Your Next Customer May Never Call You. Google Will Do It For Them.

As business owners, we have invested a lot of time thinking about what AI means for our operations and SOPs, but have we looked at how our customers are using it to interact with us?

We may have realized the organic listings are changing, but in the race to earn customer trust, Google has added one more task for its AI engine: phone calls.

Today a customer can search for something like a hair salon, auto repair shop or pet groomer, tap “Have AI check pricing,” answer a few questions about what they need, and let Google do the calling. Google’s AI contacts multiple businesses, asks about pricing and availability, then sends the customer a summary of what it found. What used to require several searches, phone calls and voicemails can now happen without the customer talking to a single business. Google calls this agentic calling, and the company has continued expanding where and how it can be used, including categories such as home repair, beauty and pet care.

This is already changing how customers shop

Here’s the number that should get your attention: in late 2025, call-tracking company Invoca reported that pricing calls generated by Google’s AI had increased more than 300% in a single month. The more interesting part is what happened after Google actually called.

About 26% of those calls went unanswered, and of the ones that were answered, 48% still failed to give Google usable pricing. Sit with that for a second, because these weren’t cold calls. A customer had already asked Google to find a business offering a specific service, and Google made contact on that customer’s behalf. A significant share of businesses still couldn’t complete the handoff once the phone rang.

Your website is no longer speaking only to people

For years, we’ve told clients that their website needs to answer the questions customers have before they call. That advice hasn’t changed. What has changed is who’s asking the question, because increasingly it isn’t the customer typing it into a search bar themselves. The person researching your business may never visit your website. They may ask Google, ChatGPT, or another AI tool a question and expect it to assemble an answer instead. That makes the information you publish increasingly important.

What services do you provide? Where do you provide them? What does something typically cost? What is included? Who is it for? What makes one option different from another? What happens next? If all of that knowledge lives in your head, behind your front desk, or inside the phrase “call for details,” you’re making both people and machines work harder to understand your business.

This doesn’t mean every business needs to publish an exact price for everything. A plumber can’t know what is behind a wall before seeing it. A veterinarian can’t diagnose an animal from a Google search. But “prices vary” doesn’t have to mean “we can’t tell you anything.” Starting prices, typical ranges, consultation fees, diagnostic charges, examples and explanations of what affects the final price can all give a customer a useful answer without pretending every job is identical.

The goal isn’t to dump more content onto your website for the sake of it. It’s to build a real repository of information about your business, specific enough that a person or an AI system can actually use it.

But good information doesn’t matter if nobody finds it

This is where the conversation comes back to organic optimization. Publishing a great pricing page doesn’t automatically make your business visible. Google still has to understand who you are, what you do, where you do it and whether your business is relevant to the person searching. That means the fundamentals still matter.

Your Google Business Profile needs to be complete and accurate, your website needs to actually describe what you do and where you do it, and your reviews need to keep building real-world evidence about the business. Your content should be answering the questions customers are actually asking, not the ones you’d prefer to answer.

Increasingly, I think businesses need to stop thinking about this simply as “ranking a website.” You are building a digital reputation and a body of information that search engines and AI systems can use to understand your business well enough to recommend it. The website is a huge part of that repository, but it isn’t the only part. Your Business Profile, reviews, videos, articles, social channels, third-party mentions and other credible sources all contribute to the picture. And now there is another piece of that picture: what happens when AI actually calls you.

Your staff needs to be ready for the call

Google’s automated calls identify themselves as being from Google and explain why they are calling. That creates a surprisingly simple training issue, and it has nothing to do with AI strategy. If someone answering your phone hears an automated voice and immediately assumes it’s spam, hangs up, or refuses to provide useful information, the business may be turning away a customer who is actively shopping for exactly what you sell.

Your front desk doesn’t need a meeting about artificial intelligence. They just need to know these calls exist and what they’re allowed to say when one comes in. They need access to current pricing, starting prices, or at least a useful range, and a better answer than “we don’t give prices over the phone” when an exact quote isn’t possible. “We need to see the project before we can give an exact quote, but jobs like this usually start around $X” gives a customer something to work with. “We can’t tell you anything until you come in” doesn’t give them anything at all, and that’s the version most people are used to hearing.

There is also one setting worth checking. Google Business Profiles allow businesses to turn automated calls and texts on or off. If you want to receive customer pricing and availability requests, make sure “Bookings and inquiries from customers” hasn’t been disabled in your Business Profile’s advanced settings.

The layer between you and the customer is changing

Customers have always wanted the same things. How much does it cost? Can you do what I need? Are you available? Are you any good? Can I trust you? What’s changing is how they get those answers.

We’ve been through versions of this before. When the internet first became part of how people found local businesses, the companies that understood search early had an advantage while everyone else was still debating whether they really needed a website. Then came the aggregators. Kayak changed how people compared flights and hotels. Angi, Thumbtack and others did something similar for local services. The customer still wanted a plumber, a hotel room or a contractor. What changed was the layer between the customer and the business. Businesses had to learn how to get found and compared inside that new layer, and I think we’re watching the same shift happen again right now.

The difference this time is that the middleman isn’t just organizing the choices anymore; it’s starting to do the research itself. Your customer might visit your website, might read your reviews, or increasingly, might just ask an AI to search, compare, and place the call for them.

That’s why I wouldn’t build an “AI strategy” around this. I’d make sure the fundamentals are ready for a world where machines increasingly help customers do their homework. Be easy to find, and give straight answers to reasonable questions instead of hiding behind “contact us for pricing.” And make sure the person answering your phone knows that the robotic voice on the other end may represent a very real customer.

The technology is new, but the questions your customers are asking haven’t changed at all. The businesses that make those answers easiest to find are putting themselves in the best position, no matter who, or what, is doing the asking.