were in Detroit, had our shoot with window Pro and Bob Guinea. Shout out to Bob Guinea for being such a gem and window Pro. So that was good. And then where else? Oh, I was in Pennsylvania doing some family stuff. You guys have never been in Pennsylvania. Beautiful state, lot of windy roads, lot of hills, a lot of trees. Beautiful state, we

Dennis Ayotte 1:29
were in fair chance, which is like an hour south of Pittsburgh, which is like literally 10 minutes from the West Virginia border. So ended up going to Morgantown and hung out with some family there and did dinner. But I was shocked, like, how close it was. Like my geography, like, once you get past like Texas basically, is not great. So understanding like Pennsylvania, because I guess New York's right there, West Virginia, Ohio, so yeah, but that whole area is just beautiful. I don't know. Have you? Did you go? Or are you going Wellsboro, Pennsylvania, okay, up in the mountains.

Aaron Watters 2:10
Definitely cool. Cool area, Lancaster area and all that for the Amish. Did you go to any of those? No, the area I was in, apparently, George Washington, when he was still like a British General fought the French there. And then general Bracken, I believe, or Bratton, something like that is buried there. So whatever that area is definitely like south of the state. So where your mom was from is, where is it like relative? Yeah, to think it's northeast. Look at it. Don't quote me on that. Sorry, mom, yeah. But the fun story, just getting getting through, not the content yet, but a fun story about chat. GBT, my mom, she goes back. She wrote some books about her small town. Oh, wow. She has some people in her Facebook that are also from back in the day. Last year, we took a beach trip, buried my daughter in the sand, put a bucket over, I swear, there's, there's

Aaron Watters 3:10
put a bucket over her head, just kind of as our thing. Where is she? You know, this woman posts on my mom's Facebook from like, back in Wellsboro. That's incredibly dangerous. Did you know that three children died from sand dune collapses in the last two years? How dare you do that with your grandchild? My mom just was so nice, you know, talking about whatever. Lady did it again this year. Wow, did the Japanese torches or Japanese lanterns? Yeah, we couldn't even get them off the ground. It was so windy. And she does multiple posts about how dangerous it is and how it's illegal. So I turned it into a chat GPT image of this lady screaming at my parents, telling them that it's illegal. So the beauty of AI, my brother happened to comment back at him. Then I, you know, did you post that photo? No, I didn't have the guts to do it. My mom asked us not to. She knew. Okay, you know, Pennsylvania is fun.

Aaron Watters 4:06
Yeah, have have a soft spot. There a spot in the heart. Okay, my mom definitely loves it

Dennis Ayotte 4:11
nice. Yeah? It's a beautiful shape, for sure. So what do we have on? Upcoming content ideas,

Aaron Watters 4:17
yeah, upcoming content ideas. That's an internal No, okay,

Dennis Ayotte 4:23
this is a real show, guys, just so you know. All right, moving on. So first topic, SEO related, talking about Google AI mode, so it's now available in 180 countries, only. English, you know, now has agentic abilities, which I haven't really messed around with that. I have used AI mode for some different things and just kind of testing research. I used it to, like, compare some products. So for like, a week there, I wanted to be a DJ like, I think I told you, my obsession now is watching DJ videos on YouTube. YouTube. So I was like, I want to be a DJ. So I started, I was like, looking at headphones and different things. So, but my wife said, I can't be a DJ at 40. So, you know, that drew her, that dream is dead. No, she actually supported it. I think it was more. So I just let that dream die for now, but so used AI mode on a few things. Looks like they're touting the fact that it can book restaurant reservations, which I feel like that's been around for a while. I know there was, like some rumors before we might have talked about it, how they're rolling out this booking process to like, nail salons and other places. So that'll be interesting wondering, you know, overall thoughts on that, and how far do you think we are until they'll incorporate it into, like, booking appointments for the trades, you know, plumbing, AC, stuff. What are your thoughts there?

Aaron Watters 5:55
Yeah. I mean, they need to get some big movers and shakers to adopt it with a booking calendars. I mean, you've got some key ones with service Titan and the bigger ones that'll probably happen for sooner rather than later. I still think it's probably six months out. You also, you know, most home service companies want to have control over the schedule, so it might be a fake booking just preserving a spot. But the impact here is massive. And if you're not doing online booking, that's a huge miss. And when we look at these like, I don't want to go too far away from Google AI mode, but I would still argue that GPT is agent is much more efficient than the Google one at this point. But when we signed up for Google Ultra, and I think I mentioned in the last pod that, you know, one of the key bullets said that the AI would make outbound calls and do things like that for you, but it was very vague. After signing up. It does not do that. There's no way to get it to do it like the biggest impact that I'm seeing here is, you know, we've talked about SEO, making your website indexable, making sure you have backlinks across the web, like that was the old school, really, really important that Google sees you as a priority. Now we have to be shifting to say this is a Google AI change. However, how are the bots and how are the AI scrapers taking into account the different priorities. So, like, it used to be domain authority for Google was set them apart. Well, there's financial means here. So like, GPT isn't technically going to go to Google first to scan the web. They're going to go to Bing, right? And Jim and I are going to go for Google. So there's still, like, a prioritization where I've seen more Bing maps come from, GPT than Google Maps at times. And so you can still get them. They'll still still go back there, but trying to land the plane, making sure that your services match what the bookings are looking for. And so you can take it back if you look at Google GLS and the Google AI, what actual categories of job types are available in GLS? Does that match your price book in your CRM? Does that match the page title and the content on your page about that service? And so if you take it a step back and say, like AC tune up maintenance. Let's say is under HVAC. Well, AC tune up. Do we have that as something in our price book? Do we then have it as a page on our site, and do we have it as a service under our GBP? All those the taxonomy should match what Google's looking for to make it easier for the AI bot to search it. It's pretty intuitive. They're pretty darn smart. They'll be able to figure it out. But if you can make the AI work less, you're gonna get more visibility.

Dennis Ayotte 8:52
Yeah, and I think we're learning some of that as like, we build out these like AI agents, like, there has to be some sort of, like, consistency in the path and like identifiers, you know, at least if you're trying to do something very custom with an agent, right, like, around specific content. But it seems like we're still in this, like, Wild Wild West. There is no real, like, unique identifiers. We just have a sense of, like matching your price book to the, you know, category, to the page title, to try to make that path, like, a little bit easier for for the bot. What's interesting to me is, so you mentioned, like, you know, there is some, like, booking capabilities already, and the way I understand, like, at least the restaurant reservation thing, like, it actually calls the restaurant, right? And so I'm interested what a world is going to look like when you have AI bots calling AI bots, right? Cuz a little bit of a tangent here, but we're seeing it more and more the trades with like Avoca and broccoli AI and all these like AI agents coming. You know, it's going to be interesting to see. I. They talk to each other, you know? And do they even need to, could they speak like their own language to figure it out? Perhaps. So,

Aaron Watters 10:08
yeah, and do they? Does it become a point to where it's not even a vocal, where it's a okay in GBP, or whatever your lead aggregator is, are you going to put in a different phone line? That's a dedicated Robo line, right? And so then, instead of it being an actual phone call, it could be a different type of media where they're able to, probably, instead of using words, be able to send data back and forth quicker, right? So that that's something like I could see, that's beyond what I would ever be able to develop, but just thinking of what could be down the pipeline,

Dennis Ayotte 10:42
yeah, because you think if it's like aI talking to AI, like the language could be whatever for them to, like, understand it better. So that'll be interesting to follow and see kind of what happens there. Also the fact that it's in so many countries right now, but only in English, so obviously a long way to go that, because is there even 180 English speaking countries out there? I don't know. Maybe there is. We should GPT, yeah, actually, somebody in the comments list out all 180 countries, please. Yeah,

Aaron Watters 11:15
that would be, that would be cool, yeah. Man, there was something key though there? Oh, I'd be interested. So we, we do spot checking, even though we're at the C suite here, like we're really excited about our clients, and when we get a new one, or if one of them has a rough month, or if they adopt a new technology, we we're going to call grade and we're going to take a look at, you know, are they booking or not? With what you've seen? Because I'm pretty I haven't seen a good AI call Booker just yet. At least that could even come close to matching empathy and a lot of stuff. Brigham talk to us about from power selling pros. Is there one that you've seen that's worked well so

Dennis Ayotte 11:55
far, not that I've personally seen. So the one I probably had the most exposure with is the CRM workies. They have their own, like, genius, something or other. And I've listened to a lot of those calls, and not really great, like, some of the kind of issues that have run into is just like the cadence in which it replies a lot of times it doesn't understand the entire, like, list of services that you may offer. But the other big one that was a flag for me is this gentleman had called in on behalf of a deaf person to communicate, and it was like aI trying to talk to this guy. And he was like, hey, just want to let you know I'm calling on behalf of, you know, this person who is hearing impaired, and you know, AI could not it just was like trying to talk over him and ask him questions. So he ended up hanging up. Thankfully, he called back and finally got, like a real person. So that one didn't work great. I'm in all like, the kind of mastermind groups for the trades and stuff like that. And the two I see coming up most frequently that are, you know, the popular ones are the I believe it's Avoca, avo CA, and then the other one is broccoli, which is a very unique name. And then I know we have a couple clients that are using some some other ones that well as well. I'm still not convinced that it's going to book calls as well as like a human, you know would. And we're in a position right now where we have a client asking about their booked appointments, because year over year, it's like, flat, right? And so, you know, one of the things that goes in my mind is like, Oh, well, this year they're using a AI call center person, right? And so or bot and so is there impact? Because I feel like we are spending more, so we should be getting more calls, but we're not booking any more appointments. And so is it an issue? Because now we have aI trying to book some appointments, and their call booking rate is not, you know what it is, but that's probably the metric we would want to look at. Is like, what is the call booking rate for AI versus like a human, and I'm sure they'll probably be benchmarks coming out soon. It would be interesting, if anybody out there on service site and has that information would love you know, for you to share it in the comments or to kind of understand that, but that's something I hadn't thought of until, till now, like, how are these AI bots? Are they being measured, just like humans? Yeah, like

Aaron Watters 14:24
we've got the lead pulse where we're we're basically tagging calls, how they were handled, and things along those lines. We're not getting full coaching advice. But you know, even in the written transcripts that we get, we watch a lot of the GLS leads that come in, and what you typically see, especially with the client that I follow very closely with plumber, that when they outsource their call center, they rarely book. But then, if it's their actual staff and they're available, they book really, really well. That's something that you know we're grading. Them pretty aggressively. Who's grading the call from the bots? And if percent of your calls are going to bots, what are you comparing that data to?

Dennis Ayotte 15:08
Exactly? Yeah, I will say the transcripts for sure have gotten a lot better, at least in we use CTM call tracking metrics, and I can't help myself but to go listen to calls and look at stuff, especially, you know, with certain clients, just to keep a beat on it. And we just launched a campaign for a client through E local. E local is not a platform that we really use a lot, so I really been paying attention to those calls to see kind of what's going on there. And those transcripts have been super helpful to spot check and then dive a little bit deeper, like when I see something so that's promising to see, you know, that get better, and then, you know, I know you started creating, kind of like an agent or a workflow to start pumping those into Gemini, which then spits out back, kind of like A summary of stuff to help with our lead pulse, yeah. So,

Aaron Watters 16:04
yeah, our current process, or it has been, you know, we have people doing call grading, and then we're automating that a bit, but now it's okay, now that it's more AI related and automated, we could actually get more specific and drill down on the types of tags where, if you're teaching virtual assistants on how to tag something, there's a lot of Lost in Translation, or it's just easier to keep five five different tag types. But now that we use an AI agent, we can increase it to 10 to 12 pretty quickly.

Speaker 1 16:36
Yeah, I just had a total like, 10 hat moment like imagine. So now we have aI answering the phones, and then we have aI grading, like, the AI, like, one day they're just gonna collude and be like, No, we're both doing a great job. Yeah? Like, good job. It's so funny to think about that, like, you know, because it's so scary, because not too long ago, like, GPT was testing a model, and it wouldn't, like, turn itself off, you know, so and they literally, like, had to pull the plug. But can you imagine, like, everything is going to be like, AI is checking AI to check AI. That's why HR is super important. Guys. I know that's gonna be interesting.

Aaron Watters 17:22
So know that your oven just turned on. I know, because the AI has got control to your home as well.

Speaker 1 17:27
Oh, man, yeah, don't tell me about it. Our little, little floor robot, like the vacuum thing was going crazy the other day. So I'm like, looking up on online, and of course, we have the brand called Yuffie, and apparently it's not the one you want, because China can, like, tap into your so I was, like, all freaked out now, so it's unplugged, and the robot is is not cleaning my house anymore. So need to, need to shop for a new robot vacuum. So any buddy got good recommendations, put it in the comments. So we're gonna have some fun comments this show, hopefully. So cool. Well, that was a little bit on AI mode. I know we kind of went tangent on it, but it's gonna be very, very interesting to see where we go in the next, like, five to 10 years, and how much of this, like booking and stuff, is going to be done by agents, versus, like, actual people, because I'm not going to lie, like I do like the reservations for restaurants, because I've used it probably 2030, different times with a level of Success. So it's nice. It's like having a personal assistant, you know,

Aaron Watters 18:44
and in your operating system, because you should be on an iPhone, you know, most people should be on an iPhone. I am strongly about that. I am your own operating system is going to be able to curate what you're looking for, and so if your booking preferences have been taken note of then it's going to follow those processes pretty quickly. I mean, yeah, I hate to think about it, but it's, it's going to be necessary evil.

Dennis Ayotte 19:08
Yeah, in kind of to the point you made earlier about how, you know, GBT talks to Bing and Gemini talks to Google. You know, what do you think? Because we already have, like a baseline of like best practices for like being and being places and what that needs to look like, Apple, maps and stuff. Do you think there's going to be a day where you know, Bing becomes even more important from an optimization standpoint, or more a better question, like, what should people be optimizing on Bing right now to make sure that, like, they're compatible with GPT. Do you have any tips on that?

Aaron Watters 19:46
Yeah. I mean, it's this specific things of like, Bing has web tools and their Webmaster Tools making sure that you're you're still set up and configured there. I think the bigger thing is just being places and locality. And then I. Apple Maps is oftentimes lost on agencies and lost on businesses to where, you know, we got so accustomed to with the citations of getting to like the Big Four, like local ease and some of the four aggregators. Now we really need to manually go and claim your apple map citation. Yeah, it's a it's a running joke for within my family that like, Okay, if you use Apple Maps to get to the golf course, that you're gonna end up on the seventh hole the clubhouse. Yeah, as I just said, the iPhone is way better than Google phones. Google Maps is far superior than Apple Maps. I mean, that's just a given, so I'm not a pure Apple fan, right? But all that said, diversity of your data, making sure that it's easy to read your website. I don't know how much longer websites are going to be a key component of the indexability. I'm thinking three to five years, not like in the next six months, but I see our websites in the future being more like a table of contents, and people are going to be interacting and engaging less with our websites, more with the higher quality data aggregators, which is another thing, like with Yelp, is a big piece of me. So when you talk about, I'm finally landing the plane, see, we don't do show prep where it says, here's the question, and then get to the answer. Even more important than big places for me, is Yelp, yeah, and this is why we we really do strongly suggest any of our clients at least do the EP. It's like $180 a month. Yeah. You keep competitors off of your page. You get some of the cool features and verified badge you're in our ecosystem, so that people from Yelp local are not calling you every day. However, it's something that based on our clients needs, what they're serving, where they're at, whether you want to do ad spend or not. But Yelp is typically the go to for perplexity and for GPT. They use it quite frequently.

Dennis Ayotte 22:03
Interesting, yeah, we know in some folks mind, Yelp is the devil, but important to optimize that profile. And like you said, like there's a baseline of investment you can make there that'll go, like, a long way. And $180 a month is not too crazy. And so where does Bing Places get their reviews? Is it coming from Yelp? Okay, and then Apple Maps pulls from what Facebook. They pull from Yelp as well. They pull from Yelp as well. Okay,

Aaron Watters 22:33
interesting. They, they've got a blended but I typically see them come from Yelp. Okay, cool. Um, Bing went through that whole weird thing with Yahoo, and it's like, do we do Yahoo Local? Does Bing, you know, get bought by Yahoo? They had a whole weird shakeup. Yeah, it's still kind of a mixed bag, but that's why I say Yelp is still a very important player for local.

Speaker 1 22:54
Yeah, it's interesting how chat GBT is given being almost like a second life. I really thought, like early on, that it was going to be a major game changer for Bing, and they were finally going to get more like market share, which I don't know is exactly happened. I know Google has lost some share just because of perplexity and chatgbt and all of them, but interesting how it's kind of highlighted Bing, and now making sure, like, you know, I think it was always important to have something there, but chatgpt is making it even more important, I think. And Gemini, I mean, it's a given, because it's going to Google, and we've always all optimized for that. So all that to say, optimize your Bing presence. Everybody should be

Aaron Watters 23:42
important. And I think it's also like coming and as we've tried to move on from this, we can't help but but lean in. But like it's coming back to the personalization of how you handle the web, how you search with your phone. And what we know is that we're going to have personal experiences throughout anything digital. And so in the same way that, like our SEO lead, she goes to Google search and she looks at her discover, and it's really personalized and curated for her, I've never used discover. I just look at it in Google Search Console, because a question we often get right now is, hey, I've got a ton of organic traffic or organic impressions on Google Search Console, but I don't get a lot of conversions. It's like, okay, well, you've been writing really good blogs. You have E, A T and authorship set up. You're getting a ton of visibility through discover, but yeah, they're in Minnesota, and you're here in Texas, and so it's still good to have that visibility, and it probably feeds down to the local area, but maybe you should change some of the keywords and what you're writing to be more generalized in your location. All that saying, like that, personalization of your experience. I may never go to discover somebody. May only use perplexity and not use Google search, and that's just the way that it's going to be. Sold out,

Dennis Ayotte 25:00
yeah, I think, and especially, like as generation shift, we're going to see, you know, totally different user behaviors, you know, over time, because chat GBT might be the default for, you know, younger generations, as opposed to, like Google, how it's been for us for so long. So and

Aaron Watters 25:19
Instagram can get caught, you know, having weird chats with kids in the in the DMS, which they got, they just got pinged for. So got to be careful, but people are gonna be experiencing AI in anything they do on their phone or tablet,

Dennis Ayotte 25:34
100% so alrighty, moving on. So referral traffic from chat GBT is dropping, so sending 52% less referral traffic than it was. So says this correlates with an increase in chat GBT citations going back to Reddit and Wikipedia rather than independent websites and blogs, interesting. So, man, it's so crazy how Reddit has become such a monster in terms of just dominating like SERPs now and how important it is, but also like how kind of difficult and somewhat maybe scary, if you don't do it right, to have a presence on on Reddit. So that's interesting. And then Wikipedia. I remember when Wikipedia was like a no no. It's like, don't go to Wikipedia. And now it's like, you know, going to be one of the top sources for some of this stuff. I think it

Aaron Watters 26:36
still is a no no, as far as a trusted, trusted resource, is the way that the user generated content. I mean, I would treat Wikipedia honestly the same as you would treat Reddit like, look, this is coming from people that are either professionals in their own mind, or they might have some professional experience, but they're they're putting stuff out there and content out there that is very biased. That's true. All content is biased. Yeah, we have our own what I take with this, and this is from was a search engine roundtable, yeah, SEO roundtable. So search engine roundtable does a really good job. I actually call tracking metrics. Sent this link out in their email newsletter as well, but I always want to look at the headline and ask some questions. And this is something that we talk about a lot, is is that the headline, or is that the article? And the headline, to me, reads, okay, 52% sure. For our clients, that probably doesn't matter very much, because Wikipedia shouldn't be showing up for local search. Now, if it's a DIY and stuff like that, maybe. But Wikipedia is going to give you, like, authoritative research, or what you know what happened to the Chicago Bulls in 1997 so I think the types of search queries is what I would like to lean into. And they didn't publish any of the information in this article about what the queries were. It was just kind of an overview. So while, while this is really interesting, I still would then ask the next question and follow up. Okay, well, what about our local results? And you know, the best way to do that is one manually doing searches with AI tools and GPT. We do get about 1% traffic with GPT on our sites, so it's pretty small, yeah, but call tracking metrics does a great job of also sharing sources, referral sources, in the call logs, and I have seen email forms and calls starting to come in with GPT as a referral source. And it's very it's few and far between, yeah, but I would argue that the ones that at least I've looked at and graded and seen the quality is there because somebody that has a GPT account is actually using the chat and not just clicking around on ads

Speaker 1 28:55
interesting. So does everybody need to go out now and create their own Wikipedia page, or what

Aaron Watters 29:01
I I would honestly, I mean, yeah, it's diversity of effort and getting your your name and citation out there, not getting it approved, that's a whole other I don't know what the whole qualifications are. Now, I know, back in the day, we used to represent the agent for Antonio Cromartie and some NFL players, we were in charge of getting their Wikipedia pages set up. Yeah, it was the funniest thing them saying that some first year, NBA players weren't popular enough to have a Wikipedia. They got shed, got told no, but all that said, I would definitely look at Wikipedia. And then if you have an in house marketer, this is something I would probably say, especially a content producer, I would create my own GPT that is a community guided GPT to filter content through that. Then you can engage in your local Reddit subreddits or go into Wikipedia. It, or any user generated content, and be able to go back and forth and just create your own brand strategy. Because, you know, as you change marketing managers, or if you have multiple people putting content out, you want to still have one single voice, yeah. And

Speaker 1 30:16
so should that voice always come from the owner, you think, or

Aaron Watters 30:20
I would definitely if the owner is well spoken and is somebody that you want to put your name on, absolutely, but it should come from your brand guidelines and should come from your style

Speaker 1 30:31
guide. Oh, God, so more. So like it like it's the point of view of the company as opposed to an individual.

Aaron Watters 30:36
Yes, but tagging it as the owner, if that was your question Absolutely. But like from a subreddit, however you want to go at it, you can come at it as the owner or a manager, but just be clear about who you are. You can ghost and act as if you're the owner, but that takes a lot of trust if you're in a Reddit thread. Gotcha, if the owner's name is on it, and they start getting some backlash. Oh, yeah. But I think just clear your policy, but the biggest thing right now is engage. Don't be afraid to

Dennis Ayotte 31:09
engage. Yeah. And I think with Reddit, the biggest thing is authenticity. And like, if you're going there to try to purposely game the system, I think you're going to get noticed right away, but if you truly try to add value and, you know, provide insights to people, I think it's, you know, could really be beneficial for people. I'm a huge redditor. I love Reddit, but you're right. There's a lot of bias there, and you gotta be careful on like the stuff that you're reading and like vetting as well. So and as far as Wikipedia goes, you know, be interesting if you could create, you know, a Wikipedia around your business, and then use, like, some of the backlinks you might have to, you know, like, I know, we uncovered not too long ago that, you know, I think we did a search for, like, best AC companies in San Antonio. And it was pulling data from like those pay to play type things like, you know, top picks for, you know, whatever local publication. So here in San Antonio, we have the San Antonio Express News. Their web property is my essay.com and so they have best of my essay, right? And the San Antonio current has it. I know the TV stations do it, and it's interesting, like these. You know, large language models are pulling from those sources because it's just saying it's the best, but they have no idea that, Oh, maybe these businesses paid to get on this list. So that would be something else to, I guess, look out for, but super interesting there.

Aaron Watters 32:46
And I'd say the great equalizer. And what, what we know, regardless of how AI shakes out, user generated content and reviews are going to carry more weight, and so they're going to balance those things, which they should in, accreditations or badges or training seals, BBB, that is definitely a huge factor. The problem is, it's an uphill battle for the smaller guys, because they've already they're also paying for review tools like a podium like, like an automation or service Titan revenue Pro. So that doesn't mean you need to stop that. Just means you got to build into yourself right now the process of getting reviews, and you've got to get it started. And if you haven't, you're already way behind

Dennis Ayotte 33:33
for sure. Yeah, and that kind of segues into our next item with just Google and those badges you mentioned. So Google's rolling out a new Google verified badge in October for local service ads. So it's going to replace some of the other trust signals, including Google guaranteed and Google screen, and just unify it under one identity. And so what I read like right now, it's like a green check, and now it's going to a blue check, and then they're also going to potentially cross pollinate over to other Google properties. And what we saw specifically mentioned Google business profile, right? So that's going to be interesting to see that as well. So And sorry for being distracted there we so we're in an old bank building, and we always get people coming in. I think it's the bank, but we put up a sign. So shout out to whoever put up a sign, because this guy read it and turned around. So thank you for not interrupting the podcast, but still interrupting the podcast

Aaron Watters 34:42
full 360 period. He's still going to come in. He's walking through the carport, right?

Dennis Ayotte 34:48
But, yeah, so super interesting that you know, so first we saw now Google Local Service reviews are also going to appear on, you know. GBP and like vice versa, right? So seems like that was phase one. Now we're seeing like another phase of, you know, the properties coming together. And I know you mentioned some stuff about maps earlier. So what do you think this is like, a sign of for them to just be kind of trying to finally streamline across all these different kind of properties that they have.

Aaron Watters 35:25
Yeah. I mean, it's if, if it's what most SEOs over the last five years have been concerned about, of just Google Maps being more of a pay to play situation, and if that's what they were going to do, it seems like a pretty good move to solidify just one approval, get the reviews into one dashboard, and really start pushing it that way. Like that makes a lot of sense for that to become more of a paid product. So I think that's where they're where they're headed. I think it makes it easier to index also for AI crawlers of like one citation source, one one way to approve it. They've also gotten a ton of terrible feedback about businesses getting suspended, getting your approvals, getting GLS licenses and all that. So I think they are also reshifting their approval process and so simplifies it. I think it's a good move. But what we see is these paid badges, and these, these verified badges, carry a lot of weight. Oh, for sure, yeah, Angie, right? Like Angie, still, I was helping a client that had a very old profile on Angie, and it said not approved, you know, by Angie, but they're running ads on home advisor, and so, you know, those two aren't talking to each other. They will be as a Monday. But anyway, it's just a scenario of the barnacle concept of the big guys carry a lot of weight because it's easier to get indexed. Yeah, these approvals,

Speaker 1 36:59
yeah, I think that beige, beige, bad badge bait is still super important. And like, you know, you see, not only for like, status, like, you know, people are now paying for badges on X or Twitter or whatever you want to call it. And so I wonder one day if you know, Google's gonna enter that realm and say, Hey, you just want to pay to have one seems like potentially a next step for them, but also kind of scary that if they do all kind of go under, you know, one roof, like we recently had a scare where our Google ads or MCC account got suspended, right, which we might talk a little bit about that and That new kind of scheme scam that's out there. But you know, so even more important to make sure that, like you're following Google guidelines and making sure whether it's yourself or your agency partner is on top of that stuff, because you know, one thing goes down and it's all you know gone and never want to get any profile suspended or anything like that. So that'd be interesting. But yeah, on the topic of us getting our MCC suspended, which was fixed relatively quickly, so shout out to our team and our Google reps for helping out there. But it was a very unique way that someone tried to kind of scam us, right? Yeah, yeah. It's

Aaron Watters 38:28
heck, we lean in and we'll be vulnerable and open about it, but, like, it was a really unique way that they did it, where they basically came in through the sales process, which that's not unique, but they also quoted a really large ads budget in the message, which, that's that's kind of normal. They booked meetings with our sales team. They through multiple emails, said, Hey, well, we want to give you access to our Google ads so that you guys can take a look at it. Which, hey, we do that, but we follow a specific process of the MCC getting added, and we get their Cid, then we add it to ours. But the pushback we typically get in that process is, if a client has a current vendor and they don't want that vendor to know that they're shopping services, they don't want to add the partner ID for us. We've never really done this, but we won't be doing it in the future either. They asked if they could just add an email to it, which our team gave them, and we ended up clicking on a couple links. They sent a exact HTML copy of a accept your invitation link, but clear signs that it was wrong, like the from address was wrong. It was like from something@googlemail.com and basically what they did, I don't know fully yet, but what I believe happened is they used, then us clicking that link to then vary. To find get advertiser approval for like, 100 of their CIDs, and so they used our payments profile to get the CIDs approved. They're probably going to run up a budget on those CIDs, and at the time, either try to have us pay for it, yeah, or, you know, just stiff Google for the bill. And fortunately for us, like the art, the Pay Per Click team was not the ones that approved it. They saw it immediately, and one of our guys immediately removed it, so it was probably on there for maybe two minutes. But we did start getting emails about advertiser approval. We did start getting emails from the credit team at Google, which I did not know existed that basically said our credit threshold was getting compromised, because for the most part, 97% of our clients pay Google directly. Yeah, we don't want them to think that we're playing games with the margins and marking up Google Ad Spend as far as the total cost, we want them to see our fee and what you're paying Google and all that said it was, it was scary. We got it. I mean, we got suspended for maybe two hours, and got it pretty quick, and none of our clients were impacted anyway. But it is something that scams are gonna scam.

Speaker 1 41:14
I know. Man, I'm wondering, like, if they just started going down the list of, like, Google premier partners and, you know, figuring out, like targeting them that way. So interesting little scam, but thankfully, you know, our team was on top of it, and we got everything sorted out, because that would have not been

Aaron Watters 41:32
good. Yeah, that's what our sales team reached out to the the real person that they were, they were using her information, and she said that she forwarded us to the cybersecurity team at their office, and oh, wow, they said there have been like 20 other agencies that have called them about it. And so I don't know if the 20 other agencies also click the link, but yeah, it's definitely not the best moment for us over the last week.

Speaker 1 41:55
Yeah, yeah. So never click links is the, I think, golden rule of that cool. Well, anything else, dude, I think that's, that's it,

Aaron Watters 42:07
yeah. I mean, there's so much to talk about in the trades right now. I mean, we got Pantheon coming up. Oh, that's right, go. I've got another retreat that I'm headed out to. But I know you're taking a squad. I think, yeah, eight people are

Speaker 1 42:21
gone. Yeah. Eight people. Deep Pantheon this year. So excited because, you know, always wanting to go and see kind of what the new technology is. And one thing service Titan is good about is rolling out. Well, announcing new stuff, the rollout is another side of it. And, you know, just excited to see some of our clients check out some of the the breakouts. I love just going to a lot of the operational stuff, the marketing stuff is good too. But the operation side, you know, trying to understand best practices there always love going to the call center stuff, because you just seems like every year you find like another little like nugget you can take back and share with your clients to help them in their call centers overall. So that's exciting. They got some pretty unique keynotes this year. They got Andrew Huberman so and then Peter Attia So, both kind of like bio hackers, slash, I don't know doctors, I don't know, but I have seen, like, a couple of their podcasts, and going to be interesting to see what kind of take they have for the trades. And, you know, reminds me of the the year I went, I guess was the first year I was here. So 2022, they had Simon Sinek, which was awesome. They had another person, Kat, something. I forget her name, but she was the CEO at Cinnabon. Those are really good. They was really great value. Past couple years on keynote. So interesting to see this year. But yeah, Pantheon is going to be fun. It's, think it's what, September 17 to the 19th, something like that. So think there's still tickets available. So free plug for Pantheon, if nobody's going check it out.

Aaron Watters 44:14
Yeah, definitely. I'm always intrigued to see how the service Titan staff handles their speaking opportunities, and just being able to see, over the past, you know, few years, the transition of how they've communicated and really been more buttoned up and going to the public and or going public, it's pretty interesting. Really love what, what they've done. Seeing Tom Howard out there is always good some Yes, seeing him in Tyson, yeah.

Speaker 1 44:40
And there was, you know, bit of a shake up there, I think one of their lead kind of Google Ads persons jump ship and went to an agency. So be interesting to see. What other kind of leadership is there to chat about some of that stuff. So it'll be good. And it's in Anaheim, which I think is close to their headquarters, which is in Glenda. Know, I don't really know. Again, geography, not my strong suit, but yeah,

Aaron Watters 45:06
like, I can map billboards in in exactly. So if we do out outdoor buys, yeah, knock that out

Speaker 1 45:13
exactly. Man, I've gotten good with Google My Maps. I really love that tool for mapping stuff like that, and especially, like, you know, we have clients all over the country, and so it's like, you know, Beaver Dam, Virginia. Like, probably, well, for sure, I've never been there. But like, you know, understanding, you know where that is, which is just north of Richmond, Virginia. If anybody was wondering same thing, like Spokane, Washington, you know, did not know where that was, but now I do

Aaron Watters 45:44
Go Zags. Let's go.

Dennis Ayotte 45:46
Oh yeah, okay, cool. Yeah,

Aaron Watters 45:50
awesome. In July, I'm a Texas guy. I can't they've got some massive trees. It's beautiful.

Speaker 1 45:55
Yeah? Well, we need to go there. We need to go see our guys at raptor rooter and plumbing. So if you're in Spokane Valley, Washington, and you need a plumber, go, go check them out. So exciting stuff for them, we're about to do some wraps for them, and then some print collateral, so it'll be good. We actually talked to Chris today, so he's doing well, but cool. Well, I think that's it for today, right? Man, yeah, let's do it. Awesome. That guy, actually, he found the bank. So fantastic for him. Cool. Well, thank you everybody for tuning in to another episode of Talk of the trades. Hope you found some value. If you did drop your comments down below any questions you have, more than happy to answer them. So thanks for put

Aaron Watters 46:46
your banking information in the comments and we will send you something nice.

Speaker 1 46:50
Yeah, click the link they will have here. So cool. Alrighty. Y'all

Unknown Speaker 46:55
made it.