Mat Rogers is back. He runs Lizard Marketing, he has been on this show more than almost anyone, and every time he comes on he brings the stuff that is about to hit your business before you see it coming. This one is two big changes at once, and both landed right in the middle of busy season.
We recorded this the first week of August. Here is what stuck with me.
This episode is part of the PCM Podcast. For the planning side of this, see Mat Rogers on winning digital marketing in 2026.
Mat opened with something I want every owner to hear. “Both artificial intelligence and Google don’t care that it is in the middle of your season,” he said. They keep moving. The digital landscape has been shifting nonstop since about last September, and if you are not paying attention it has real implications for your ability to grow.
The flip side is that if you stay flexible, you catch the wind while your competitors sit there wondering what to do. This is an old, slow industry. You don’t have to be. And remember, by September and October we are already building budgets for next year, so the work you do between now and December is what shows up in May.
The $99 SEO trap
AI has created experts and competitors everywhere. Mat’s dad raced cars, and his line was don’t run up and down pit road looking at everybody else’s race car. Focus on yours. His other line was that he doesn’t get his liquor on the bottom shelf, and that applies here.
Mat saw a competitor pop up offering to automate your entire SEO for $99 a month. AI does the homework on your market and drops a new piece of content on your site every single day, 30 or 31 pieces a month. If I heard that pitch with my owner hat on, I would think it sounds like value. That is the problem.
Then he read me a headline from Search Engine Journal that came out the week before. Google is seeing a surge in scaled content abuse manual actions against sites that use AI to crank out content at scale without human editorial oversight. It costs Google money to crawl your site every day, and if the content is not helpful, they are done being nice about it.
What actually gets you penalized
Here is the part that should scare you. They are not penalizing the page. They are penalizing your domain. Google stops trusting the whole site and stops using anything on it when a customer asks a question.
Mat walked through what trips the flag. Low effort automation, like the same page with the city swapped out for Mesa, Gilbert, and Queen Creek. AI translation with no local adaptation. And publishing in volume, meaning thousands of articles that summarize what is already in the search results without adding anything new.
The timeline is what makes it sneaky. The first 30 days you see a spike, because Google gives new content a grace period. Days 31 to 60 it tails off. By day 90 your domain takes a huge hit, and digging out takes 90 to 120 days and usually means gutting big parts of your website. “Cheap AI content is not a shortcut. It’s a liability with a delayed fuse,” Mat said. Think of it like a red card. Once you get one, the ref stops trusting you.
What AI actually wants is human experience. Your process, what your techs see in the field, real reviews, the products you use, and your price ranges. That is why Mat’s team sends every client a list of questions to answer on their phone, and the content gets built from those answers. You cannot skip that step.
Put your prices on your website
This brought up a book I read years ago, They Ask, You Answer by Marcus Sheridan. Back in 2017 he was saying to answer every question on your website, post every video, and put a price on everything. He grew a pool company into something huge doing exactly that.
Mat said it is more true now than ever. When someone asks AI a question, it creates a secret set of sub-questions behind the scenes. How much does it cost, how is it applied, is it safe for my pets, how fast can they get here. Content that answers all of those gets synthesized right away, often on day one. Content that leaves gaps does not. Every site Lizard builds now has prices clearly labeled.
As Mat put it, “AI has made information accessible and cheap.” Your competitors and your customers can already see everything. The best thing you can do is be honest about why you charge what you charge and what justifies it.
LSAs are moving into Google Ads
This is the big one. Starting July 20, Google began folding Local Services Ads into your Google Ads manager account as a Performance Max pay-per-lead campaign. You get a 14 day heads up by email, then the LSA dashboard closes. Check the email tied to your LSA account.
If you are one of the owners who only ran LSA because the leads were cheap, and you shut off your PPC campaigns, you have a real problem. Mat has been begging people for two years to keep PPC alive with a small budget just to keep clocking conversion data. Now your LSA leads are landing in an ads account with no data in it. In his words, Merry Christmas.
Some things stay the same. It is still pay per lead. It is still service based, not keyword based, so whatever service types you have turned on in LSA are what the new campaign optimizes for. If termites is off in LSA, it will be off here too. It still runs by geography, so use zip codes, not a radius. And you still need someone disputing bad leads. Mat’s team transcribes every call and submits receipts to Google every month for leads outside the service area or for services you don’t offer.
Export your LSA data today
Your historical LSA performance will not migrate. If you don’t export your conversion data from the LSA dashboard and import it into your ads account, you lose it and you start over. The optimization period on a new campaign is about 90 days, and as Mat said, we don’t have 90 days left in the season.
So pause this, go into your LSA dashboard, export everything, and get it into your ads manager account. If you work with a big box agency and can’t get your account manager on the phone, ring somebody. It has to be done fast.
Weekly budgets are now daily budgets
The budget change is going to hit people in the pocket. LSA ran on a weekly budget. Performance Max runs on a daily budget that has to be optimized. Mat told a story about a mutual friend who told LSA it could spend $100,000 a week and just cut it off himself when he hit his real number. That trick is gone.
If you have $20,000 a month for leads, your team has to break that into about $5,000 a week and then into a daily number, and watch it. Otherwise the budget runs away from you and you get a bill. Google takes your money and says goodbye.
Get your website ready to talk to AI
Mat’s last warning was about websites. Most sites locked into the big box agencies are not built to talk to language learning models. The sites Lizard is building now score 100 out of 100 on the SEO, AEO, and GEO benchmarks and 3 out of 3 for agentic browsing. By October you need to be ready to build a site that AI can read, whether you like it or not.
And do not let one of the cheap AI outfits lock you into an annual contract for content that is going to get your domain a red card. You will be coming to Mat and me at the barbecue asking for help, and that fix is not fun.
See you in Dallas
We wrapped up talking about the house party in Dallas during PestWorld. The group text is insane and the sponsorships are nuts. Mat said something I loved. There are gatekeepers everywhere in life, and the whole point of what we are building is to bring up any owner who wants to come with us and make enough noise that the gatekeepers have to pay attention. They did.
So do the three things. Stay away from bottom shelf SEO, export your LSA data, and switch your head to daily budgets. Then come celebrate a good season with us. Thanks as always, Mat.
