I want to start this one with a number I can actually stand behind, since that's been the theme lately.

The biggest shift I saw in any client's account this year was Rapid Dry Carpet Cleaning moving off Google paid ads and onto Local Services Ads. Scotty had good reason to be skeptical of anything with "ads" in the name — a previous agency had billed him for leads that turned out to be spam. LSAs run differently: pay-per-lead instead of pay-per-click, a Google Guaranteed badge, and a real dispute process for the calls that never should have counted. Since making the switch, we're still seeing the occasional spam call — that never fully goes away — but the ratio has flipped. Real customers now make up the clear majority of what comes in, not the exception. If you're running paid ads in a service category that qualifies for LSAs and haven't looked into it, that gap is worth checking. → How Do You Actually Qualify for Google Local Services Ads?

Here's what I expected to matter more than it did: new tools. I picked up a few things this year — better microphones, a couple of cameras, an AI recorder that transcribes notes and fits in a pocket. Some earned a permanent spot in how I work. Some didn't. That's fine; that's just what trying things looks like. But none of it moved the needle the way something boring did: paying closer attention to workflow, so more of my actual time goes to clients instead of around them. The tools were never the point. The time they freed up was.

The honest part, since a clean answer here is rarer than people think: I don't have confirmed AI search referral traffic to report. Not for my own site, not for a client's, as far as I've checked. There's one maybe — I have a hunch that C&G Remodeling found me through some kind of Google recommendation, possibly AI-assisted, but I can't confirm that, so I'm not claiming it. If you're hearing that AI search is already sending small businesses meaningful traffic, I'd want to see whose numbers that's based on. It's not showing up in mine yet, and I'd rather tell you that plainly than pretend otherwise because it's the trendier answer.

Part of why that's a fair test: I do all the AEO, SEO, and GEO work for my own brand that I'd recommend to anyone else — but I don't run a dollar of paid advertising behind JpCS itself. Right now, this business is entirely referral-based. That's not a strategy, it's just how it's grown so far. At some point I expect that to change, and when it does, I'd genuinely expect an uptick in both business and reach — including whatever visibility that buys with the LLMs everyone's trying to get in front of. Being completely referral-based right now is itself part of the honest answer for why I can't point to AI search traffic yet: there's no paid signal out there for anything to have picked up on.

What still works, running underneath all of this: reviews, responsiveness, and just being known. LSA placement is largely driven by review volume and how fast you answer the phone — not by anything clever. That's not a new insight, but it's the one that's held up all year while everything else got noisier.

If you want help figuring out whether Local Services Ads or another paid channel actually fits your category, that's what falls under paid advertising with me. → Paid Advertising

Next month: the year-in-review letter — what I got wrong in 2026, and what's actually changing for 2027.

— Jon

Jonathan Petrous
Owner & Operator, Jpetrous Creative Services
jpetrous.com | jonathan@jpetrous.com | 586-563-6634