When I was remodeling in the nineties, I always talked budget up front. I needed to know what a client was willing to spend before I could design something worth building. Most of my leads came from referrals, traditional marketing, and the Yellow Pages, that giant book of phone numbers that was the first place anyone looked when they needed a dentist, a dog walker, or a dendrologist—not that many people were looking for dendrologists in those days.

The internet changed all that. AI is changing it again, faster and with far less runway to adapt. I sat down recently with Marcus Sheridan, contractor, keynote speaker, author, and founder of contractor pricing platform Price Guide, to talk about what's shifting and why so many remodelers are going to get caught flat-footed.

The conversation kept coming back to one question. The first question every homeowner asks when they're thinking about a project.

What is this going to cost?

Google is already rewarding contractors who talk about price

"The home improvement industry is going through the biggest shift it's ever seen in terms of forced pricing transparency online," Sheridan told me. "Most contractors aren't ready for it."

Google has added an experimental feature to “near-me” contractor searches, a button called "online estimates." Google is indexing sites for cost information and ranking transparency higher. Contractors with pricing estimators get preferential placement in sponsored ads and in organic results.

There's also an experimental feature where Google deploys AI to gather price estimates on the homeowner's behalf and emails results back, flagging which contractors provided pricing and which didn't. Sheridan showed me one result where a company was listed as available but had not included a price estimate. Google added a disclaimer about lack of transparency and is likely to stop displaying this contractor as soon as more competitors add a pricing widget to their websites. Google’s AI displayed the contractor because it HAD to—due to lack of data—not because it WANTED to.

Meanwhile, organic traffic has been declining for contractors since AI summaries were added to Google pages about two years ago, accelerating sharply through the chatbot adoption craze of 2025. The shift from passive search results to active AI vetting is underway, and it's going to increase at an increasing rate.

Why the "call for quote" approach is collapsing

The traditional sales method—revealing nothing about pricing until you're standing in the home—is buckling under consumer frustration and the availability of AI alternatives. "Call for quote has become the middle finger of the internet," Sheridan said. "People absolutely hate it." Homeowners now have somewhere else to turn. A chatbot will happily answer their pricing question; it might hallucinate, but it won't deflect. Sheridan says call center directors at home improvement companies are already feeling it. "More and more, the call center directors are saying it's getting brutal with the homeowner. The bar is resetting in the industry. ‘Call for quote’ is no longer an acceptable answer."

All this doesn’t mean you need a pricelist, as if you’re Burger King, it simply means you need to talk about cost up front. "If you don't talk about what drives cost up and down, you annoy humans, you annoy AI, you get penalized. We're getting to the point where you will not get recommended by AI if it says, 'they have decent reviews, but they're not talking about pricing at all anywhere. I can't find it. I'm not going to recommend them.' That's where the industry is absolutely, positively headed."

Add pricing page for remodeler websites

Sheridan recommends every contractor build what he calls a perfect pricing page, not a price list but a page built around the elements that address what both AI and homeowners need to understand value: what drives cost up, what drives cost down, why some contractors charge more, why some charge less, where your typical project ranges fall—and financing options.

The example he gives comes from his own pool company. "When someone calls me today, I say the average person is going to spend somewhere between $100,000 and $150,000 for a new swimming pool. Here's what I'm including. You could come in under $100K—it’s not likely. You could go more than $150K if you want a lot of stuff. The only way I'm going to give you an exact number is by coming out to your house." That is honest, it is useful, and it puts you back into the estimating conversation where the real relationship gets built.

"If you create a perfect pricing page, you're going to outrank all your competitors," he said. "You're going to get more AI summaries, referrals, citations. You're going to do better in legacy Google search. Homeowners are going to trust you more because you've explained value much better."

Build your ads around a pricing estimator

Beyond the pricing page, Sheridan says every contractor needs an interactive estimator on their site. His company, Price Guide, builds them, but the argument he's making is about data, not his product. Because his product is integrated into hundreds of contractor websites, and because he wants it to be effective, he monitors the data. He says as soon as contractors add a pricing widget to their websites, they see a spike in leads. “You can’t argue with data.”

The bigger return comes when you build paid ads around the estimator. Instead of a generic call-to-action, you lead with the question the homeowner is already asking:

Wondering what a new roof will cost? Use our estimating tool to find out.

When someone clicks that and goes through the tool, Sheridan says paid conversion rates jump from under 5% to 40-50%. "If you talk to anybody doing paid advertising, their conversion rate is usually less than 5% of those that click the ad," he said. "So now all of a sudden you can go from less than 5% to 40%." The return on ad spend follows accordingly.

He offers this best practice: show two numbers at the end of the estimator, the project range and the estimated monthly payment. Give people both.

One more tactic worth noting. Sheridan says many contractors now require leads who didn't come through the estimator to use it before scheduling an appointment. "Lo and behold, the quality of the appointment goes way up," he said. The homeowner already understands value before you walk in the door.

AI agents will vet 45 remodeling contractors before recommending 3

What's happening in search right now is prelude. Within two years, Sheridan believes most homeowners will have AI agents handling contractor vetting entirely. "A homeowner says to their agent, 'I need to hire a roofing contractor,'" he said. "Now instead of vetting five or six contractors like the homeowner would have done, it vets 45 local contractors within 10 miles. It reads every single review ever produced by every one of them. It views every page of their websites (see AI: Your New Robot Overlord). For every single one that has interactive tools, it runs those tools."

The agent comes back with a short list, a rationale, and an offer: "Here are the two I'm recommending. Here's why. Want me to set the appointment?" Contractors without pricing context and interactive tools don't make that list. "I'm staking my brand on this," Sheridan said.

"If you don't have an estimator on your site in two years, AI will flat out refuse to recommend you."

The pace of adoption is what most people underestimate. ChatGPT went from unknown to 100 million users in two months. At the International Builders Show in February 2024, I was sitting in a bar with a remodeling buddy, and we were using ChatGPT to write bad country songs.

“Truck won't start,
  Dog won't bark,
  All my plugs have lost their spark.”

Two years later, at IBS 2026, we were using AI to produce fully mixed, genre-blending music tracks from scratch. In that same span, most American adults adopted some form of AI for search.

Agent-based AI is going to feel the same way: gradual, then sudden. "When it hits," Sheridan said, "it is going to go fast." The first question hasn't changed. What is this going to cost? Contractors who answer it online—clearly and before anyone asks—are the ones who will still get recommended when the agents come looking.

—This article is created from a conversation that also became a Pro Remodeler Podcast episode.