Google's AI can now phone a home-repair business on a customer's behalf. Think about what that does to your website

At I/O 2026 Google shipped what it called the biggest upgrade to the Search box in over 25 years: a box that expands for long conversational questions, takes images and files, and runs on Gemini 3.5 Flash as the default model in AI Mode. Google also said AI Mode passed a billion monthly users within a year of launch, with queries more than doubling every quarter.

Buried in the same announcement is the part that matters if you own trucks. Booking in AI Mode expanded to local services, and for home repair, beauty and pet care Google can place calls to businesses on the user's behalf — rolling out to US users in summer 2026.

The customer stops browsing

The old path was: type "roof repair near me", get a map pack and ten links, open four tabs, judge each site in about three seconds, call one. Every one of those steps was a chance for a decent website to win a job.

The new path is: describe the problem in a sentence, get a handful of options with prices and availability, and in some categories have Google make the call. Fewer tabs get opened. The shortlist happens before anyone sees your homepage.

What actually gets you into the answer

Nothing exotic, and nothing you can buy. A model assembling a shortlist needs facts it can pull without inference, and most contractor sites hide every one of them behind a stock photo and a phone number in an image.

• Service area written out as places, not "and surrounding areas".
• Hours, including whether you actually answer at 9pm or just say 24/7.
• Prices, or a range, in text. A price in a PDF or a graphic does not exist.
• Licence and insurance details stated plainly, with numbers.
• Which specific jobs you take and which you refer out.
• Structured data that says the same things the page says. Schema that contradicts the page is worse than none.

And one thing not to do: do not buy your way into the answer. Google's spam policies were updated in May 2026 to cover manipulating generative AI responses, which is the exact service a wave of new agencies is currently selling. Paid mentions and rigged "best of" lists are now named spam rather than a clever edge.

Speed stopped being a nice-to-have

If Google is placing calls and surfacing availability, the fraction of visitors who do reach your site are further along and less patient — they are checking one or two things before committing. A homepage that takes four seconds on a phone in a truck loses a customer who had already half-decided to hire you. That is a worse loss than never ranking.

Written by Nick Georgalos, who builds the sites. Corrections go to the same number everything else does.