Dan Leibrandt on AI Agents in Pest Control Marketing
Table of Contents
- Let the AI do the work, not just the writing
- Have the AI write the prompt
- Audit your website, then let it fix the safe stuff
- Write with Claude, then strip out the AI tells
- When an agent picks the pest control company
- Ads still count, and Dan expects more LSAs
- Let the robots do the robotic stuff
- Frequently Asked Questions
Dan Leibrandt runs Pest Control SEO, an agency that does SEO for pest control companies. He’s also my partner in Pest Control Millionaires and one of my co-authors on Zip Code Kings. We don’t do many of these in person, so when Dan came up from Chicago to Escanaba, Michigan, in June 2026, we recorded this one together.
Dan started out writing freelance copy. When his dad asked for help marketing his flooring company, Dan built him a better website and realized a lot of home service owners were dealing with the same thing. His mentor, Dennis Yu, introduced him to the niche agency model, and Dan had just landed a big pest control client. “You have a bug problem in your house, you go search for a pest control company,” he said. So three or four years before we recorded this, he went all in on SEO for pest control companies.
I asked what he’d been up to in the six months since we last sat down. The answer was AI agents. Here’s what stuck with me.
This episode is part of the PCM Podcast. For Dan’s earlier take on search, read how Dan Leibrandt wins at SEO in the age of AI search.
Let the AI do the work, not just the writing
Most people use ChatGPT or Claude to write an email or come up with marketing ideas. Dan’s breakthrough was having the AI do the work. For about six months, one of his main tools had been Claude in Chrome, a browser extension that lets Claude see your screen and work in your browser. “Most people don’t know you can actually have the AI do the work for you,” he said.
He’d been using it to repurpose my podcast episodes onto this site. For the images, he had Claude write the prompts, ran them through Claude and ChatGPT, then had Claude in Chrome pick the better image. “It’s almost more just like you’re an AI manager now,” he said. It’s pretty wild to sit in front of the screen and watch it work.
It also means fewer hires. Virtual assistants used to get the basic, monotonous work, but they’re human, so they can be inconsistent or get sick. An agent can work for hours at a time. “It doesn’t complain. It doesn’t need an extra salary for bonus work. It just does it,” Dan said. His agency is him and a few other people.
I asked whether owners who aren’t into tech should hire someone to do the Claude work. Dan said no. Maybe a company doing $5 million or more gets a dedicated AI person, but most owners can do this themselves.
Have the AI write the prompt
A lot of people give an image tool one or two sentences. Dan has the AI write the prompt, then works on it with the AI. Some of the prompts he wrote for our site’s images back then ran a full paragraph, spelling out the colors, the kind of chart and which numbers go in the bottom right corner. Ask Claude where images would make sense on a page, maybe five of them, and have it write a prompt for each. Dan runs the same prompt through Claude and ChatGPT and keeps the better image. Gemini and Grok were weaker for his charts and sometimes got the text and numbers wrong.
It works for ads too. Start from an ad that already works, put the image into ChatGPT and change the offer, test a different color or add your branding. You used to need Canva for that. I had shown Dan 30 AI-generated pictures for our Facebook ads that morning.
Audit your website, then let it fix the safe stuff
Dan set up Claude in Chrome on my computer in about a minute. Add the extension to Chrome and pin it. Open your website (we used pestbadger.com), click the extension, and a side panel opens where you can chat with it while it sees your screen.
His usual first prompt is “Do a deep audit of this site and find the biggest issues and opportunities.” He always asks for both, what’s wrong and what’s pretty good but could be really good with a little more. Then have it put the report in a Google Doc. It can write a five-page report with the right heading structure.
Then have it do the work. If you’re logged in to your site, tell it, “Okay, great. Now go implement those things.” The report might flag missing alt text, five duplicate title tags or key pages blocked from search crawlers. Some changes are more sensitive, and it will tell you when a person should really do them, so start with the safe ones.
Dan explained that pages get blocked with robots.txt, the file that tells search engine crawlers what to skip. You want a new site blocked while it’s being built, but Dan has seen sites launch where Google couldn’t crawl any of the new pages, because the developer never switched it over. Only block pages you don’t want ranking, like a login page or a pile of landing pages, because a hundred landing pages eat into the crawl budget Google gives your site. Our guide to pest control website SEO covers the pages you do want ranking.
Then point it at your GorillaDesk, your CallRail or your GoHighLevel. “The biggest use case and the biggest opportunity is where there’s the most data and complexity,” Dan said. When he ran it on his mom’s website for her therapy business, it caught her address spelled wrong, Boulevard instead of Road, and NAP consistency is big, especially on your website. “If I was going through your site and making all these changes, I probably would have missed these things, too,” he told her.
Write with Claude, then strip out the AI tells
I use AI for my posts, but I correct it. I take out the em dashes and the words that show up in everyone’s posts, because when I see them, I know right away it’s AI.
Dan uses Claude instead of ChatGPT for copywriting. One of the top people in advertising told him to, and so did his mentor. “It just sounds more real, more human,” he said. In just about every prompt for copy, he writes “no em dashes or any other AI tells.” One way he likes to use it is turning a video’s transcript into website content with a custom prompt that keeps it sounding real. It’s the order he laid out in why real content still wins in SEO. Start with something real, then let AI shape it.
When an agent picks the pest control company
Here’s where I think search is going. The customer won’t be the one reaching out to us. AI agents will search for us, go through our websites and give the information back to the customer.
Dan does voice for everything, and he can see the AI living on your phone, in something you wear or in glasses. Picture a homeowner’s glasses spotting something. “Can you go closer to the corner of your house there? I think I see something.” It might be a dangerous bug, so the glasses ask if you want them to call pest control. You say yes.
So who gets the call? Dan thinks a big part of the answer, and one you control, is personalization. A premium customer’s agent can see they bought the $2,000 sofa, not the $200 one, so it looks for a premium company. Position yourself as premium everywhere you show up, from your Google Business Profile and website to your reviews. “Everywhere across the internet, you should be known for the kind of customer that you want to attract,” he said. If your team includes entomologists and wildlife specialists, show it everywhere, so the AI can tell a customer who wants professionalism why to pick you.
Dan also says an LLMs.txt file has basically been proven not to do much for large language models like ChatGPT, but it does help when AI agents crawl your site. On WordPress, Rank Math, his favorite SEO plugin, turns it on with a button.
Ads still count, and Dan expects more LSAs
Here’s where I pushed. These AI platforms are ad platforms too. ChatGPT had just launched ads when we recorded this, and if you’re paying them, I think you’ll probably be one of the first ones to show up. From what I’d heard, Google had tested an agent in California that calls companies for the customer and reports back, and it was opening up to home services. I don’t see Google giving up billions of dollars a year in ad revenue. If you aren’t running ChatGPT ads yet, start looking into it.
Dan agreed the agent could still shop through ads. But people who click an ad are fairly likely to buy, while an agent wants to look through all the options, so it might click your ad and not convert. “You don’t want to pay for clicks,” he said. That’s why he thinks Local Services Ads will be really good and only get bigger in home services. When they came to pest control about five years before this, two showed at the top. Now Dan often sees three at the top, an ad in the map pack and more LSAs if you scroll far enough.
A few weeks after this episode came out, Google started folding LSAs into Google Ads. Mat Rogers explains what changed in Google’s LSA shakeup.
Let the robots do the robotic stuff
So what does this mean for a pest control company? Dan thinks you’ll need less office staff. You’ll still need technicians, at least for now. But AI can do a lot of your marketing, maybe with one A player managing it, and scheduling and other monotonous work can be automated. People argue about whether AI is ready to answer the phones. At Pest Badger, we’ve since put an AI agent on our service line, only when our CSRs are busy or the office is closed, and never on sales calls. Here’s how AI replaced our backup call center. What’s left for you is managing your people, strategy, making content, building your reputation and getting more reviews. “All of those things that you should have been focusing on anyways, now those are really the only things you should do,” he said.
I’m a little older, so I pushed back. A Pizza Hut went back to its early ’90s look and family nights, it started crushing it, and other Pizza Huts followed. Some of my best memories as a kid were reading books for Book It and turning it in with my parents for a free pizza. Ours hadn’t been busy in a very long time, and after it went back to the old style, the parking lot was packed. Will people push back on AI?
Dan agreed with me. “Let’s have the robots do the robotic stuff and then let’s have the humans do the human stuff,” he said. Build relationships with your customers, do local shows and get involved with the local baseball teams and sporting events. Those things will get rarer as people try to replace the human parts of their business.
Answering phones could go either way. But if you only post AI images and videos on social media, people can tell, and it creates a big lack of trust. “It’s like okay, well, you don’t even care,” Dan said. Same with logos. AI can help with a design, but if you just put that design on your truck, I’m not a huge fan. Get a really good uniform and get your branding right.
Frequently Asked Questions
Who is Dan Leibrandt?
Dan Leibrandt runs Pest Control SEO, an agency that does SEO for pest control companies. He’s also my partner in Pest Control Millionaires and a co-author of Zip Code Kings. He started out writing freelance copy, then went all in on SEO for pest control companies after his mentor, Dennis Yu, introduced him to the niche agency model.
What is Claude in Chrome?
It’s a browser extension that lets Claude see your screen and work in your browser for you. Dan uses it to audit a website for its biggest issues and opportunities, put the report in a Google Doc and then fix the safe items, like missing alt text and duplicate title tags.
How will AI agents choose a pest control company?
Dan thinks personalization will be a big part of it. An agent working for a premium customer will look for a premium company, so everywhere you show up online, from your Google Business Profile and website to your reviews, be known for the kind of customer you want to attract.
Will AI replace a pest control company’s office staff?
Dan thinks owners will need less office staff, because AI can take over scheduling, other monotonous work and a lot of the marketing, while you still need technicians. Answering phones could go either way. His rule is to let the robots do the robotic stuff and have people do the human stuff.
Full transcript
Every word of the episode, from the video captions
Building the business turns you into a different kind of human being.
Realize that failure is a part of the...
I think there's hope out there for all of us.
Welcome back to another episode of Pest Control Millionaire. We don't do a lot of these in person. But going in person for you. It's cool.
Let's go.
Leibrandt, welcome back to the show.
Thank you so much for having me back on Jonas. It's so good to do the shows in person, you know, I do a lot of podcasting like you and for the most part it's online. So it's good to actually connect here in person, actually talk like real human beings for once. Yeah.
Welcome to Big Escanaba.
Yeah, yeah, very big city compared to my hometown Chicago.
Pretty good. [snorts] yeah, so for all you people that haven't heard Dan's story, we can just do a real quick recap.
Yeah, yeah, I'll give a quick recap of my story. So I started out as an entrepreneur about 5 years ago and I started trying to do a...
Yeah, something like that. Not as young as Mike Andes when he went to college. But yeah, so I started as an entrepreneur about 5 years ago and the first thing that really hit was copywriting. So I was doing freelance copywriting for about a year for all kinds of different businesses, all kinds of different copy. So I wrote radio ads, I wrote cold emails, I did LinkedIn ghost LinkedIn ghostwriting, I did, you know, nurture sequences and for like baby e-commerce brands and for home service companies and software companies, all kinds of crazy stuff for copy. So I had a good pretty good foothold in that doing that mostly freelance and then I my dad actually asked for help marketing for his company and he owns a flooring business and you know, he just had a new website built and even though I wasn't really familiar with websites. I mean I did like website copy, but I didn't actually build them. I was like, "Dad, I could build you a better website than this." So, I built my dad a new website.
I helped him with some other marketing things like his Google business profile and some Facebook stuff and I realized that a lot of other home service owners must be dealing with this same thing. You know, it's like these old white guys that are don't know how to do digital marketing. So, I decided to go deeper on that and I was doing home service marketing. Then I met a mentor around that time and he introduced me to the niche agency model. So, he took me to this conference the seven-figure agency seminar hosted by Josh Nelson and there were over 100 agencies that are doing over a million dollars a year and just about all of them were niche down on one particular home service. So, there's a million-dollar agency serving lawn care companies, a million-dollar agency serving maybe garage door companies, whatever it is. So, I had a big pest control client that I landed around that time and I was like, "You know what? I like this client. The pest control market is growing.
It's it doesn't seem too saturated. So, I'm just going to go all in on pest control." And that was about three or four years ago at this point and now I've just decided to go all in on pest control and specifically doing SEO for pest control companies. So, my mentor actually wanted me to do all digital marketing and I found that a little too overwhelming and I was like, "Okay, so what actually moves the needle for pest control? Like, how do people find and typically work with pest control companies?" And I realized that, you know, you have a bug problem in your house, you go search for a pest control company. So, that's a huge opportunity, of course, to up where people are searching. So, I've gone down a super deep rabbit hole in the local SEO space. I've interviewed just about all the top people in local SEO, Darren Shaw, Joy Hawkins, Ben Fisher, Mike Blumenthal, you name it, I've interviewed them and I'm kind of friends with them along with other people in local marketing.
That's on my podcast Local Marketing Secrets. So, yeah, I've gone pretty deep down the local SEO rabbit hole and now I've been connected with Jonas for about the past year and a half, 2 years. And, we've been pretty closely collaborating on Pest Control Millionaires and also our book Zip Code Kings which released about 8 months ago. So, I have you know, released several courses in the Pest Control Millionaires program. I show up to all the weekly calls and, we have helped a lot of pest control companies together. I mean, it's like the results in the program are totally insane. We have over 300 people in there now and it's really cool to see all that we've built and, you know, from basically nothing like a year and a half...
Yeah, it's been pretty cool. How did you meet Dennis, you?
Yeah, so it was from building up my Twitter following. He actually reached out to me. So, I didn't know much back then about entrepreneurship or business, but what I did know and what I gathered from some other people that I met is that building a personal brand is really...
So, I decided I actually made a post saying I decided to take over Twitter and I committed to doing at least three posts a day. It was about three to five posts a day and I basically got no engagement for the first 30 days and that started to kick off. Then I ended up getting 10,000 followers in 6 months and like growing on Twitter is pretty hard. It's probably easier to grow on TikTok or something like that. So, that was a pretty cool feat and Dennis saw me. He mentors these other young guys. So, he messaged me. We got on a call and he said, "You're in Chicago, right?" I'm like, "Yeah." He's like, "Oh, be in a at a conference in Chicago in 2 days. I'd love for you to come. So, we met there, we headed off, and you know, now that was over 3 years ago.
Wow, that's pretty crazy. I didn't know it went down like that. Yeah, it's pretty cool. Yeah, so there's a it's a 2026 or June. A lot of things have changed recently. A lot of things are changing in the AI Why don't you catch us up with what you've been up to the last 6 months since we sat together?
Yeah, definitely. So,...
Like outside of the Pest Control Millionaires program.
Yeah, yeah, for sure. So, a big unlock and a big change in the like digital marketing and SEO space specifically, which we were just talking about before the show, is AI agents. And, you know, I guess like the way I use it, maybe you could argue isn't quite agentic, but it is having AI do the work for you. So, I consider that agentic. So, one of the main tools that I'm using and I've been using for the past 6 months or so is called Claude in Chrome, and [snorts] incredibly powerful. It's very similar to like an open claw, or, you know, Google is going to release something like this for Gemini by the end of the summer. So, this is like a fairly recent development, and what you can do is have the AI actually control your screen. So, a lot of people talk about ChatGPT or Claude or whatever, and maybe they have it generate an email, or come up with marketing ideas, but most people don't know you can actually have the AI do the work for you.
Like, this is an actual breakthrough, and most people don't know about this. So, I've been diving pretty deep into that. We've been using it for our client sites, and even for our Pest Control Millionaires site. Like, I've been using Claude in Chrome to repurpose all of your podcasts to our Pest Control Millionaires.com site, and maybe all these different photos. Like, I had Claude generate a of prompts to create images, and then I put all those prompts into both ChatGPT and Claude, and then I had actually Claude in Chrome decide which of the images that were generated was better. So, Claude and ChatGPT generated the images, and they generated the prompts to generate those images, and then Claude went through and picked which image was better, ChatGPT or Claude. So, it's doing basically all the work. You it's almost more just like you're an AI manager now. But it's not like tools anymore. We've kind of evolved past that, or at least that's where things are now.
Yeah, it's pretty wild just sitting down there in front of the screen and watching it work. Pretty cool.
Yeah, in a lot of things in the AI world. As far as like SEO, and everything that you're doing with the Claude that you were just showing how much time has that saved you?
Mhm, a lot. Well, part of it is that I don't have to hire hire nearly as many employees now. And like one way to think about it is like virtual assistants were the hot topic for a while. Like anything basic you have to do, anything monotonous, anything that takes a while, yeah, that isn't like really high-level, like strategy or recording content or you have virtual assistants do that. Well, now it's really reached a threshold where why not have the agent do that? You don't need to pay the virtual assistant, and a lot of these virtual assistants can sometimes be inconsistent, or you know, maybe they get sick. Like they're human. That's kind of the thing is that when you use robots, they don't get sick. There's like they can work for you whenever. You can have it work for hours at a time, and it just does the work. It doesn't it doesn't complain. It doesn't need an extra salary for bonus work. It just does it.
So, what it's empowered me to do is like I my agency is literally just me and like a few other people, and that's all I need to like have a good client base. So, yeah, it's definitely minimize the work and just all these monotonous things that me or my team would have to do are just erased now. AI does them.
Hold up. Quick pause. If you're running a pest control company or fertilization weed control company and you're not in our Facebook group, you're choosing the harder path. Every operator that's in there is skipping years of mistakes cuz people are actually sharing what's working right now. So, stop trying to brute force your way through growth alone. Search Pest Control Millionaires on Facebook or click the link below. And now, let's get back to it.
Talk us a little bit about the pictures thing and then I'll have a follow-up and how can PCO's use that?
But that's our follow-up question. Like, okay, well, it's really cool. Like you talked about like older white guys like not very like in front of things, but now like with Claude like they're not going to learn how to use it, are they? Are they better off just hiring someone to go do the Claude work like just have this Claude agent or are they can they should they figure it out themselves?
No, no, they should be able to do it themselves, especially as a smaller owner. That maybe if you're 5 million plus and you know, you have the money to expend so that maybe have like a dedicated AI person or something like that. But no, I think most owners can do this themselves. And I think one thing definitely to say around image generation is a lot of people might just give like one or two sentences in order to generate an image. Whereas actually the best way to generate images is to have it create the prompt for you. So, and you kind of collaborate on making that prompt. So, it could be like so I'll bring back the example of our Pest Control Millionaires site. So, for anyone that wants to see like an a good AI generated image, you could go to our Pest Control Millionaires site, and then you can go to one of the drop-down menus.
Should be under free guides. And you can click on we have it so far on the Facebook ads one. I think we have it on the LTV one and some of those other pages. So, let's say the Facebook ads one. I gave or I rather I had Claude in Chrome go through all the copy on the page, which you could you could just use Claude, not Claude in Chrome. You could have Claude go through all the copy on the page and say, "Okay, now find where it would make sense to generate an image on this page and, you know, maybe find five different images we can make for this page and then generate prompts for those images." Because some of these images and some of these prompts are incredibly complex. It would be a full paragraph to generate an image, maybe like eight sentences. And it would say like, "Oh, make sure to use these specific colors and use this specific kind of chart and use these specific numbers in the bottom right and that kind of thing." You don't want to do that and you don't want to do that manually. So, you have the AI create the prompt for you and you can also just work back and forth with that.
So, maybe you could say cuz I think like maybe a more tactical example could be making something like a Facebook ad creative.
We talked about...
Yeah, yeah. So, you could potentially go into Claude. And by the way, image generation is very new to Claude, but they do a very good job. But still, like I mentioned earlier, I like doing it in Claude and ChatGPT and then you can compare the two cuz sometimes I mean, there's always going to be one that's better. So, you can just choose. But I found that they're pretty equal. They're fairly equal. I've also tried image generation on Grok and Gemini and I found that they're not as good at image generation. At least for the kind of more like charts that I was trying to generate. And but when you want to make sure that the text and numbers on the page are right, sometimes Gemini and Grok still won't get those. So, it looks like Claude and ChatGPT are the best at that. So, if you wanted to make a Facebook ad creative, you could go into Claude and say, "Hey, you know, I want to make a Facebook ad for our new offer. You know, we're going to do a $47 off, you know, first mosquito treatment."
You know, we want it to be engaging. We want it to be eye-catching. And maybe you could even give an example. So, like I was mentioning this idea earlier today. Like, we have a really good, mosquito ad with that same kind of offer and that we just give people in our program. But, people could take that image, put it into the ChatGPT, and maybe now instead of $47 off, it's $97 off. Or, maybe they can test a different color. Or, maybe they can add their branding to it. All those kinds of different things. So, if you have already a good base to work off of, like all the creatives that we provide in the program, then you can just put that into ChatGPT and edit it however you want. And, you know, previously to do image editing, you'd have to put it into Canva or something like that, and you would have to edit it. But, now, like I said, the AI can just edit the images for you.
So, a lot of the workflow has been...
Yeah, that's awesome. And I use it I mean, I showed you 30 pictures this morning and they're all AI generated for Facebook ads. Okay. So, let's just say they're PCO, right? They don't run their own marketing. How else could they use...
Yes. So, we also talked about this earlier and I think this would be really cool. I'll give like a little preface on Claude in Chrome cuz that's mainly what I've been talking about here. And this is like the breakthrough. Cuz you've Person watching this, you've probably already heard some stuff on Claude and ChatGPT and stuff, and you're using it for basic prompting. But, to go to the next level, you really should get Claude in Chrome. And I did it right in front of Jonas. We installed it on his computer in like a minute. All you have to do is go to a Chrome browser, and then you, up Claude in Chrome. Then [snorts] you install the plugin, and then you'll want to go to your plugins and click the pin icon, so it's there whenever you want to use it.
And then, you can go on any browser, anywhere you want. So, let's say you search up your website, like we went on yours, pestbadger.com. And we have the site up, and then you click the Chrome extension, you click Claude in Chrome, and it will show up a side browser. And now you can chat with it on the side, and now it can see your screen. So, you can say something like kind of the typical one I like to do when I maybe just do like a basic audit on client sites or prospect sites, is I can you know, do a deep audit of this site and find the biggest issues and opportunities. I always use the two like biggest issues, what are the biggest things that are wrong, but also the biggest opportunities. Like, ah you know, we're we're doing pretty good on this, but if we could just do a little bit better, we'd be really good. So, find the biggest issues and opportunities, and then report back to me on what you find. And then additionally, you could say, and put all of make a that report and put that into a Google Doc, cuz it can it can do that, too. It can just create a new tab, like I showed you, and it can put like a five-page report in a Google Doc, and it'll structure it properly, have like the right heading structure and everything.
So, that's a really cool way to use it is like optimizing your site, but then the further extent of that is then actually having it implement those things. So, if you are logged into your WordPress on your computer, or logged in anything, but this is just for this example, if you're logged into your WordPress, then you can say, "Okay, great. Now go implement those things." And it'll say, you know, with the report it might say, "Ah, well, you're missing a lot of alt text. Ah, well, these title tags you have like five duplicate title tags on your site." And ah like actually some of your key pages are are blocked from search crawlers. Like those kinds of things that are imminent. So, you can literally just tell it to do those things. And maybe some things are more sensitive and it will say like, "Hey, you know, I probably should really should have a person do this."
So, maybe you can just start with having it do the more basic, more safe things. But, you can have it do most of these things, which is really cool. And then, another aspect of using this is once you get familiar with it and like kind of get comfortable with the AI controlling your screen and just doing whatever it wants to do or not not doing whatever it wants to do, doing whatever you tell it to do. Another way to use this, which I haven't heard anyone really talk about and a lot of this is only in the SEO context, which I think it is the best use case for SEO stuff, is having it do something like audit your GorillaDesk or audit your CallRail or audit your GoHighLevel. I think this is a huge opportunity, especially. And I think like the biggest use case and the biggest opportunity is where there's the most data and complexity. So, this is why it's so good on your website because there's so much data and so much complexity on your website. Like if you have a fairly big company and you've been doing SEO, you probably have over 100 [snorts] pages/articles on your site. You probably have 10 to 20 plugins.
You probably have you know, lots of internal and external links. Like all these different things. So, you want to make sure that that the AI, or rather AI is the one that's going to be able to do all that monotonous and nuanced work better than a human. So, another example, I show I was showing my mom this. She owns a $2 million therapy business. And I had it audit her website and something really small was like her address was actually spelled wrong. It said Boulevard instead of road and like we were talking about earlier NAP consistency is big especially on your website. You want to make sure that the address on your site is right. There are also some other things on other pages like maybe some words were misspelled and like I was telling her cuz she was like you know, I have to you know, be mean to my marketing agency again, you know, they're always upset with me cuz I'm giving them revisions and stuff.
I know. I know.
But I was telling her like look honestly, if I was going through your site and making all these changes, I probably would have missed these things, too. So it's like the AI can catch all the things that even like a high-level human can't catch. So yeah, it's pretty ground break ground breaking. It's sweet.
Yeah, you mentioned block crawling. What does that mean? I mean I get the concept, but how how does that happen?
Yeah, so you anyone like on your site can choose rather anyone managing your site can choose to block certain pages from This is called robots.txt which is basically you're you're blocking it from the robots crawling it and like a sometimes how this can happen is if you're launching a new website and when you have it like set on a side server, then you probably do want to have robots.txt on all these pages cuz you don't want them to index like we haven't launched the site yet. But sometimes what will happen I've seen this where someone launches a new site and Google actually can't crawl any of the new pages because the developer whoever didn't switch that over. So you want to make sure that you don't have robots.txt on your key pages. You do actually want to have it on your pages that you don't want to rank or index at all. So, that might be like a WordPress login page. That might be you have like some side offer pages.
You have like landing pages.
Yeah, yeah, landing pages. Like often times you don't want those to be especially like things that are at scale. Like if you make a hundred landing pages, that's dilutes your you have a specific crawl budget that Google allows. So, if you have tons of pages on your site, then Google is going to be more frugal with how it's spending the crawl budget. And now your good pages aren't going to be getting crawled as...
Got you. So, there's some pages that you want turned off. Cool. Cuz like we talked about this like the future of what it looks like with...
On the Google side reaching out to us as pest control. And it's not going to be like the customer reaching out to us. It's going to be more of like the crawl agents searching through ChatGPT or crawl searching for us. They're going to go index our site. They're going to give all the information back to the customer. What do you see coming down the pipeline?
Yeah, definitely. It's going to be interesting. And I feel like I decently predicted a lot of these things like when we did our show, I don't know, 8 months ago and then maybe 12 months ago. So, yeah, the future of search, which is really fascinating. I Of course, I can't predict it exactly. But what I think it will be first off, voice search versus versus text. Like it you saw me prompting Claude doing all these different things.
I do voice search for everything. And this is especially prevalent in the young generation. I forget the exact stat, but there's some stat like Gen Alpha, which is below Gen Z. I think that's people below 16 years old maybe, something like that. 16, 17.
Young? How young?
That I think 80 to 90% of them prefer and use voice search and voice text actually writing things out on a keyboard. So, I think that's going to be a huge thing, especially prevalent for the new generation and just even people adapting it now. So, it will be some kind of voice and then definitely with your phone, but maybe also with glasses. So, you're just talking to it and you could even consider like I think Open AI which controls ChatGPT is considered giving people like a necklace and it's basically a necklace that just listens to you all the time. So, I could I could see something almost the equivalent of like an Alexa, but something that's probably on you that's listening all the time if you want to turn that on which that might sound like scary to the people listening, but...
But most of the time it's your phone's listening to you.
Yeah, yeah. But I think a good amount of people in Gen Z and Gen Alpha be like, "Yeah, I do want it to like listen to me be able to listen to me all the time." The same way you have an Alexa, you know, it's I mean, it's sitting there, but you say, "Hey Alexa, turn on this good song." It's just It's more convenient versus having to go and turn on the Alexa or whatever you want to do. So, I think that might just be your phone, that might be a necklace. Could also very well be glasses. I'm hesitant on glasses. Glasses seem like they're still not here. Mark Mark Zuckerberg has been all in on glasses for about the 10 past 10 years and it's kind of unclear who's going to win the glasses race. There's Meta glasses, there's Google Glass, and there's Apple has been kind of silent about theirs, but that they're going to release glasses, too.
And then probably a few other companies, but it seems like those are kind of the top three contenders. So, they're still kind of minimizing it, making it as wearable and like it doesn't look awkward or anything. But the Meta ones actually look solid.
Of crazy. So, I can see that where many more people are wearing glasses.
Yeah, yeah. They're they're they're partnered with Ray-Bans and I think maybe Oakley or another big one.
But I haven't used Oakley ones. I heard they're cool though.
Okay, yeah. Yeah. So, I can see that in the future for sure. That probably won't be the older generation wearing those, but more so the younger generation. And people will talk to their glasses and there will be like a user interface, let's say, where, you know, they're walking around their house and maybe even the maybe the person doesn't detect it, but the glasses do. And the glasses are like, "Uh is can you go closer to the corner of your house there? I think I see something." They're like, "Okay." You go closer to it's like, "Oh, that is definitely, I don't know, this kind of dangerous bug. Like, you know, you want me to call pest control for you?" And then you say, "Yes." And then it calls it. So that's all it is.
It'll be like it'll be asking Claude, ChatGPT, or do you think it'll be Google or Meta platform using their AI? And then they're going to they're going to go index the websites and they're going to give the information back to the customer. I guess it depends on the platform. And like another element of this, too, which is like the further extent is I was talking about this yesterday.
And when when people have in-home robots like an Optimus robot, let's say, that Elon's making. Well, obviously, Elon's going to have his own Grok platform in the Optimus robot.
So, and it could be that same kind of thing, but just even further. I just I'd rather talk about glasses whether rather than robots because robots aren't here yet. Glasses are very close to being here. Robots, I don't know. Elon says that we'll have 100 million robots in the next 5 years. So, that's coming, but not quite yet.
And I wouldn't like Love Elon, huge Elon fan, he's never hit his mark.
So, I feel like it's coming for sure. 5 years, probably not. We can be wrong. You know, he's probably more accurate than we are, but he's never misses. He's never hits his timelines ever, so but I mean, they've been coming out with a lot more robots for 15 years, 20 years, and it's still not here yet, which is like the most simple thing to...
Yeah. That makes sense. 10? Yeah.
It seems like a very simple thing to do. So, yeah. I and like one aspect of make sure that I hit on on that and I definitely talked about this in our last podcast is like, well, if the AI agent what wherever it's searching what whatever AI platform, like how is it choosing the right company? How is it choosing the company? If it just says, oh, I saw a bug, you want me to call a pest control company? And you say yes. And then they call them. Well, who are they going to call? How does that get chosen? And I think a big part of that that is understated and something you can control is personalization. So, I talked about this on one of our weekly group calls recently. And that is that you know, if you have if you want to attract premium customers and in this, you know, further down scenario, someone's AI agent just calls or searches up companies for the customer and they are a premium customer, then likely and you know, they buy all these premium things that their agent can see all their transactions like, oh, they get the $2,000 sofa, not the $200 one.
They work with an HVAC company. They preferred to pay $15,000 versus this, whatever. Like, they always do the most expensive thing. So, then throughout your marketing, you need to make sure that you are positioning yourself as premium. So, everywhere you show up online, that's your Google Business Profile, your website, your Yelp page, also your That's actually a big thing that we can touch on like review text mattering a lot more Everywhere across the internet, you should know you should be known for the kind of customer that you want to attract. So, maybe I don't know that there's another archetype where it's kind of like the older retired person that really wants someone who's professional. Like they want professionalism above all. Your whole team has been tracking for 10 years and they are like wildlife specialists and you know, advanced entomologists, all of this. Then like yeah, you should display that all of your all over your site and all across the internet.
And if you do that properly, then the AI to that person who likes professionalism will say, "Oh, well, this person shows clearly they have five entomologists that are, you know, beyond certified, whatever. And you know, this is why you should choose them." So, I think that personalization there will be key.
Yeah, and I think the other side of this whole thing is like who's it going to Well, as you can see already, they're all kind of their own ad platforms...
So, like ChatGPT just launched their ad platforms. So, if you're spending money on ChatGPT, when they ask ChatGPT, if you're not spending money on ChatGPT or you are spending money on ChatGPT, you are marketing on there, you are paying them, you're probably going to be one of the first ones to show up, right?
And I think so it's going to take all the information and index all the information on the website still, but if you're still on their ad platform and you're spending money, it's going to go to you first. So, for PCOs that aren't doing ChatGPT ads yet, start looking into it. And I think Claude will have theirs. And I think that Gemini have theirs. And so like if they're on Gemini Google, like people search on Google, it'll Gemini will give them those ones who are spending the most money. Same thing with the Google Chrome, like all that. Like I think that'll play a factor, too. It's like how Okay, so this AI agent calls, right? So, they're saying that they already been testing this in California last sort of last year, but they opened up the home services this year. So, the AI agent is going to call three different customers. It's not going to be the customer calling. The AI agent will call three different customers and report back all the information to the customer or these three companies. Okay, I understand that. Like, it makes sense to me. But, if you're spending more money on Google, right? You're willing to spend more money on Google, and you're willing to spend more money on keywords, like, it's still going to take into factor of that.
Because, otherwise otherwise Google is going to Like, people will stop spending money on Google ad platforms. Yeah. So, I just I do not see that happening. And so, like, there's still going to be a concept of, okay, you're still spending money versus people are just doing all this organic stuff, too. Like, cuz they're not going to want to lose all the ad revenue. There's no way.
Billions of dollars a year.
Well, that still could be through ads, though. So, I mean, ChatGPT could be shopping through three different Google ads or three different local service ads, whatever it is. So, I don't think it changes the dynamic too much, but...
People might have a lower conversion rate compared to clicks cuz I would say relatively speaking now people when they click they're more likely to convert with someone versus the AI agent who is totally I guess rational and wants to look through all the options. So, you might see that the AI agent is clicking on your ad, but it's not converting cuz it's looking at all the ads.
That's what I'm saying. So, like, that's almost like a question that I want answers to. Like, okay, so, we're spending way more money on Google or on ChatGPT. Like, I just want to like, okay, now it's going to reach out to us. It's actually the customer. Like, I still feel like that part will take into account.
Yeah. Yeah, you So, you don't want to pay for clicks.
Like, so, that that's why local service ads will be really good. And I would assume in home services local service ads will only get bigger. Like, I just it makes it so much easier for the owners and I so I could see and local service ads already have expanded. It's funny because you know that they came out in pest control about 5 years ago and for a while it was only two local service ads showing up showing up at the top and then you could expand for more but it was two local service ads then usually like two or three Google ads maybe one if not many people are running them. Then three Google business profile results and then the rest organic. Now what's been happening a lot in search is that instead of two at the top I've seen many times where it's three local service ads at the top. Then there might be one, two, or three Google ads and then there's the map pack and many times in the map pack now I see that there's a local service ad in there as well or actually it's a technically a Google ad but someone's like boosting their Google business profile but there's also local service ads and then if you scroll far enough there's more local service ads.
So Google has really been pushing local service ads and I can see that like to simplify it for the agent I can see it just using local service ads. Yeah, it's going to be interesting what it's even for this year 2026 what it's going to look like the evolution of it all. Definitely and the thing you mentioned I think you talked with Mat about this Mat Rogers. Of how I mean it will be agents searching. Cuz you don't want to do a Google search and spend like an hour your customers don't want to spend an hour looking for a pest control company and you know who has the most reviews but who has this it's like no my agent knows me better than me it's like you pick. Like I don't I don't want to waste my time picking a pest control company.
So there's not like I mentioned the personalization. I will will mention one other thing I'm not sure if Mat mentioned this I didn't get to catch that episode yet. But one thing, this is proven, a lot of people have talked about, have you heard of, LLMs.txt?
LLMs.txt is something that a lot of people thought was for, like AI crawlers, or, rather, just large language models. So, ChatGPT, Claude, whatever. It's basically been proven that adding that to your site doesn't really do anything for the large language models, but it does do something for the AI agents. So, when you have AI agents crawling your site, having, LLMs.txt on your site does make a difference. That does make you show up better for, like agents crawling your site. And if you have Rank Math, which is really my favorite SEO plugin if you have a WordPress site, you can install Rank Math, and of the list of things you can turn on and optimize, you can literally just press a button to turn on LLMs.txt, and that's it.
Yeah, pretty sweet. Cool. So, what do you think the future looks like for PCOs?
For PCOs, yeah, we talked a good amount about like the agent stuff and robots and stuff. I think that, kind of along that that same theme, that PCOs will be able to have less office staff. You'll still need the technicians cuz, you know, that's the actual in-person stuff. At least in the short term, but, there might be a point where, I mean, you don't need anyone in your office. You can have AI answering the phone, you can have AI doing all your marketing. Now, maybe you have like a chief marketing person that's an A player, and they manage all the AI stuff, but I think people having like huge office staffs, or even, like I mentioned earlier, having the virtual assistants, like you can kind of get rid of that now.
You can just have AI do it, which, you know, people will argue as to whether it's really there for call answering or like especially for outbound, I was talking with Jacob about in terms of the future, you like a lot of that office stuff and it just like a lot of the monotonous stuff that you're doing, maybe like scheduling and such, like, that can all be automated and AI augmented, where you don't have to spend so much time doing all these monotonous things, but instead now spend your time managing your people, coming up with strategy, making content, building your reputation, getting more reviews, like all of those things that you should have been focusing on anyways, now those are really the only things you should do. Those are the only things that make sense to you. The AI should be doing the...
Yeah, and I will like I'm a little bit older, so I'll push back a little bit. And here's a good example. So, like, Pizza Hut, they I don't know if you heard about this, there was a I think it was a Pizza Hut in Louisiana or something like that, but they went back retro to like early '90s, back to their lights, back to like their heritage, back to like having like more focused family nights. Do you remember I don't know if you remember Book It at all? But back when I was in school...
We used to read a book, right? And after we got done reading the book, we'd get this Book It. And we got the Book It, we'd go turn it in for a free pizza.
It was like some of the best memories that I had as a kid was going to the Book It. We'd take my Book It thing with my parents and going to the buffet. It was just really cool back then. One of the I think it was Louisiana, I could be wrong with the state, that don't matter. Went back to that old style and it started crushing it.
So, now [clears throat] all the other Pizza Huts are doing the same thing. And I haven't seen our Pizza Hut busy in a very long time. Like I've said it for the longest time, like they I can't believe they got rid of this, they can't believe they did that. Like again, some of my best memories were there. And looking to what they recently have done here, and like the parking lot is packed. So, all to say like...
Will will humans eventually push back in some of this AI stuff?
Like and want it more traditional.
Yeah. So, I it's not even so much as that cuz like a lot of the things that I've mentioned like doing the SEO stuff and like optimizing the CRM. Like that is a totally valid point. I agree with you. Like what I'm saying is let's have the robots do the robotic stuff and then let's have the humans do the human...
Like even answering phones. Like that's one where I think like go either way, yeah.
That could go either way.
But yeah, like especially the like building relationships with your customers and maybe doing like local shows and you know, getting involved with like the local baseball teams and like the local sporting events. Like those are real things. So, what I'm saying is like double down on the human things then let AI do the robotic things. Like you shouldn't be spending all your time with like the scheduling or updating the website or whatever. And like building a good brand and reputation like you're talking about and what you've done. That is what you should be focused on and also that will in a sense be the most rare because people will try to replace some of their more human elements. Like you know, the call answering could go either way, but like one that comes to mind social media. Like if someone is only using like AI generated images and videos on social media.
Yeah, you can tell. [clears throat] At least right now you can tell. And there's something about that that creates like a big lack of trust. It's like okay, well, you don't even care.
Even like people's logo. Like it drives me nuts or truck like again like truck wrapped the little it looks helps. Helps the design, but if you just use that design put it on your truck, I'm like not a huge fan.
Exactly. No, I agree. So, all those like physical in-person things, like you want to have a really good uniform. And like all the branding aspects So, yeah, like the social media one I think that has actually hurt a lot of reputations in the space.
Even with like posting on social media, like I can I use it. Like I'm not denying that I don't use it, but I correct it.
And like I make it look like which I did, I wrote it myself, but I take out all the em dashes, I take out all the recurring words that just show up all the time everyone's post, like I When I see it, I know right away that's AI. It drives me crazy.
Do you Do you feel the same way?
Oh, yeah, I totally do. And I can usually recognize right away when someone's talking...
Were talking about it this morning. When we were talking about Facebook ads, like you kept saying the same word over and over again.
Yeah, take those out. Like just recreating those same words over and over again. I can't stand that.
And you can avoid that a little bit. Like I was saying, you know, for copywriting for anyone listening, like if you're using well, no, you should use Claude instead of ChatGPT for copywriting. Like I've talked to Ken Moskowitz, who's one of the top people in all of advertising, he says that you should use Claude. My mentor is a really big name in marketing and advertising, he says use Claude.
ChatGPT, yeah.
I don't Like a lot of these these people and me myself, I've witnessed the difference of maybe just generating titles for YouTube videos or, you know, descriptions, whatever it is, like yeah, Claude is better. It just sounds more real, more human. Like something about ChatGPT, it always sounds robotic. And like you said, you should say something like remove the em dashes. So, what I say in just about every prompt related to copy, I say no em dashes or any other AI...
Cuz em dashes is like the main culprit, but there are plenty other plenty of other AI tells where it'll use certain Can't think of one off the top of my head, but like there's certain terms that like you know are AI. Yeah. But what you can do, I will say, I do still like using something like Claude for website content. Like social media, that's a much more like the much more condensed copy. So something like a YouTube title. Like a YouTube title, you only get a little bit of writing, and people really trust it. So if you don't have a good title there, you are screwed.
Right, I agree.
But something you can do, and like what we've done, is we might record videos. Actually, this podcast here will get repurposed into an article on our site. So we will take the transcript from this podcast, and then we will put it into Claude, and using our custom prompt to make sure that it sounds real, and it is you know, like the highlights of the show. Like in a sense, Claude can actually give a better consensus of the highlights of this show than we can. So that's like a good way I like using it is repurposing video into articles and website content. Cool. Well, it was a great show as usual. I don't know what time we're at, but we got lots more to do today.
Yeah, definitely. No, this has been a great show, and thanks as always for having me on, Jonas.
Yeah, talk to you soon.
Yes, sir. Hey guys, thanks for listening to another episode of Pest Control Millionaire. We don't charge any money for this show, but the podcast isn't free. Please like and subscribe, and give us a five-star review in your favorite podcast app. This makes a huge difference for us. If you have any specific questions about your business or your personal life that you'd like answered by me or any of my podcast guests, please send an email to And if you want to get in touch with me to learn about our marketing class, we do a live version every Thursday night. Check out our website at Thank you guys for listening, and I'll see you guys in the next one.
Watch the PCM Podcast on YouTube
