Google Just Changed How People Find a Plumber. Or Electrician. Or Contractor.

In a major shakeup, Google announced that you can now use Google Assistant to find plumbers and any number of other local home services that you may end up having a use for at some point during your lifetime. In an official announcement today on its Keyword blog, Google outs the new capability of its digital assistant to find you the help you need so you literally don’t have to lift a finger, not even to type out a search query.

Finding plumbers is not Google Assistant’s only new trick and as mentioned above you can now use it to find any number of local home services. This means that Google Assistant can find you a plumber, an electrician, a dish washer repair service, a cable service, home cleaners and more. While there are likely to be some services that Google Assistant may not recognize chances are that it won’t have too much trouble finding a local service that you could generally find in the yellow pages.

More than just being able to help you find the local service that you need Google Assistant can even go so far as to make the call to the service for you too. That isn’t before you’re asked a series of questions of course. Before anything else happens and after you tell Google what you’re looking for, it will give you some more details then ask you if you want it to make a call or bring up a list of results. From there it can ask you a series of other questions like what the issue is that requires help from this service and what specific address the service is for. After you answer these and find the service that you want, you can still tell Google to make the call for you and do everything hands free, especially if you have a Google Home speaker as it’s now able to make voice calls in the U.S. for device owners. Google says that U.S. users of this new feature will end up getting a list of prescreened services in many areas, and those that don’t live in an area that supports prescreens will still get results. The feature may already be live for some users, but Google does mention that it will start rolling out to users in the U.S. over the coming week so it might be a little while before you’re able to ask for Google’s help here.

According to Google, companies will be "prescreened by Google and companies like HomeAdvisor and Porch ". This means more than ever, Plumbing, HVAC, and other contracting companies need to make sure that they follow Google's rules, create incredible review ratings to stand out, and make sure they're smart about how they're getting leads online.

Exactly how this new feature will work isn't fully known yet. However, two things can be certain:

1. Customers will begin seeing fewer choices, not more, when looking for a contractor. And,
2. You can expect other AI-heavy services- like Siri and Alexa- to follow suit.

If your company has awesome reviews and can be found on page 1 AS WELL AS other sources, you'll probably get more leads.

The future is here. How do you feel about it?

Is your company ready for this digital revolution? Contact us today .