Forced Pricing Transparency In Home Improvement
Marcus Sheridan, founder of contractor pricing platform Price Guide, joins Pro Remodeler editor Dan Morrison to explain why AI and Google are increasingly filtering out contractors who won't discuss pricing online. They cover the new Google "get competitive quotes" feature, why call-for-quote is losing leads, what belongs on a pricing page, how a pricing estimator can push paid ad conversion rates from 5 percent to 40 percent, and what happens when AI agents start vetting contractors autonomously. If your lead volume has dropped in the past year, this conversation explains why and what to do about it.
TRANSCRIPT:
"The home improvement industry is going through the biggest shift it's ever seen in terms of forced pricing transparency online."
—Marcus Sheridan
Welcome to the Pro Remodeler podcast, a podcast for Pro Remodelers. But you knew that. I'm Dan Morrison, a former pro remodeler and current editor of — you guessed it — the magazine. Today we're talking with Marcus Sheridan about shifts in how people find you and what they're willing to put up with after they do.
We've known forever that the first question a consumer has when they're looking to get a project done is, what is this going to cost?
When I was a remodeler in the nineties, I always talked about budget up front because I needed to know what they were willing to pay before I could design something to build. That was in the early days of the internet. So many leads came from referrals, traditional marketing, and the Yellow Pages. The Yellow Pages was a giant book of phone numbers organized by type of business — dentist, dog walker, dendrologist. It was the first place you went when beginning a search for products or services. The information superhighway changed all that, basically eliminating the phone book industry by about 2010, almost a decade after Google became a verb.
Why am I talking about ancient history? Because it ties directly to what Marcus and I talked about: industry disruption. The main difference was that when Hypertext Transfer Protocol came onto the scene, there was no infrastructure to support it. Nobody owned personal computers, and there was no World Wide Web. With today's disruption —
Your new robot overlords...
— everyone already has a cell phone, laptop, smartwatch and probably three other devices that wirelessly connect to the web. Adoption was slow in the nineties because even if you owned a personal computer, a substantial proportion of the population did not. So investing in a website made less sense. It was more of a vanity project.
Short of data centers, the infrastructure for AI is already in place for massive, rapid adoption. Two months after ChatGPT was released in November 2022, it had 100 million users — the fastest consumer software ramp-up ever recorded. A year later, a third of U.S. adults under 30 had used ChatGPT. Fast forward to today, and some estimates put AI usage at 60 percent of U.S. adults. Not just the youngsters, though there is a steep generational gap.
With that preamble in place, let's look back at the first question of home improvement consumers. What is it going to cost?
How Google is ranking pricing transparency higher in contractor search results
It's always been the first question. Now, though, things have really shifted because Google knows this as well. They're trying to address the question, and AI knows this — they're trying to address the question. Have you seen Google's new feature? When somebody does a near-me search for a contractor —
There's a new online estimates button. When we recorded this a month ago, it was "online estimates." Now it's "get competitive quotes." Perhaps Google delivers different buttons to New England than it does the Mid-Atlantic. Either way, Google is indexing your site for cost information and ranking transparency higher.
So somebody goes to Google, types "remodeler near me." Now for the first time, you're seeing this button. What Google wants to show is the companies that have an online estimate feature on their site.
So if none of your competitors provide a pricing estimate tool, you'll show up in the results.
We're also seeing that Google rewards it. When somebody clicks, it shifts to "online estimate, new roof near me." And even in their sponsored ads, for companies that have estimators on their site, they're showing them first. In the regular organic results, they're showing them first as well.
But then you've got this other new feature Google's been experimenting with: "Have AI get prices." You click the button and Google shows you a series of questions. You answer them as the homeowner, and then they message you back within a couple of days. Who's gathering the answer? Their AI. Here's an example email they sent me: "Here's a company, Drain Doctor. They're available for faucet repair right now, but they did not include a price estimate." This is experimental — Google is just messing with it right now.
The important thing is what he just said. AI gathers the estimates and emails them to you.
But all of it is a precursor.
Remodelers may have noticed that organic traffic has been going down steadily since AI summaries were added to Google pages about two years ago. It's been even more pronounced since the chatbot explosion of 2025. When a potential customer searches for "roofer near me," it used to be that Google would look around at business listings, websites, and sponsored pages. Now AI is combing through your entire digital footprint to deliver the best choice to the consumer. It's not a chatbot diligently scavenger-hunting its way through your Google search. It's a special agent performing a specific task. It's the precursor of fully integrated, agentic-based search.
What agentic search means for contractors who won't discuss pricing
There's the search where Google will be your agent — it does all the legwork for you, and it knows that one of your fundamental questions is roughly, what's this going to cost? So it's going to reward the companies that have real-time information about pricing. Full stop. That is the biggest development we've seen in forced pricing transparency.
Forced pricing transparency. I mean, it's still voluntary. And if you can convince all your competitors not to play AI's game, you don't have to volunteer.
It first started in roofing. Roofing was the first in home improvement where you started to see a lot of contractors have a real-time estimator tool on their site. But then it's permeating to all of home improvement. It's already starting. And then it goes from home improvement to the rest of B2C, then from B2C to B2B — that's the natural pattern.
When your special agents are talking to special agents at the lumber yard who are talking to special agents on the job site. And in China.
Most contractors aren't ready for this. Most contractors are still doing the "we won't give you any pricing information at all until we're with you." And it pisses homeowners off, and it's pissing them off more than it ever has.
Compound that with the fact that more people are pissed about more stuff than they've been in quite a while.
What we're seeing is for those that use a call center and continue to hold firm to "we will not talk about money whatsoever on the phone beforehand" — more and more, the call center directors are saying it's getting brutal with the homeowner.
Because people are pissed and they're tired of people deflecting their questions. The chatbot doesn't deflect questions. It may hallucinate, but it doesn't deflect.
So it's being forced by technology. It's being forced by the homeowner. What also is sad to me is I see a lot of educational membership communities within home improvement that work with contractors — some of them are still holding fast to "this is the way that you sell." It's been proven to be false. It's absolutely not the only way, and it's not the best way, and it's not the way of the future. I think the Great Awakening for pricing is about to happen.
The big confusion is this: the contractor thinks, I have to put my exact pricing on my website. That's not the point. What we're saying is, if you don't talk about value online — 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, "Well, 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. That's what we're seeing right now.
SEO and generative chatbot optimization have overlaps for sure, but maybe SEO is more of a subset than a Venn diagram buddy. In general, Google has always tried to filter out sites that game the system, instead promoting sites that do the right things and answer the questions Google thinks users have. Now Google, along with Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, and all the other chatbots, have decided that what users really want to know when they search "roofer near me" is how much it's going to cost.
Why call for quote is losing contractors leads and how to replace it
I have said it a million times, and I'm going to say it again. Call for quote has become the middle finger of the internet. People absolutely hate it.
People are pissed. In this case, Google might be right. People have no idea how much a roof costs because — wait for it — most people aren't roofers. And when people ask questions, they expect answers, not hedging, deflecting, or sideways sales pitches. I mean, you can still do the sideways sales pitch. Just package it into an answer to the question:
ExampleA new asphalt shingle roof for a house your size is going to cost between $12,000 and $18,000, depending on a few factors.
How do you do that if you can't even get them to call your office? Marcus says you need a price estimating tool on your website.
So I created a company called Price Guide. It's a software that allows contractors to quickly, easily, and cost-effectively build pricing estimators for their website. What we see consistently is the second someone adds a pricing estimator to their website, they get three to four times more leads. Three to four x, the second they add it. You can't argue with the data. What we're seeing right now is more contractors than ever saying, "I'm spending more than I've ever spent on Google ads, Facebook ads, and I'm seeing less results than I've had in the past." The quickest way to change that is to build the ad around the instant estimate:
Example ad copyWondering what a new roof will cost? Use our estimating tool to find out.
When they click, they're in your sales funnel.
And what we've seen from that is when someone does that with paid, there's generally a 40 to 50 percent conversion rate.
That's crazy.
It's crazy because if you talk to anybody doing paid advertising and you ask what their conversion rates are, it's way less than 10 percent. Usually it's less than 5 percent of those that actually click on the ad. So now all of a sudden you can go from less than 5 percent to 40 percent.
That's basically an order of magnitude.
What's your return on ad spend at this point?
It's likely an order of magnitude better.
Night and day difference.
If you've noticed that leads are fewer and farther between, or that you have to work ten times harder to convert them, we might be stumbling into what's behind the shift. Everything started changing about a year ago, sometime in 2025. For those listening in the future, it began really changing a few months ago in Q1 of 2026.
I've got data on my side and it's not speculation anymore. There's no theory involved here. The one claim I'm making — and I'm staking my brand on it — is this: if you don't have an estimator on your site in two years as a contractor, AI will flat-out say, "Not going to recommend them." I can pretty much guarantee that is where we're going. Within two years, everybody's going to be using agents anyway.
I like to call them special agents.
How AI agents will vet contractors without the homeowner lifting a finger
We're going to blink, and go from almost no one having an agent to everybody having an AI agent they use to do all their vetting for them. So they say to their agent, "I need to hire a roofing contractor to replace my roof. Go out and get me this information." Now instead of the agent vetting five or six or seven contractors like the homeowner would have done, it vets the 45 local contractors within five miles. It reads every single review ever produced by every one of those contractors. It views every page of their websites. And for every single one that has interactive tools, it runs those interactive tools.
Then it comes back to the homeowner and says, "I vetted 45 companies. I've done these different estimators. I've looked at every review. Here are the two I'm going to recommend. Here's why I'm recommending them. What would you like me to do next? I can go ahead and set the appointment if you'd like."
When remodelers say they lost a job to AI, what they mean is that they lost a job because they didn't account for AI being an industry disruptor. When you're riding a bike downhill, don't stare at the front tire. Look ahead so you can adjust around the potholes and slow down for the sharp turns. Sure, keep an eye on your business operations — the front tire — but focus on the future down the road. The disruptor that's disrupting us right now is akin to a really steep hill. Not only are we going a lot faster, but the consequences of crashing are a lot higher.
Every contractor in two years is going to have an agent that is communicating with agents as well, despite the fact that most can't even fathom it. When it hits, it is going to go fast. If you look at the adoption we've had with ChatGPT — one day nobody knew what it was, November 2022 it comes out, and today pretty much everybody is using ChatGPT or another LLM.
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 lyrics for bad country songs. Truck won't start, dog won't come home, plugs have lost their spark. In February 2026, we were using AI to create fully mixed country, Afro-reggae, and pop songs tailored to the pro trades and construction crowd. So to recap: in 2024, AI was putting bad country songwriters out of business. Two years later, it put the songwriters, the performers, and the recording company out of business. In that same time, the majority of Americans adopted some kind of chatbot for search.
Crazy adoption, very, very quickly. And now it's just going to become normal. Agent conversation is just going to become normal. The agent thing is the least understood, but it's going to be way more impactful than ChatGPT ever was.
Right now, AI is disrupting search, but search isn't what AI is all about. It can crunch big data. It can fold proteins. What it becomes is almost certainly not what we think it is currently. That's down the road. The pothole in front of your tire right now is getting lost in search.
What to put on a perfect pricing page — and why it matters for AI recommendations
Everybody should have what's called a perfect pricing page on their website. A perfect pricing page has 16 individual elements of what AI and humans want in order to really understand value. For example: what drives cost up for that product or service? What drives cost down? Why are some contractors more expensive? Why are some less expensive? Roughly where do your ranges for the majority of your projects fall? Financing options. That's a perfect pricing page.
If you create a perfect pricing page, you're going to outperform all your competitors. You're going to get more AI summaries, referrals, citations. You're going to do better in legacy Google search. Homeowners are going to love you because you're being much more honest and you've explained value much better.
Now, in conjunction with that, you clearly need to have a pricing estimator on your site. Do you have to use mine? No. But you absolutely have to use one. When you build one, you want to show two numbers at the end: the range for the project, and the range for the monthly payment. That's the big key.
The model of the future is you teach value early. Explain to people what drives cost up and down. Give people a general sense for averages. Someone calls me today for my pool company — I'm going to 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 be less than $100K. You could be more than $150K if you want a lot of stuff. The only way I'm going to be able to give you an exact number is by coming out to your house and we're going to look at each one of these things.
Now you're back in sticks and bricks, mud on the ground, construction estimating.
Another thing you'll find interesting: we have a ton of contractors that, even when they get a lead that has not gone through the estimator, they require them to use the estimator before they do the appointment. And the reasons are obvious when you think about it, because lo and behold, the quality of the appointment goes way up.
That's not a surprise. I've already talked to the guest on the next Pro Remodeler podcast, and he says his sales team does a similar thing — they dump full presentations into the consumer-facing chatbot widget for gut checks and corrections.
The Pro Remodeler podcast is a production of Endeavor Business Media, a division of Endeavor B2B.