Homeowners are starting to ask ChatGPT and Google AI Mode who to hire, and most local businesses aren't in the answer. Paris Childress talks with Jonah Bautista of Atlanta Pro Network about the AI visibility audit tool he built with Claude, the local GEO foundations most contractors are missing, why directories and Reddit still matter, and how agentic ads could close sales inside the chat.
Homeowners are starting to ask AI who to hire, and most local businesses are nowhere in the answer. Paris Childress, founder of Hop AI and co-founder of GEOforge, talks with Jonah Bautista, founder of Atlanta Pro Network, about why local businesses are invisible to AI and what to do about it.
Jonah spent about six years running e-commerce agencies before moving into local marketing for home service contractors. He sees customers using ChatGPT and AI Overviews to research and shortlist providers, while most contractors have never checked how AI describes them.
Jonah built an audit tool with Claude: a short five question intake that pulls Google Maps and Semrush data and produces an AI visibility report in a few minutes. He uses it as a lead magnet alongside a local business directory with around 250 members.
A complete Google Business Profile, consistent listings across hundreds of directories, schema markup, FAQs on every page, alt text on photos and an llms.txt file, plus backlinks and genuine participation on Reddit. Jonah manages leads and follow up in GoHighLevel.
Paris estimates AI Overviews already appear on a large share of Google searches and predicts AI Mode could become the default experience as soon as next year.
Paris describes a future where a personal assistant such as Meta Muse introduces an advertiser's sales agent into the conversation, the deal closes without a website visit and the platform takes a commission instead of charging per click. Jonah compares it to the concierge lead hand off in his directory and explains why he left e-commerce for local GEO.
Paris: Hey, everybody, and welcome to episode 63 of The GEO Show, which is brought to you by GEOforge, full self-driving for AI visibility. Today, I have a special guest, Jonah Bautista, who is the owner and founder of Atlanta Pro Network, and this is a local agency in the Atlanta area, and I'll let Jonah tell you all about it. Welcome to the show, Jonah.
Jonah: Hey, thanks so much for having me, Paris. Yeah, it's a pleasure to be here. Just to give you a quick introduction, so I, obviously you mentioned, Jonah Bautista. I have about six years of experience running e-commerce management agencies, throughout the US and internationally. And we, over the past year, have really taken those strategies and taken those those techniques and applied them more on a local level. So really helping home service contractors specifically is our main audience we really work with. But yeah, being able to help them to have more connection within their community, to be more visible in AI, to be more visible throughout different search engines, and anywhere that customers are looking for them, we make sure that those eyeballs hit our clients, so.
Paris: Great. Before we get into the GEO topic, what's interesting about your background is that you made a transition from e-commerce marketing into more local local marketing for home services, you mentioned there that there was you know, there was some knowledge transfer. But I'd like to hear more about how your experience with e-commerce helped you make that transition. Are there common, are there commonalities that e-commerce marketing shares with local?
Jonah: Yeah. So in essence, everybody's needing the problem to be solved, right? They're looking for something to essentially to to fix whatever issue it is that they're having to make things faster, easier, more affordable, whatever it may be, right? So you're essentially still speaking to the same emotions. You're looking to essentially show, okay, this is where you're at, this is where you want to be. Here's that value gap and how we help to make that an easy sale, right? Especially when you have that trust factor involved, and that's kinda the whole goal is to essentially establish that that sense of comfort, that sense of okay, these people not only know what it is that I'm struggling with, but they have done the solution multiple times over, and there's plenty of social proof to be able to demonstrate that they can be able to do it for me also. So yeah.
Paris: Yeah obviously when people are shopping, looking to buy something, they're clearly trying to satisfy some kind of pain point, and the same thing when they're hiring a local contractor. They need a problem solved. A the fundamentals are there. Yeah, the emotions behind that and that purchase. Great. Let's now pivot into GEO, Generative Engine Optimization, more broadly, AI search. Now this is where things are moving clearly. I'm sure that your clients have been asking you about this. They're getting curious. They probably know from using ChatGPT themselves. This is the new journey. People are using ChatGPT now as a new front door to, their journey. And even when they still go to Google, now Google is showing AI overviews on the majority of search results. In fact, that's even now pushing down the local maps pack that usually that's the big battleground for local and and even pushing down the ads. And then the traditional blue links are way down now. So start with just an open-ended question. How are you helping your clients? How are you talking about AI search? How are you helping them make this transition into a world where now AI search is the new front door?
Jonah: Yeah. There's definitely, there's still so much demand coming from so many different directions that, the AI search is one of the components of the whole, and right? And because they're all intertwined, it's like you have to look at things holistically, right? The first thing that we do is we essentially would allow for if someone's interested, say, "Hey, I'm needing some help. I've been doing this for the past 5 years, 10 years, 20 years." We get some guys that they've been doing this for a very long time and don't even have a website, they're like, yeah, they're just figuring out, Like you said, they're using ChatGPT themselves, because it's such a simple tool that they can punch in and get much more clear answers. And then further than that is like you also said, when they punch into into Google, the first thing they're receiving is an AI summary, so that way they don't have to scour 25 different websites, but instead are getting very clear, concise, bulleted information that they can choose to dive deeper if they want to, but oftentimes are able to get their answer, quickly and easily within a single search. So essentially the first thing we do is an audit, right? You've got to figure out where you're starting from before you can actually be able to provide any sort of diagnosis. Imagine going to the doctor and the first thing the doctor says is, "Oh, you definitely need this shot." And it's like, "Whoa, wait a minute. Do you want to find out what's going on first?"
Paris: Some audit work up front, yeah.
Jonah: Yeah, exactly.
Paris: You just walk me through how you structure that audit, how you present it?
Jonah: Yeah. So essentially, we've got tools that we've built inside of Claude, you know, that will go through and scour the internet. Once they've gone and submitted their website information, any sort of socials they have a couple of self-based questions. We try to keep the audit questions very minimal, so that way it's able to be something that a business owner isn't "Oh, I'll get back to that later." We want them to be able to knock it out within 30 seconds or less.
Paris: Okay.
Jonah: Claude will go through.
Paris: Questionnaire. You send them a few questions. Are you sending them a link to a, to something inside of Claude, or are you just sending them some questionnaire that you can then pull their answers into your Claude tool?
Jonah: Yeah, so essentially we've sent them a list of … It's basically a, an HTML site that we've designed. It's a tool and it's all constructed with Claude and with connected to Google Maps and connected to Semrush and a couple of other tools, so that way we'd be able to see okay, what are you ranking for? What's, … Where are the gaps? What is your competition doing? Are you advertising? What's your social rates? Like, all … There's all kinds of information that gets built out from that, right?
Paris: Okay.
Jonah: So they answer this very short questionnaire. It's literally five questions or whatever. Within about 60 to 180 seconds, give or take, we'll be able to have an auto report that gets sent both to the client as well as to us. We'll be able to review, say, "Okay, here's…" We'll kinda rank it as well. We'll actually be able to see, this is where you're excelling, and you're doing very well, especially in relation to your competition, and here's where some gaps, some things that really need to be resolved. And you would be surprised at the number of business owners that are lacking very foundational aspects of being visible online, right? Especially when it comes to GEO, but even with SEO. Even with the basic foundational things, there's key components that haven't been integrated into their websites or haven't been optimized within their Google business profiles, or no citations or backlinks or anything that essentially would be able to tell any of these softwares where to be able to find this particular professional. And it's like the only way they get found is if somebody's searching their name directly.
Paris: Oh, okay. This sounds even more holistic because probably you're finding a lot of stuff that's preventing them not only for, from appearing in AI search, in an LLM search, but probably across the board. Even Google, just Google Local SEO probably also they'd be hampered if if they have those things missing.
Jonah: Yeah, exactly.
Paris: So I presume then your tool, if it is checking for AI visibility and presence, you must have some kind of system for recommending or just generating some prompts, like some kind of sample prompts that customers might type in. Yeah, who are the best who are the best roofers in what is it? Fulton County? I don't know, whatever, I don't know.
Jonah: Atlanta, right?
Paris: Yeah. They probably wouldn't say Atlanta. They would probably get a little bit more narrower, right? They would say Buckhead or something. I don't know.
Jonah: Yeah, so people use a range of different search terms, and obviously there's thousands of different search terms that we could use for any given industry. We keep it relatively simple for the audit. We're basically starting with just a simple plumber near me, and then using whatever ZIP code that that particular plumber is applying for. Saying "Hey, this is where this is my business. This is where I'm located." So therefore we're going to start with that location and see where they rank from there, and then we'll be able to move out further. Yeah, people can say the neighborhood, they can say a ZIP code, they can say a much larger city space. They can say any number of different different keyword search terms. But we just, like I said, we try to keep it relatively simple, especially starting out. And then as we progress in our relationship, we're going to grow that reach further and try to make sure that we're able to amass more keywords, more areas, more services, more categories, etc.
Paris: Gotcha. The tool that you've described sounds like it would be an amazing lead gen tool. You using it both for your current customers that you want to maybe upsell into an AI or GEO service, or are you using it also for prospects or maybe both?
Jonah: We probably should be using it for prospects, but no, we traditionally don't.
Paris: Sounds like it would be gold for lead gen.
Jonah: Yeah. No, we traditionally don't,.
Paris: Get people to come to that page and input those things on their own.
Jonah: Yeah.
Paris: Give you the email address in order to see the report, so you gate the, you just gate the results. And.
Jonah: Yeah, we're.
Paris: You just follow up with a, hopefully with a call to explain everything to them.
Jonah: Yeah. Yeah. And in that sense, yes, we do. So we traditionally, we don't do a ton of marketing for ourselves because we are a smaller agency, and we essentially we don't want to take on an incredibly high volume of people. We're more a closer knit, more community-based, more real relationships, sort of agency. So we're actually we're meeting a lot of these business owners. We're actually shaking hands with these people. We're actually … We're part of a business community, so a business networking community that it's like a … It's basically a directory as well. We've helped to establish their strength, their their credibility, their professionalism, their We redesigned the website. We're doing SEO and all that stuff for them, and they've got about 250 businesses inside of there. So most of our business actually comes from that directory itself, just in the relationships we formed and just being publicly visible, within that space. So we actually don't need to do any advertising. We don't need to do, a whole lot of that. We still obviously improve our SEO on a regular basis and our GEO on a regular basis, and we still accept clients from all spectrums, whether from Atlanta or other places. We even sometimes take people that are not in the home service contracting space as well, but I honestly, I prefer to work within that same space just because we know that space really well. We're able to service those clients efficiently. Their price points are in line with, what makes sense for our offer as well. We've had restaurants come to us. We've had, retail come to us, and I'm just like … I'm like, "Yeah, we could do it, but I don't really want to."
Paris: Not really right in your wheelhouse, huh?
Jonah: Yeah, exactly. But yeah, generally speaking, like you mentioned, for lead gen with that we'll post results. We'll showcase how we've helped somebody or, some different things that we're noticing with the directory as a whole, and then people will come to us asking for help, within the community. So yeah, it's not necessarily trying to get anybody and everybody though.
Paris: Yeah. And when clients are specifically asking about AI presence they may even be asking for rankings, which I think is not right because there isn't really such a thing as rankings in an AI answer. But do you have a special type of report that you build for them that can show here is let's say your share of voice, do you break that out separately from your primary other types of reporting? Can you walk me through that?
Jonah: That's a great question, and I'm going to be 100% honest with you. So we don't have the most effective strategies in order to be able to showcase exactly how they're showing up for a range of different prompts or range of different keywords when it comes to GEO right now. That is something we're open to, so if that's something that you have the secret sauce in, I'm definitely open to listen and learn. But yeah, but that's, that is one place that I do feel like we could be more effective.
Paris: Okay. Yeah we'll talk a little bit later about that. But let's… I want to focus on your customers now and what kind of just their, what kind of mindset are they in and level of awareness? Do they generally content on a regular basis? Are you doing… Are you helping them create blog posts, let's say weekly or anything where they're they're really putting out fresh content on a regular basis?
Jonah: Yeah, so our clients they tend to be really busy, almost even owner/operator sort of experiences, right? These guys, they've grown a business from the ground up. They're … They get their hands dirty on a regular basis. They're out there meeting with customers. They're organizing teams. They're actually managing a ton of different things at any given moment to where That's the whole reason they even hire us in the first place, right? They traditionally don't have as much technological skill, I guess you could say. They don't, they haven't created that sort of routine, and they haven't actually implemented it in a way that is as effective for their companies. So they come to us for that sort of help, right? And we have structured programs that will launch blog posts and Google Business Profile posts and on Houzz or Nextdoor or whatever, tools it is that they're currently using and how they want to continue to grow, which program it is they're a part of. So that way they're actually staying relevant, and they're staying consistent, and people are able to to see the, this high quality of work that they do, but the biggest, most important ones for us are definitely going to be the Google Business Profiles, first and foremost. We want to make sure that they're post on a regular basis, so people can actually Google can see that, and we help to rank them higher in Gemini and et cetera. And then of course, there's other avenues like Reddit as well. Reddit's a really popular tool that a lot of these AI softwares are utilizing in order to see okay, who's doing what within the community. But yeah.
Paris: Yeah Reddit is one of the most popular sources that gets cited by ChatGPT specifically. And yeah, it's a massive community. They have on practically everything. So I guess, yeah for the Atlanta community, there's probably a lot of relevant places where you can drop in. Although you really should be careful in Reddit, as I'm sure not to not to go in with any kind of a direct sales tone, but.
Jonah: Oh yeah.
Paris: Just try to be helpful. So if I'm a, if I'm a landscaper and then there's a, like an Atlanta landscaping Reddit thread subreddit I'll just go in there and offer advice. I'm not going to go in and and really push hard on my services. And then if people eventually see me as the expert they'll come and find me and eventually that's going to come my way from the people that are to hire. But it's best.
Jonah: Right?
Paris: Just the community more education. And that's a… Sometimes it's not such a black and white situation, and Reddit can be pretty tough on on people that are sometimes too pushy or too salesy. They can.
Jonah: Yeah, I've actually when I first started, utilizing Reddit, I tried the strategy of essentially, kinda like you were saying, of just coming off as an expert and posting opinion pieces and and things like that, and it's like Reddit flagged all of my messages. And I'm like, "What do you mean? I didn't say anything promotional. I didn't do anything that was out of the norm," they're just like, they're like, "Nope, we don't like it." I'm like, "Why? Tell me, please."
Paris: A, that is a tough community, and they're getting tougher because a lot of marketers are now, especially GEOs, are now going in there specifically to optimize for ChatGPT, because it's pretty well known now that this is one of the most popular citation sources. So that's where now the marketers have come and.
Jonah: Yeah.
Paris: It, so they're getting even more defensive. Yeah.
Jonah: We tend to focus more so on as far as like being able to really be presented effectively in these in these generative platforms, our biggest first strategy that we'll utilize is definitely within their website, is the coding, is the schema, is the the breadcrumbs, the llms.txt, the robots.txt, the just going through and making sure that they've got FAQs on every single page. There's alt text in every single photo. All these different things that are essentially telling both the search engines as well as the the AI software that says, "Hey, these are the guys to talk to for these particular questions." And, designing the entire format of the build to be making sure that it's actually answering the questions that people are actually asking, the more service areas that you're talking about, the more services that you're talking about, and then being able to ask those direct questions, the more likely it is you're going to pop up in those spaces.
Paris: And how do they capture all those questions? Are a lot of these businesses, do they get call-ins? A lot of, do a lot of their leads and bookings come through the phone or.
Jonah: Yeah. Yeah, I would say so. Text is super popular nowadays, text, email. There's still people a generation before you and I that definitely prefer phone calls. So we do have all those options available, and we try to track all of that information so we can actually see, okay, your call volume this month was X, your text, volume is Y. But yeah, contact forms as well. We give people a couple different avenues. But yeah, text is the easiest for us to be able to to track and then calculate how people are responding to different stuff. Everything is recorded within a CRM. It's all going back to one place, and then tracked and then automated as much as we can without while still sounding human. But yeah.
Paris: I suppose, are you hosting the CRM for them.
Jonah: Yeah.
Paris: Doing that on your end?
Jonah: Yeah, we use GoHighLevel, I'm sure you're familiar. GoHighLevel's super easy CRM, especially for marketers.
Paris: I met their team recently at BrightonSEO last week,.
Jonah: Oh, nice.
Paris: Somebody. Yeah, it was a guy from Chicago. I think his name was Jeremy. Great conversation I had with him. Yeah. GoHighLevel, it's a great, it's a great tool. I am familiar with the platform.
Jonah: Super powerful. They're always getting better. They're always adding more and more to it. I just saw some new features that they added recently. I think now that AI is getting bigger, they're also releasing faster which is pretty cool. And yeah, you know what I mean? It's just, it's been our bread and butter for so long that we know it. We've used it for six years, so we know it in and out, and are able to get clients set up relatively efficiently on that. Most of the guys that we connect with they don't even have a CRM, they've been just personally texting or, yeah, or emailing everybody for the longest time.
Paris: A CRM for a local business, home service business, I would be pretty surprised. I think very few I would assume have a real CRM. I mean, that's a sign of a pretty, I don't know, fairly sophisticated business and more of a B2B, not so much B2C type.
Jonah: Mean it's… I would argue that it's absolutely vital. It is absolutely vital that they're losing out on tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars every single year that they're not tracking their data and they're not automating some kind of communication, with their customers between wasted hours, between lost sales, between reactivations, between review campaigns, between… there's so many different opportunities that having a functional CRM provides that if you're not taking that the… It's a couple hundred bucks a month. Couple hundred bucks a month to be able to potentially generate 10, 20, 50 times that, with the, depending on your lead volume and-.
Paris: Yeah. There's, it's a no-brainer in terms of its payback. It pays for itself multiple times over. Yeah, And what about things like offsite work like, link building was one of the big tactics for SEO, and now with GEO that's morphed a little bit more into just outreaching for brand mentions and getting sites that have roundups or listicles directories anywhere where they may be mentioning the names of competitors in your space. You go in and say, "Hey, can I get on that list?" Or, "Can you mention me there?" Do you do any of that kind of offsite work or that kind of PR.
Jonah: Yeah. Yeah, for sure. So we've got systems that essentially get them listed in 400 different directories, across the United States. So that way they're able to have that consistent NAP, that just name, address, phone number is consistent across the whole internet. And then of course, that's backlinks to all these different all these different websites as well, many with very high authority rankings. And then of course, there's more like gray hat strategies, which I'm not super fond of. These people, you'll see it all over the internet. They'll promise like 10,000 backlinks for $99, and it's like yeah, I don't trust that.
Paris: People selling backlinks like that. I'm surprised.
Jonah: It's wild.
Paris: Going to start to go away because now in Backlinks really were the currency of of traditional SEO because it was about at least trying to really get the domain authority from one to flow some link juice over to your domain, and that would Rank. But I do think that we're moving towards Google's AI mode eventually becoming the default experience.
Jonah: I agree.
Paris: I don't know when it's going to happen. I think they probably are still trying to figure out the ads monetization for But AI Overviews is now on the, I think on the large majority. I don't really know. It, I'm sure it varies by the type of query, keyword, or prompt. But it I think it's at least on average about 70% of all of Google searches now, you have the AI Overview that pushes down everything else, which is a chat experience. And then if you do any kind of follow-up question that then takes you, it routes you straight into AI mode. So I I would predict that maybe by next year, Google AI mode becomes a default experience. And users can probably also, if they want the traditional experience, they want to browse through links and really do their own research that way, they could probably toggle back and forth and toggle back to classic Google. I think AI mode is coming soon as the default, and.
Jonah: I totally agree. It's just so convenient and it's so much faster and easier and direct. I think there's an increasing amount of trust that people are having when it comes to the AI responses and especially with their own personal chatbots, I was actually on a podcast recently where the host was describing this almost like a second brain sort of experience or like a, an external identity. They've communicated with their chatbot so much that they're they trust its answers to the point that they will accept whatever responses that it gives. Say for example, you have this really powerful interaction with a plumber, right? You called up a plumber, said, "Hey, this is what I need done." They give you a quote, it's now whatever. You feed that information back to to your ChatGPT or Claude or whoever, and what he was describing was the potential for one day it seeing this information and be like, "Oh yeah, that sounds like they probably know what they're doing," but I'm not really finding out a whole lot about them, because there's they don't have the schema built out or they don't have whatever, a GEO integrations, properly set up, with their company, that it ends up recommending some other businesses that do have that information set up properly that are able to provide the high-quality answers and all this information. It's oh, like you could literally lose business because because someone, consulted with their chatbot and there's nothing that can be found about you. Even though you had a great one-on-one experience, it still is just oh yeah, but what about these other guys that could be more in line with what it is that you're looking for?
Paris: Yep. Are Have you started using Meta Muse or ChatGPT Dots?
Jonah: I have started using Meta Muse, yeah.
Paris: Have you?
Jonah: Yeah, I've tried it out.
Paris: It out in Europe, but I know in the US, I think it's probably the fastest-growing AI right now. It's on fire. What's it, what's the experience like? And then can you see that also as a channel that Meta Muse is going to be the one that recommends the local service providers, and you're just going to trust whatever it says and just go straight to whatever company gets recommended?
Jonah: Yeah. To be 100% honest with you, I haven't used it to its full capacity. I've mostly been using it as like a email management tool which I know that there's a million different ones for that. So I haven't really dove into Muse and really explored exactly of everything it can do. But yeah, it's… there's so many powerful tools coming out. I think we're in this really interesting, fascinating age where we're developing things at record speed, and it's almost as though who knows what six months from now is going to look like, and relative to to the technology that we have at our fingertips.
Paris: Yeah.
Jonah: But,.
Paris: No, let me present you with a vision that I have with Meta Muse and maybe others, and tell me what you think. 'Cause you've got organic and paid, and right now they're pretty separate. So if I I mean, if I go to Google, I can clearly see what are the sponsored, what are the sponsored results that are paid ads where is organic. Within Google Maps, I can see if it's a sponsored Maps listing that's paid. If it's organic, it's not there. But when you have a world that's driven by these AI assistants like Meta Muse, and we could be having a conversation, or I could be having a conversation with my Meta Muse and saying, "Yeah, I think I don't know I'm really dissatisfied with my garden. I really wish somebody could come in here and clean it up." And then Meta Muse would detect that, and it would it would look in, let's say, look in the Atlanta area and it would say, "All right, I actually have three Atlanta landscaping companies that are advertising with Meta." And I could plug one of them into this conversation. And so the, at that point, and it needs to be all transparent to the user. So at that point, Meta Muse would say, "Hey, you know, I could recommend somebody that might work, and I can hand you off to the ad agent." Like the sales rep, but it's another agent. And then, and, "Yeah, Jonah, do you mind if I introduce you to this other agent who can tell you all about,.
Jonah: Wow.
Paris: Bautista Landscaping?" And if you say yes because you trust your agent, that's your personal assistant that's there for you every day.
Jonah: Yeah.
Paris: So he wants to, or it wants to now introduce you to to a landscaper agent, and you say sure. So then that person gets into the conversation in a three-way. Is still there kind of moderating and making sure that you don't get taken advantage of or everything. That's just overseeing the situation. And the new sales agent from this landscaping company comes in and says, hey, Jonah. Yeah so and so your Muse agent told me that you're that you're looking for this type of work, this type of shrub." I mean, it could be something really detailed. "And, yeah, we're running a special, and we could have a crew out to you on Saturday afternoon if that works." and that deal's going to get closed without any visit to a website, without any click out of that experience. It's not just a lead that's generated. It's going to be closed business, then Meta is going to take a cut of the… They're going to take a commission. They're not going to get CPM or cost per click. They're going to get a commission on that sale because the advertiser is going to say, "Anytime Meta Muse can sell jobs for me, 20% goes straight to Meta."
Jonah: Wow.
Paris: You go find the customer, you figure out when the conversation is right, and the personal agent's going to again, is going to bring the sales agent into the conversation, sell, hopefully close a deal. And I don't need to go to see a Google My Business page. I don't need to go see a local business website or a Facebook page because when I want reviews, they're going to be right there. When I want pictures of the business' jobs, it's going to be right there.
Jonah: Right.
Paris: Questions. The answers are going to come in. And on that basis, because I trust my agent so much And my agent introduced me to this other agent that gives me all the information. So I think that's the future of ads in an agentic world.
Jonah: Honestly, that's genius, dude.
Paris: Because then basically I would never get the organic guys don't really have a chance, because if I'm a landscaper that's not advertising in Meta, then I'm not going to be the one my agent isn't going to be the one introduced to any of these conversations where people are asking about getting their grass cut, getting landscaping done. So that's actually pretty, probably a great situation for Meta because that means that, anytime they can solve a local problem and they have an advertiser that's ready and with an agent that can plug right in,.
Jonah: Right.
Paris: They're not even.
Jonah: Yeah.
Paris: CPMs. They're going to get commissions on the closed deal. I think that's where we're headed. And then what-.
Jonah: I think you're spot on. That's genius, and I had, I'd never even thought about that before, but that's so smart. That's a, it's a great business model and honestly I see it being convenient for everybody involved, especially because you know that Meta's going to provide the resources and the tools to say, "Hey, just upload your sales documents, upload your, whatever training documents," whatever it is that you have, connect it to a calendar yada, and then we'll just go ahead and.
Paris: So the advertiser, and let's say you're the agency and you've got a, you've got a local business and you want to set them up. Gonna say, "Okay, I need all the assets we can get our hands on. I need pictures, I need FAQ documentation," just an entire knowledge base because what we're going to do is we're going to train the sales agent going to sell inside of Meta Ads for you. We're going to, we train this sales agent in the same way that we would train a salesperson, a real salesperson.
Jonah: Exactly.
Paris: Who would be picking up the phone for you. And then you're not going to be selecting audiences really. I mean, anybody who needs a job and who's the right fit, the agent's going to figure that out and.
Jonah: Yeah.
Paris: In front of them. So I'm not going to pick audiences. I'm not really going to be doing all this demographic kind Research. I'm just going to say, "Here's my agent. This is what we do. This agent has all the knowledge about my business. Anytime you can sell jobs, do it, and I'm going to be willing to pay you X commission." And.
Jonah: Right.
Paris: The, that's the auction because A is going to pay 20%, advertiser B might pay 22%. But then Meta has to be objective and offer the right solution. So if advertiser A is really close to the customer, they should probably recommend that because it's closer and more local,.
Jonah: Yeah. Yeah, because that really becomes the question at the end of the day is how do you keep it ethical, so that's one of the, that's one of the tools that I built out for this business directory is we have this like we call it a concierge system, right? It is similar to what you're describing, where essentially they would go onto the website and they would type in, either the problem they're experiencing or the specific industry they're looking for, the different professional they're looking for, whatever the AI algorithm that I built out will help to decipher and guide them to the right direction. It'll ask them a couple of qualifying questions. Say "Oh, what's going on? Where's the problem? How long are you experiencing?" Blah. Different things to figure out what exactly information the professional needs, and then it'll partner them with a, one of our members, that's that's usually our top tier status. They're … The, it's really, it's crazy affordable. It's literally, it's 100 bucks a month. But it'll partner them with one of these guys automatically. It'll go ahead and send automated text message and emails to both parties and say, "Hey, you've got a person interested in your services. You've got four hours to be able to connect with them. If you don't connect with them in that timeframe, it's going to move to the next person," right? And it'll round robin between all the service providers that are within that same niche. Usually people claim it within about 15 minutes or less. It would be five minutes or less if they had a CRM. But yeah. Yeah, but essentially once they claim that lead they'll be able to have that connection, that relationship. It's already a trust-built, thing because they're part of our community and, we've already vetted them. We've already … They've gone through certain qualifications. They're a local business. They have, a certain star rating, across the internet. There's no major conflicts that have come up, with them and other customers, et cetera. But it's kind of the system that you're describing, where it's literally just a hand-off, sort of thing. The only thing that we haven't integrated is the whole agentic, strategy where it's like, "Hey, we'll just build you a salesperson," right? So that way you don't have to worry about trying to connect with them. We'll just, close that deal for you. But that's genius, man. I love that.
Paris: Yeah, it's… I mean, we're not there yet. I do think I can clearly see that happening both in Meta and of course, ChatGPT has launched several months ago, and they're already at a billion dollars in revenue. And when you think, the way that they're doing it now is they're just showing, they're just showing display ads in conversations, which is a… That's a really old world way of doing it. I don't think that's their vision, is to charge on CPM on to just drop some display ads at the bottom of your chat. Think that the advertising is going to get really integrated into the conversation itself. So,.
Jonah: I think that's one of the biggest problems that these… I would say that's one of the biggest problems that these platforms seem to be experiencing, is like how to really make it profitable. They've consumed billions and billions of dollars and they're essentially like "Okay, so when do we start making money?" 'Cause charging these small subscription fees isn't quite cutting it, of course they get bigger contracts, but.
Paris: ChatGPT definitely. I think it, I don't know, I think it's either 90% or 95% of their entire base. I think they're at 1.2 billion active users, but 90 or 95% of them are non-paying users, and they've got to figure out a way to monetize that enormous base. And I think that their vision is to do it with ads, we're in the very first version of it now, but I don't think this is going to be the format that sticks.
Jonah: Yeah.
Paris: It's going to become agentic, and then they have this they have the Dots now, which is just like Meta Muse. Very similar, that's going to be your persistent AI assistant that's kinda just there for you all the time running, your life.
Jonah: Wow.
Paris: Day, you trust it more and more, then yeah when you need stuff, it's just going to be it's just going to be introducing you to these other agents, trusted agents that represent other brands.
Jonah: Right.
Paris: By the way you said earlier your, that you had e-commerce experience before getting into local. I think the same thing is going to be true with e-commerce.
Jonah: Totally.
Paris: My agent is going to go to Shopify store on my behalf to shop, and it's actually going to interact with the seller's agent, the merchant's agent as well, and it's going to be agent to agent. Those two agents are going to figure out… my agent's going to show up and say, "Hey, Paris is looking for like this. Do you have it in this size?" And then the merchant's agent's going to say, we don't have that in stock. We have something really similar. Do you think he would like this?" And, "Oh, let me go back and ask him." And it's Gonna be intermediated by two agents in the middle, I think,.
Jonah: What I think could be more probable is the marketplace experience, where essentially you have a company like Amazon or whatever it is that has 500 of a very similar type of product, and it's essentially just going to weigh out and say, "Okay, based on the number of reviews, based on the number of purchases, based on the this, that, whatever, it solves this problem this efficiently, this price point yada, here's the one you want. Do you want me to go ahead and order it for you?" And just not having to have too much of a communication, back and forth. 'Cause yes, obviously people want the best thing, but what they really want is convenience. They want the problem solved, they want it quickly, they want it affordably.
Paris: Yeah, I like that. Cool.
Jonah: It's coming whether we like it or not . And I think people are going to like it. I think they're going to like it,.
Paris: Yeah I do think that these assistants or these personal agents are going to, is really what's going to open up AI to the masses. And it looks like Meta's in a good position now. I had counted them out. About a year ago, I had completely counted out Meta. They didn't have any really competitive models, You kept hearing about all the turmoil and chaos inside the company, but they, I think they've figured it out.
Jonah: Wow. Nice.
Paris: Yeah. We're definitely moving from a world where lo-local, let's say local SEO is all about Google, you really just had to worry about Google. But now it's going to be, it's going to be very different. You still have to definitely optimize for Google, but then you're going to have agents, you're going to have to think about for certain, of people are going to go there first,.
Jonah: Yep.
Paris: Meta Muse, I mean everybody's on Facebook, and it's the most popular AI product right now. I think optimization is going to become more complex because it's going to be more cross cross-channel, Which will make it more interesting, and it'll be, it'll actually make it more valuable for agencies like us because it's just more complicated to have to figure out.
Jonah: Yeah, I'm interested to see how it's going to continue to evolve, because right now it's easier for us to essentially provide that service because it's okay, the website is the foundation, the business profile is the next step from there, and then of course we've got all these other avenues, you know, all these other tertiary spaces that essentially continue to add to the the content that these sources are or these these platforms are consuming, but yeah, but as things continue to grow outward and the tree continues to branch, we'll see how if it becomes a little bit more consolidated, like if it's just more all-consuming and all-knowing, or if it's essentially more divisive and more, "Hey, you have to do it this way in order for us to be able to verify you."
Paris: Yeah. For e-commerce, Amazon has come down hard and blocked all of these agents, and then Shopify has taken the opposite position, and they're saying, "Come on in and buy," because it's probably going to result in more sales anyway if if you let agents come in and buy. Or maybe a lot of those sales wouldn't have happened by the human user, with the ease of sending an agent, then, you know there's incremental sales. This is the I think this is the new battlefield in e-commerce is who's going to let the agents come in and who's going to block them,.
Jonah: Yeah.
Paris: More of these walled gardens where you have different rules that you have to play by platform. And that unfortunately would make things harder for the customers, the users and more complex from a marketing standpoint. But more complexity is generally good for guys like us, but it's still.
Jonah: Generally.
Paris: Great for the whole ecosystem really.
Jonah: Yeah.
Paris: I have to optimize very differently for ChatGPT, and then for Google, and then for Meta, Sharing data, and there's different approaches and strategies. I have to train agents in each of these platforms really. It's just redundant. A lot of.
Jonah: Yeah.
Paris: Seems like.
Jonah: To be honest, that's part of the reason that I left the e-commerce industry altogether or am definitely trying my best. I've still got a number of clients. I've got about maybe 15 or 20 clients, that we still manage in the e-commerce space. But it's just, it's such a quickly changing industry because it's such a newer industry. There's so many different, All these platforms have different policies and they're constantly changing. And, the growth of AI is really changing things very quickly as far as competition and marketing strategies and, all these things price points and labor costs and et cetera. You've got the shifting economy that's definitely changed the way people purchase, the way people interact with advertisement. There's a lot of different factors that are constantly moving. And plus, dealing with so much physical product is very laborious. To actually have to lay hands on things or to have systems in place to make sure that physical products are transported from one place to another across the country without any sort of interruption it's a lot. It's a lot. It's a pain in the butt. And we did it for a long time. We rolled with the punches. Every single year around this timeframe, honestly, things get chaotic. It's like September rolls around and it's just all the platforms tighten up their policies, and they make things much more restrictive. And so you have to really renavigate, your systems and really make sure that you're on your Ps and Qs because any little slip-up could end up getting your account suspended, and that's a pain in the butt. So yeah. Definitely the industry is changing very quickly with the way that AI manages it the way that these platforms are using AI in order to be able to reduce their own labor costs and make their systems more more user-friendly, higher quality, that sort of thing. But it just becomes a very big challenge for the business owners because I've seen guys that are doing six figures a month all of a sudden get shut down for small infractions, that's… All that money gets tied up for the next three to six months. All that inventory gets tied up for so long too. It affects real people's lives, so.
Paris: Yeah, that's a massive disruption when you have a supply chain that's just humming.
Jonah: Yeah. It got us to the point where we were just like, "Okay let's shift strategies." 'Cause I don't want to continue… It was a point where we were, you can make seven figures plus, like in this industry. But it just got to a point where there was so much risk involved that we didn't want to continue. We couldn't ethically continue to take on more clients in that space and tell them, "Yeah, we can do X, Y, and Z, and we'll help you to achieve these sorts of levels." We had to really start reeling back the way that we talk about it and also really be much more upfront about the risk potential in order to be able to to take on people ethically, so.
Paris: Yeah, I.
Jonah: Yeah.
Paris: Yeah good decision to pivot over into local and yeah, I think.
Jonah: It's cool.
Paris: There and yeah, they're just service businesses and.
Jonah: Yeah, it's been fun.
Paris: Get really interesting. I think with the just with AI visibility, I think there's a lot of overlap in existing SEO strategies that are still going to put you in a good place appearing in AI. But then there's a few, there's a few newer, more nuanced strategies as well. It depends on the competitiveness too. Each spaces has a different dynamics of competition. And I mean, the more competitive it is the sharper you have to be. But in some places it's not that competitive and you don't have to do everything perfectly, you just have to be a little bit better than the next the next group, and Coming out on top.
Jonah: Yeah. With this industry, what we're noticing is there's 80% of the businesses out there, they haven't paid any sort of time, attention, energy, money to really growing these parts of it. So the businesses that do, they can make huge advantages in a relatively shorter amount of time, especially when it comes to GEO because it's such a newer industry and there's so many There's a lot of opportunity out there. It definitely opens the door for people to be a lot more successful relatively quickly.
Paris: Yeah. I agree with you. All right. Jonah, this has been great. Thanks for great conversation. It was great to meet you and hope our audience got some great knowledge there. This was the first episode that, where we really tried to dive deep into local GEO and it was really interesting. And.
Jonah: Yeah, absolutely.
Paris: Of where it's headed both for organically and paid but they're … This is a fun time to be in the business.
Jonah: Absolutely. Paris, it's been a pleasure being on, man. Thanks for having me.
Paris: Thank you too. And thanks everybody for listening, and see you all in the next one.
