Adam Bennett: Here's the line from MAICON that we can't stop talking about. AI can mention your pest control company in an answer and still tell the customer to call somebody else.
Chad Treadway: Which means getting named is the easy part. Getting picked is the job.
Adam: Welcome to Pest Control Marketing That Actually Works, the podcast for pest control operators who want real growth, not empty promises. I'm Adam Bennett.
Chad: And I'm Chad Treadway, and we're from Cube Creative Design. For twenty years we've been helping pest control companies stop wasting money and start growing.
Adam: Chad, thanks for stepping in for Elisabeth today. She is out this week.
Today's episode is a MAICON special: what AI search wants from a pest control company. We were at MAICON in Cleveland, the marketing AI conference from the Marketing AI Institute. It's a few days where marketers talk about everything AI. We listened for one thing: what a pest control owner can actually use.
Chad: We'll name who said what so you can fact check us, and we'll tell you where we disagree, because we do. Here are the three questions we're going to answer. One, why can AI name your company and still send the customer to somebody else? Two, what proof does AI look for before it recommends a pest control company? Three, who should be the face of your marketing, and what should AI do for you?
Adam: Let's start with that line from the top. Wil Reynolds from Seer Interactive put AI search in three steps: seen, believed, chosen.
Chad: Walk through those, because not everyone listening may have heard his talk.
Adam: Seen means AI can find you. Believed means it can decide to trust you. Chosen means you land on the short list it gives the customer. His point was that you can be seen, even mentioned by name, and still not be chosen. The AI can say your name and then tell people to go somewhere else.
Chad: Which is a brutal way to lose a customer, because you'd never know. Your report says you got mentioned, which is what you were hoping for.
Adam: Right. And here's where I think pest control owners get this wrong. Most of the effort goes to the seen part. More pages, more keywords, more posts. But when we look at the Cube Score, visibility is one side out of six. It's one hundred points out of six hundred, and most owners treat it like it's the whole score.
Chad: I'm going to push back a little. I think seen still matters. If the AI never finds you, you have no chance for any of the rest to happen.
Adam: I actually agree with that. It's step one. I'm not saying skip it. I'm saying the short list really gets decided at believed. That's where the small companies lose, and they never realize it.
Chad: So how does the owner find out? I don't think most owners know what AI is actually saying about their company.
Adam: They really don't. Here's the test. Open an AI assistant, ask who the best pest control company in your city is, and read what it says about you. Not just whether your name shows up, but what it says.
Chad: And do that more than once. This part is going to surprise a lot of people. A study from SparkToro and Gumshoe AI, that's Rand Fishkin and Patrick O'Donnell, found that when people asked an AI for brand recommendations again and again, the same list came back less than one time in a hundred. The same list in the same order was closer to one in a thousand. Wil cited that research in his session.
Adam: So one screenshot proves almost nothing.
Chad: Almost nothing. Wil tracks ten questions and runs each one twenty times a month, then counts how often his company shows up. That's a lot of work for a two truck shop. Three questions, twice, is enough to start, and we'll give you the exact steps at the end.
Adam: And here's where even a good test can fool you. You see your name, you feel good, and you stop. Read the sentence around it.
Chad: Now here's where I push back on you. You've got two hours a month. Do you spend them on your pages or on your proof?
Adam: A hundred percent pages. Owned content compounds every month. Every page goes up and keeps working for the next year.
Chad: I'd go the opposite way. I would do the proof first. Fresh reviews and a clear guarantee are the fastest way to get believed. AI isn't going to believe what's on your own page by itself.
Adam: But a page with receipts on it solves that.
Chad: Right, but pages take months. Reviews can take weeks, and Google wants more fresh reviews.
Adam: I agree, both are important. I really don't think we're going to settle that today.
Chad: No, probably not.
The second thing that showed up all over MAICON was that the early tricks for AI search are already starting to lose. Your listicles, your keyword stuffing, the things we thought would work fifteen or twenty years ago. It has changed again, a lot faster than it did before.
Adam: So what replaces them?
Chad: According to Wil, AI now checks whether trusted people and publications vouch for you before it recommends you. He called that the proof receipts.
Adam: Which is why we've started using a label with clients: the receipts rule. Every claim on your website gets a receipt right next to it.
Chad: Give me some examples, because a receipt is a little abstract to me.
Adam: Same day service gets a real response time. Family owned gets a name and a face. Guaranteed gets the written terms. Five stars gets reviews with recent dates.
Chad: That makes more sense. Most owners never show their license number, their insurance, their inspection photos, their association memberships. Then you've got the local side: your chamber of commerce, your sponsorships, your local press. We covered all that on local links back in Episode 24.
Adam: And last week we covered the recency gap and the fourth quarter client numbers. Recency is the one we see the most. When we run a proof audit on a pest control site, the most common gap isn't review count. It's that the newest review is from July. That's why we keep saying owned content over rented.
For one multi-truck residential client, thirty-eight of forty-five new contacts in the fourth quarter came from organic search. Only two came from paid.
Chad: And across our pest control clients, web traffic is up one hundred fifty-four percent and sessions are up one hundred forty-three percent year over year. That didn't come from tricks.
Now let me complicate our own argument. You keep saying owned content, but Wil's point was that AI looks at who else is vouching for you. A page on your own site that says you're great is just you saying you're great.
Adam: That's fair, and it shows this is the wild west right now, because so many things go into it. Owned content is where the receipts live. It isn't the whole thing. You still need outside people signing off on you.
Chad: Which one matters more in your opinion, your site or what people say about you?
Adam: This is something we've been saying forever. Your site first. It's the one you control, and everything else points back to it.
Chad: I'm going to go the opposite way and say outside first. Anyone can write a great About page.
Adam: But a stranger can't verify an outside mention unless your site backs it up.
Chad: I'll give you that. I guess it really needs both. I won't give you the order.
Adam: Fair enough. Here's some homework. Open your homepage, your top service page and your contact page. Highlight every claim. Next to each one, write the receipt. If you don't have one, prove it or cut it.
Chad: And if you're a newer company with six, seven, maybe eight reviews, don't panic. These receipts take time and you can't fake them. Start with what you can show today: your license, your insurance, any guarantee you've got, photos of your before and after work. Your site makes the claim. The outside world is what signs for it.
Adam: Here's a third idea. Joe Pulizzi argued that companies lean too hard on the corporate brand. His line was: don't find people and give them audiences, find audiences and give them people.
Chad: I like Joe, but let's put that in pest control terms and make it simpler.
Adam: Your audiences might be homeowners with a rodent problem, new homeowners, property managers. Instead of one logo talking to all of them, you pick a person each group would trust.
Chad: And Joe would say that person needs a tilt, a reason to follow them over everyone else. His starter roles were the expert, the connector, the storyteller and the advocate.
Adam: For us, the expert is probably a veteran tech who has seen every crawl space in town.
Chad: I love that. He also said that in a world full of AI content, quirky is going to beat polished.
Adam: Which is good news, because most pest control marketing is polished and forgettable.
Chad: Your format matters here. One format, one schedule, one promise. Something like a sixty second "what we found this week" video, every week. We covered short form video in Episodes 17 and 19.
Adam: And put it in writing. Joe suggested a short agreement. Who owns the content? What are the guardrails? What happens if the person leaves? It's the same ownership idea from our second episode, applied to people.
Chad: Because the failure case is ugly. Your tech builds a following, then leaves and takes it with them.
Adam: Or the technician hates being on camera, and the whole thing dies after three weeks. You've got to pick someone who's willing to do this for the long haul.
Chad: Does the owner count? Should the owner be the face by default?
Adam: Not by default. A business that hangs on one face is harder to grow. Joe said it's not the CEO by default.
Chad: I'm going to disagree for a small shop. Say you're running two to five trucks. The owner is the brand. They're still out there, maybe still running a route. Customers already know them, because they might have been the original technician who called on them. That's your strongest credibility, so I'd start there.
Adam: If you're looking to grow, start there, but plan to hand it off.
Chad: Or don't. Plenty of good companies are the owner's face for twenty years.
Adam: Those companies are harder to hand off, because the customers came for the owner, not the whole company.
Chad: That's a different problem than getting the call.
Adam: It really is. I guess we won't agree on that one.
Chad: Probably not.
Adam: I think it's probably a little bit of both.
Chad: Yep. One more thing from this. Measure whether people come back, not only how many people saw it. Find the person the customer would trust, then give them a schedule.
Last idea. Across the build sessions at MAICON, every workflow put a human check at each step that matters. Your human starts, AI works the middle, and the human finishes.
Adam: One speaker who built an AI agent to run her podcast said something I wrote down. "You can't automate a process that you haven't done yourself."
Chad: I like that. Which is why the best idea for operators isn't necessarily a tool, it's a loop. Wil Reynolds takes his sales call transcripts, compares them to his website and sales material, and asks what concerns customers raise that his content never addresses. Sounds a little familiar.
Adam: And he said that produced his biggest traffic spike.
Chad: Pest control owners already have this raw material. If you use call recordings in a tool like CallRail, it's the same idea we talked about in Episode 30, where we said listen to ten recorded calls. Now AI can read fifty.
Adam: Here's our twist. AI finds those questions. A human decides which ones get put on a page and what the honest answer is. And here's the sticky point: price. If callers keep asking what it costs and your site hides it, that's a transparency problem, and you can see it in your calls.
Chad: Which is the whole point of not letting the AI decide.
Adam: Right. Chris Penn, another speaker, made a version of this. AI is bad at math because it predicts words, so he writes code that gives the same answer every time.
Chad: For an owner, that means use your CRM and your reports for your numbers. Use AI to explain the pattern.
Adam: He shared one number from his own Google Search Console AI data. Seven pages drove half of his AI citations, and the citations didn't line up with the clicks.
Chad: Which means clicks alone won't tell you if AI is sending you business. Your call tracking matters.
Adam: Here's where it falls apart. Call recordings carry consent rules, and the rules vary by state. Check yours first. And keep customer names, addresses and phone numbers out of any public AI tool. That's super important.
Chad: I'd say any AI tool, technically, whether it's local or not. But I digress. Listen to some of the calls yourself. That's key. If you never do, you won't catch it when the AI reads one wrong.
Adam: Same goes for anything a customer reads. A human reads it first. We talked about what happens when a chatbot gets it wrong just a few weeks ago.
Chad: I'm going to push back a little. Is AI written content fine if the human edit is there?
Adam: Only if the human adds what the AI can't. A real job, a real number, a real photo.
Chad: I think that might be a little too strict. AI can do a quick first draft. A blank page on a blog that never gets published helps nobody.
Adam: And a blog full of what everyone else's AI wrote doesn't help anybody either.
Chad: I still think you may be setting the bar a little too high, but we'll go with it.
Adam: I think you might be setting it a little too low.
Chad: The bottom line is the AI finds the gap, and you have to decide what's true.
Adam: And like I said, this is the wild west. Marketing is changing daily, and everybody is trying to figure out what's going on and how to do this in this new age.
Chad: The last question for us: which MAICON idea would we tell a pest control owner to ignore?
Adam: The ten questions, twenty runs a month tracking. Wil does it for his reasons. A two truck shop doesn't need a dashboard. Do the three question check by hand.
Chad: Even if the dashboard is cheap?
Adam: Not until you've done it by hand for at least a few months, because you won't know what you're looking at. What's yours?
Chad: The podcast agent stuff. Interesting for us, wrong for an owner running trucks. The lesson in it is to learn the process by hand first, which you can do without building anything.
Adam: That's fair. That's what we're learning here with the podcast. We're doing it ourselves, manually.
Chad: Here's your one thing this week. Open ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Grok, whatever you prefer. Ask each one the same question twice: who is the best pest control company in your city? Screenshot every answer. Mark whether you're named and what it says about you. Circle one claim it makes that your website can't back up. It'll take about fifteen minutes.
One more thing. Do this in an incognito or private session. All of them have that option. Use it so you're not tainting the results every time.
Adam: Absolutely. If this helped, follow the show on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. We don't want you to miss next Tuesday's episode.
Chad, quick gut check before we go. Did we answer these three questions correctly?
Chad: I would say so. Number one, getting named isn't getting picked. Read what the AI says about you, not just whether it names you. Number two, receipts beat tricks every day. Reviews, license and outside mentions give AI a reason to recommend you. Number three, trust comes from real people. Let the AI find the gaps and keep a human in every decision.
Adam: If you want help with any of this, go to marketingthatactuallyworks.ai for your free pest control marketing audit. Chad is going to show you exactly what's working and what's costing you money.
Chad: And to see how your site looks to AI search, get your free Cube Score at thecubescore.com. You can grab our twenty point pest control marketing checklist there as well.
Adam: If you got any value today, leave us a five star review. It helps other pest control operators find the show. Thanks for listening to Pest Control Marketing That Actually Works. We'll see you next Tuesday.
