Understanding AI Visibility for Home Builders - Greg Bray

Greg Bray: Yeah. Absolutely. My brother-in-law in college, he had one of those Geo Metros, and used to give us rides around. So, I'm familiar with that car. [00:01:00]

Kevin Weitzel: Absolutely. No, I'm just kidding. Greg Bray, he's our guest today. I'll be the solo interviewer. But Greg Bray is with Blue Tangerine, and we're going to be talking about a little bit more than just cars. We're actually not even talking about cars. We're talking about the different things that home buyers are doing today in their search practices and what builders need to be doing to accommodate those searches.

Alright. So, Greg, let me just start off with what is actually changing in today's scene? And I know a lot of people have already heard some of the stuff, and obviously we've heard AI out of our ears, but what is actually changing in today's market that is changing the scenario of what builders need to start considering?

Greg Bray: I think at its heart, Kevin, is this idea that we can't ignore the fact that buyers are using AI tools, large language models. We're going to use AI tools, we're going to use large language models, we're going to use LLM, we're going to use ChatGPT, all as synonyms, during this conversation. They're using these AI tools to ask questions and do their research, and that is [00:02:00] changing the kind of information that they are getting and how they are preparing themselves before they actually come to the builder.

And of course, we're seeing that in less website traffic, maybe even some drops in leads. Because sometimes in the past people would come and ask a question and now they're in in your CRM, and so they're a lead even though all they had was a very simple, high level introductory question that really wasn't like they're ready to buy right now, kind of a thing. So, that's what's changing. They're asking questions instead of doing the traditional Google keyword search.

Kevin Weitzel: So, LLM's been around since, you know, the late fifties, as far back as then, but there's a lot more refinement in this past 10 years. What's the timeline on how it's affected home builders? Is this something that has radically changed over the last 10 years or are we talking something more along the lines of, this has changed in the last two or three years and it's changing every six months?

Greg Bray: It really all keys back to when ChatGPT went live a couple of years ago [00:03:00] is really when the door flew open. Obviously, AI has been involved in some specific applications, especially some of the chatbot tools that have been around a little bit longer have leveraged some of these technologies in the background. But putting it in the hands of consumers for the conversational use really is just the last couple years. And then it took a while for a lot of us to try it and learn it and start playing with it and get better at it. And there's still a lot of people that are learning how to use these tools. But the more we use it, the more we go, oh wait, it could help me with this. Oh wait, it could help me with that. Why wouldn't I use it to help me understand my options related to one of the largest purchases of my life, a new home?

Kevin Weitzel: So, you and I have had chats ad nauseum when we've run into each other at the different events and before podcast interviews about SEO and traditional SEO and how it has changed, morphed, and that it's not dead, but that it needs to be refined. But what are builders missing out on if [00:04:00] they're not looking at how to optimize for AI?

Greg Bray: Well, the traditional SEO model is focused on rankings, and so we measure success by, oh, am I number one for this key word? Am I getting more traffic to my website? So it's rankings and traffic that really we've equated to success. We've equated that to visibility. People can find us. And we used to have that conversation with a builder, and we say, look, if somebody searches new homes in, you know, your city name and you don't show up on that first page of Google, it's like you don't exist. You are invisible.

Now, SEO alone doesn't guarantee visibility the way that it used to. It's still a core part of how all this process works, but that's really changing the impact of what it means to be visible, to be findable, for a buyer to know you're there so they can consider your options. And so, SEO gets you into the [00:05:00] system, but it's no longer guaranteeing that you're part of the conversation anymore, and that's really the heart of what's changing.

Kevin Weitzel: So, you've got SEO, you know, I've heard terms like AIO. I've heard GEO. Let's go with GEO, generative engine optimization. What does that mean in kind of plain terms for caveman, mouth breathing, knuckle dragers such as myself, and how is it different from SEO?

Greg Bray: Yeah, and again, there are lots of different terms out there for this. I've kind of gone with the GEO term. We'll see if the market decides to call it something else. The other term that I think works well is AI visibility. I think that's a term that means something, you know, comfortable for everybody as well. So, we go there. But the idea of what we're trying to do from a GEO perspective is we're trying to help an AI engine understand your content and to be able to use your content in a way that will then surface you in those [00:06:00] conversations that the user is having with the AI tool.

It's not the same tactics and activities as SEO, because it gets into deeper understanding of how is an AI tool going to actually use this content, how does it parse that content. And so, we get into even this idea of engineering content kind of down at the paragraph level or even the sentence level sometimes, which gets really granular and is a little overwhelming when you start thinking about how many sentences you might have on your website. But it's this idea here of not just about rankings, like SEO. It's like, can we be crawled, can we be ranked, and that really is that page level on the SEO standpoint. But GEO gets down at a deeper bit about how is your content going to be used and what are we providing AI so it understands us well.

Kevin Weitzel: So, when we're talking about GEO, how does AI actually read or view a website that's different than what SEO would provide?

Greg Bray: So, SEO you type in a keyword phrase [00:07:00] into Google, you get the search results page, right? You got the 10 blue links, as we call it, of things. And what Google is saying with that is, Hey, I think the information you're looking for might be on this page, you should go look for it. And you click and you go read the page. So, Google's ranking the page as a whole, as a potential useful piece of content based on the query you've put in.

When we start thinking about AI, AI is not trying to send you to a page the way that Google does. AI is trying to find the answer to your question. It's trying to provide you the information that you've asked for, and it's actually going to lots of different places, not just the top website on a search. It's going to lots of different places, pulling in information and then kind of merging that all together into the answer that it wants to present to you. Because of that, it's looking for the little pieces of content at the section level, even at the [00:08:00] sentence level that is useful to answering the question that you've asked.

And so now, we're really digging in a lot deeper. It's not reading the whole page in the sense of, oh, I need to give Kevin this whole page back. It's looking for, oh, here's the two sentences that matter for the question that Kevin's asked and that I want to give as part of this larger answer. And by the way, I'm pulling two sentences from this place and this place and this place, and bringing them together and saying, okay, here's an answer that I can present.

Kevin Weitzel: All right, so we got Chuck with a truck out there. You know, to include the ladies, we got Shaka Khan with a truck out there because she's into home building. Who knows? They've both spent their money on a website but, you know, it's a basic website. But they're paying attention. They're listening to the conversations that are out there. They know what they need to improve. What are common mistakes or some glaring mistakes that you see builders doing on their websites, that are limiting their visibility to how they could be seen in AI world?

Greg Bray: So, I want to be careful and say that some of this isn't a mistake, it's just the new [00:09:00] worldview that we need to embrace. So, a builder's website has always been the primary goal of creating that connection with the buyer, helping us as we view the communities, as we view the homes, as we try to understand what is it going to feel like to live here. How do I get the buyer who's looking at this website to fall in love with the home and want to know more and come make the appointment? Now we're changing the focus, from an AI view of, how do I answer the questions that people are asking.

The website that is aimed at this emotional connection, which has this amazing story about the community and all the amenities, and this amazing story about this floor plan and all these visuals that describe it, and these tours and interactive content. That's not going away. We can't get rid of that because we still have to work that. But the AI doesn't use that content to answer questions because it's not structured in [00:10:00] the right way to answer the question.

So, the mistake is we're too vague, we're too generic. It's too fluffy, if you will, from a marketing language. There's no clear sections or purpose around some of this content, and we don't necessarily have all the content that a buyer might care about that answers the question. And so, when we get into that, if the AI can't find the answer, it moves on. It doesn't like call you and say, oh, by the way, Kevin, I didn't understand what you meant about this community. Can you clarify that for me? No. It just moves on and gets the answer from the next person. And so, you miss out if your site doesn't provide it in that type of way. So, I think the big mistake is, again, the lack of clarity, the lack of detail, and the lack of structure within our content. And it's not the idea that we need to throw it out and start over, but we need to start layering this on top of what we've been doing.

Kevin Weitzel: Alright. I'm speaking directly to some owners that are out there because I run into them, you've run into them [00:11:00] before. And there's always this sales person that has the same mindset of, I don't want to show pricing because they need to be in front of me so I can close that deal, so I can make the deal happen. But there are more and more builders that are sharing that pricing information and detailed specs on their website. If you were leaving that information off your website, how is that affecting the AI results as opposed to like an SEO? How's it changing that microscope?

Greg Bray: Well, Kevin, let's think about it from, if I ask you, I'm looking for a home between 600 and 700,000 in the Phoenix Metro area, and you want to answer that question for me. And you go to a builder's website and it says, on the community page, homes starting in the four hundreds. Can you come back to me and say, with confidence, oh, you should look at this community, Greg, because I'm sure they have something between six and 700, and all the website says, homes start in the four hundreds. Well, we all know that homes that start in the four hundreds probably have some in the six hundreds in that [00:12:00] community, especially when you start adding some of the desirable options, right? The one in the four hundreds is like, you barely get some walls and, you know, a sink.

But AI's the same thing. When it goes to the website and it's saying, I'm looking for communities that have homes between 600 and 700,000. If it can't figure that out from the pricing on your website, it doesn't put you in the answer list. It can't, because it can't understand the depth of, well, maybe they have some, even though it says starting in the four hundreds. It would surface you if you said, I'm looking for homes in the four hundreds based on that, but it's not going to answer that question if you don't have the detail level of pricing.

I think this is one of the biggest quick fixes that a lot of builders can do is to get more detailed with the pricing. Because again, I know as a buyer I can't afford every home out there. I know that I have to narrow my search to my price range. It just makes sense, right? No matter how much I want that $5 million house, it just doesn't matter. It's not my [00:13:00] budget. And so, I don't want AI to bring me back a bunch of homes that aren't in my budget. So, I'm going to put a budget qualifier or filter around those conversations at some point, and it's got to have the data to be able to include you.

Kevin Weitzel: When you're building a website, I'm asking you because you build websites. Do things matter like, you know, how you structure the website, you know, your headers, your footers, your sections, your frequently asked questions. Do any of those factors matter when it comes to AI searches?

Greg Bray: They're mattering more and more. Again, when we go back to this idea of AI is breaking things out in pieces, now your section headings matter from what is this paragraph supposed to be about? FAQs are a thing we could talk about in a lot of detail because FAQs are becoming a really useful way to feed AI information. Not because there's something magic about calling something an FAQ. It's not the label that matters. Right?

What happens when we write FAQs is it changes how we write, where we get much [00:14:00] more specific with a one sentence question and a two to three sentence answer and things there, and so it helps us narrow in. And of course, any old FAQ is not as good as an optimized one, but it's still better than just generic long paragraphs of text that the AI has to parse through.

We all know that if we load something into AI and say, analyze this for me, or summarize it, it does amazing things, right? It can read and understand these long blocks of text, no problem. But in a search environment where someone's asking a question and AI is going out to find answers, there's a time limit, and it doesn't spend the same amount of time trying to parse and pull apart the content. So, we've got to make it easy and fast, and we do that with those good headings, the clarity, the details about what is this about, helping people understand the answers to these questions. And of course, we can get into a lot more detail, Kevin, as far as you know, what that would look like. We may not have time today, but yes, it's absolutely getting now into this idea of we have to [00:15:00] engineer pages at the paragraph and sentence level.

Kevin Weitzel: All right, let's go back to Chuck and Chaka Khan, because these two chucks with the trucks, have just spent everything in their bank to build their website last year, Greg. So, they don't have in their budget to build a new website. What's one or two changes that you would recommend to them, and what would you have them do first?

Greg Bray: The good news is, you don't have to like throw out and rebuild a website just to start improving this. Alright. Now, it is possible that there's some things, if you don't have a good content management system on the backend that lets you make edits and some of those things, maybe you going to have to go a little deeper into a new site. But the reality is, is that a lot of this is about the words on the page, not so much as the pages on the site.

And so, getting into that review and saying, what would a buyer be asking that we want to show up as the answer to? Is that answer on this page? What are the kinds of questions about this community? What are the kinds of questions about this floor plan that people ask our sales [00:16:00] team? Because they've looked at the site and then they still call and ask a question. What are those questions? We need that content on the website now, instead of forcing people to call the sales team to get those answers. That's your goldmine of where are the questions is ask your sales team, your online sales counselors. All of those folks get these questions all the time.

You need to start also thinking about some of the specifics, right? Do we have the price? We talked about that. Is it clear where this home is located? What are the features that matter and are they clearly connected with this home? What are some of the FAQs that we can add to this specific page? Adding FAQs is probably the fastest and quickest trick or tip, if you will. It's not a trick. We're not tricking anything, the fastest tip, to start improving over time with some work on those.

Kevin Weitzel: Let's talk about mental capacity. Let's talk about mindset. Let's talk about attitudes. What mindset shifts do builders need to make to make sure that they stay visible as AI becomes a bigger [00:17:00] and bigger and bigger part of the process?

Greg Bray: Yeah, it gets away from this idea that we need to rank for a keyword, and keywords are usually less than a sentence, usually 3, 4, 5 words is a long keyword phrase. And we have to get away from this idea of engineering rankings in our mindset, this whole SEO idea. Now, it's getting into this idea of we need to be understood. Does the internet as a whole understand who we are as a company, what we offer? What's special about it? What's different about it? Where is it located? What does it cost? What's included, what's not? Why they should work with us? And it's not even just about our website as a whole. It's about how do we get that message out in other locations online as well. If you want to put it into a simple little phrase, it's not about being found, it's about being understood. It really is this idea that we need to be understood, [00:18:00] and we've got to do it in a way that the machines can be our audience.

Kevin Weitzel: That's fantastic. Now, I've been doing a little bit of digging. I happen to see that you're going to be speaking in July at PCBC. What's your topic going to be there?

Greg Bray: It's actually gonna be along this, how do we get more visibility in the AI tools. I'm going to be partnering up with Leah Fellows as part of that presentation. And she's going to kind of take it from how do we also get these AI tools not to get in the way of the personalization and the human touch, in the lead management. But my part there is how do we generate more visibility, answer these questions, and pull people in? Because they're still going to come to the website. They're still going to come to the website eventually. It's just this further upstream research piece is what's changing. And so, we're going to dive into that in a little more detail, hopefully with a few more tips there. So yeah, if anybody's going to be at PCBC, please put that on your calendar. I'd love to see you there and talk through that more.

Kevin Weitzel: If they just fly in for one day, what's the day they need to be there to hear you talk.

Greg Bray: [00:19:00] The end of the first day.

Kevin Weitzel: First day. Okay. That's going to be on July 28th. Alright, so how about this, any last thoughts or words of advice today?

Greg Bray: You know, Kevin, the one thing I want to make sure we're all clear on is this does not replace SEO, it builds on top of it. Here's the risk point for some of our builder friends, they haven't even been doing SEO and now we're saying you have to build on top of that. SEO is table stakes now. It's not optional. You've got to do that because these AI tools, they go do searches, they do lots of searches as part of that. And so they are still using the search engines. They're asking Google and Bing and whatnot to pull back this content. So, we still have to have all those basic things.

So, the important message here is we are not getting rid of SEO, we are growing it. It's getting more complicated, more to do, and it's changing the environment. But it's in a good way, I think, [00:20:00] overall. Because, honestly, making things more clear for the AI tools is only going to help our communication with our buyers too. They're going to read this as well, and they're going to find the information they're looking for in a better way if we work on this together. It's very doable, it's very straightforward to get started, and we can do it one little bite at a time.

Kevin Weitzel: Well, outside of listening to this podcast every single week, as they should religiously, what is the best way for somebody to get in touch with you if they want to learn more?

Greg Bray: Well, Kevin, I want put an offer out there. We are working on what we call a complimentary AI visibility audit for builders, where we just look at a couple of key pages, a key community page, key model page, and be able to say, Hey, here are some ideas, here are some things you should look at. And the reason why we think that's pretty valuable is those patterns are probably going to carry over to all the other pages once you look at those key ones there. I put that out there for those who are interested in the visibility audit. We've [00:21:00] got five free ones available. So, for those who are listening, just drop me an email, greg@bluetangerine.com. We'll get you in the queue for that. And Kevin, I would be remiss if we did not invite people to join us in September.

Kevin Weitzel: What's happening in September, Greg? Tell us, please.

Greg Bray: We are having the 2026 Builder Marketing Summit. It'll be in Dallas, September 23rd and 24th. Kevin and I will both be there again. We would love to have you join us. Registration's now open at buildermarketingsummit.com. So, for sure if you want to connect with us, that is the place to get to shake our hands in person.

Kevin Weitzel: Well, this has been a great episode, Greg. Thank for your time today, and thank you to everybody for listening to the Builder Marketing Podcast. I'm Kevin Weitzel with OutHouse.

Greg Bray: And I'm Greg Bray with Blue Tangerine. Thanks everybody. [00:22:00]