Artificial intelligence has moved from buzzword to business reality, influencing how contractors market, sell, and operate every day. Still, many business owners struggle to understand what AI actually does and how to put it to work.
At Pantheon 2025, Taylor Hulett, Director of Training and Dev Ops at RYNO Strategic Solutions, shares a practical look at AI, answers common questions, and offers strategies contractors can implement immediately to drive success.
“We have to be ahead of these things,” Hulett says. “The best way to pass competitors in a race is the turn. So, when things like this happen, we need to be ahead of it.”
To get ahead in the AI marketing game, Hulett says service business owners need to be able to answer three questions:
Why does AI matter?
How does AI work?
What can businesses do to make an impact?
“We have to understand the tool to understand how to manipulate it,” Hulett says. “We've been manipulating search engines for 20 years. How can we influence AI?”
Why does AI matter?
Hulett makes it clear that AI adoption isn’t creeping in, it’s exploding. Users are shifting away from Google toward AI tools because they’re faster, more conversational, and feel more personal. For the first time in more than a decade, he notes how Google’s overall search engine market share has fallen below 90%.
He also points out that Millennial and Gen Z users increasingly turn to AI platforms like ChatGPT for search, and as these generations become homeowners, that shift is only accelerating.
“That's absolutely significant, and we should keep an eye on that,” Hulett says. “This is why timing is absolutely everything. We have to adopt early so we can capture that trust. We have to take action now.
“When times are tough, that's when you lean in. When a disruption happens, that's when you go all in,” he adds.
How does AI work?
Hulett says business owners need to understand how AI works in order to understand how to influence it.
“AI researches and retrieves, it does the work for you,” he says. “Google is transactional, AI is conversational. I can ask follow-up question after follow-up question, and it knows what I asked before. It can give me answers based on what I'm asking and what it thinks I'm looking for.”
He explains how when someone makes a Google search, it pulls from what it thinks are the top-ranking websites, whereas ChatGPT pulls from everything it can find, including customer reviews across multiple platforms, PowerPoint presentations, and PDFs.
“It looks at everything on the sites, everything it knows from before, any things that you've given it, any resources that you've given it,” he says. “The result is AI feels like it's talking with you, not at you.
“It's going to use data collectors to find blogs, go to other websites, and it's going to use data collectors to crawl any sort of information that you’ve given it. It'll pipeline all of that information into a chatbot engine and then spit out an answer,” he adds.
What can business owners do to make an impact?
With a better understanding of how AI works, Hulett explains what businesses can do now to future-proof their organizations in the AI age.
Hulett says SEO remains absolutely essential and serves as the bedrock and foundation for tools like ChatGPT. AI models don’t replace search fundamentals, they build on them, rapidly crawling and synthesizing well-structured content at lightning speed.
To test this in practice, his team added new FAQ sections to several client websites and tracked the results. They focused on two metrics, starting with a completely new keyword—one they had never targeted before—to see how introducing fresh, structured content would surface and perform within ChatGPT’s ecosystem.
“We were able to rank that keyword in just under three days. It was lightning fast because of the content we were able to write,” Hulett says. “We have to look at our SEO tactics and build content that AI trusts.”
Onsite SEO tactics
Hulett says content is absolutely still king, but the game has changed.
“AI wants depth and context. It wants longer-form content. It wants conversational style, Q&A formats, FAQs, blog posts, and resource-style content,” he says.
At RYNO, Hulett says his team shifted their approach to make content more conversational and customer-focused. Instead of simply marketing the business or highlighting their success, they spoke directly to the end user. By answering real questions customers are already asking, the content becomes more relevant, more useful, and more aligned with how people search for information today.
To determine exactly how customers search online, he says, business owners can use AnswerThePublic, a tool that shows how people search for any given topic.
Offsite SEO tactics
Hulett stresses the growing importance of directories, with a specific focus on Google Business Profile. AI doesn’t rely on Google Maps alone, it also cross-references information across platforms like Yelp, Thumbtack, Angi, and the Better Business Bureau to validate and surface accurate business data.
“Your reputation, your reviews, and your presence across all those platforms, it matters now more than ever because they’re direct ranking factors in ChatGPT,” he says. “If you start encouraging reviews to those websites, to those directories, you’ll then become more competitive in ChatGPT's eyes.”
He says the “Goliaths” in any given market typically focus on one or two channels for collecting reviews. Spreading business reviews across multiple sites can actually help smaller shops out- compete larger businesses with thousands of reviews.
Specifically, he warns businesses not to overlook Thumbtack, given its strategic partnership with ChatGPT.
“If you don't own and operate and leverage your profile on Thumbtack, you might be missing out,” he says.
Technical SEO tactics
From a technical perspective, Hulett says AI needs two things: speed and structure. That means businesses need to optimize their websites for site speed and use clean site maps and structured data.
“If bots can't crawl your website, or aren’t able to quickly, you basically don't exist, and that goes for Google or AI, he says. “AI can just do it that much faster. So, basically, we need a fast mobile site, a fast desktop site, with good data that’s organized.”
Hulett notes the rise of zero-click searches as a major shift in how people find information. He says roughly 60% of Google searches now end without a click, meaning users get their answers directly on the search results page and never visit a website.
According to Hulett, large language models like ChatGPT operate in a similar way. As these tools deliver answers instantly, he expects organic SEO traffic to decline, with fewer users clicking through to websites because search engines and AI platforms increasingly provide the information upfront.
“Does that mean SEO is dead? Does that mean SEO is underperforming?” he asks. “No, because where is the large language model in Google getting the information? From your website, from the conversational content you’re writing, from the directories you’re managing and leveraging, like Thumbtack and Angi.”
