A carpet cleaner with three trucks is collecting field data that no marketing agency has.

Ten minutes ago I finished a job in Parker, Colorado.

The woman who hired me is an insurance agent. She uses AI every single day for her work — it's not a novelty to her, it's a tool. When she needed a carpet cleaner, she did exactly what she does for everything else. She opened ChatGPT and typed: "affordable carpet cleaner in Parker."

ChatGPT gave her a list. It told her these companies had reviews saying they were affordable, that they had served the Parker area, and that they had high ratings. She took that list, went to Google to verify the names, and then she called me.

She is not a tech person experimenting with AI. She is a professional who has already replaced part of her workflow with it. And she used it to find a carpet cleaner.

I own Colorado Choice Carpet Cleaning. Three trucks. Castle Rock, Colorado. Twenty-three years in business. I talk to hundreds of customers every single month — not by text, not by survey, not by email follow-up. I meet them in their homes. I do the work. And while I'm there, I ask them how they found me.

That habit is now giving me data that I don't think anyone else has.

HERE IS WHAT STARTED THIS

About six months ago I noticed something in our CRM. We track attribution on every job. When a job comes from Google, we see it. Facebook, we see it. Any paid channel, we see it. There is also a category called "Others" — the catch-all for anything we can't directly attribute.

Six months ago, Others was about 5% of our business.

It is now 25%.
That is not a rounding error. That is a shift. And since Google and Facebook attribution hadn't dropped — we were actually busier than ever — something new was filling in. Something we weren't capturing.
I did not hire a consultant. I did not run a report. I started asking.

WHAT I ACTUALLY HEAR IN PEOPLE'S HOMES

Most people don't volunteer the information. If you ask "how did you find us," you get "on the Internet" about half the time. That's a dead end if you stop there.

I don't stop there.

I ask: did you go on Google? Did you use ChatGPT? Did you ask an AI to help you find someone?

What I've learned is this: people who use ChatGPT know they used ChatGPT. They'll tell you. They'll often tell you exactly what it said. The insurance agent in Parker today told me word for word what the AI gave her — not just a list of names, but reasons. Specific language about reviews, service area, and pricing signals.

People who use Google don't always know what they used. Some of them got a standard organic result. Some of them got an AI Overview at the top of the page. Some of them just think "Google" is the Internet. You cannot separate those from a CRM field. You can only get there through a real conversation.

That distinction matters enormously if you're trying to understand what's actually driving your business.

THE GEOGRAPHY DOESN'T LIE

Here is the thing that convinced me something real is happening.

Our Google Maps radius — the area where we reliably show up in local map pack results — is roughly 3 to 5 miles from Castle Rock. That's normal. That's how local SEO works. You earn your proximity and you dominate it.

Parker is not 3 to 5 miles from Castle Rock.

We have been getting jobs from Parker. From Aurora. From distances that don't match map pack logic. And when I ask those customers how they found us, they are not saying Google Maps. They are saying chat. They are saying they searched online and got a recommendation.

ChatGPT does not have a radius. It doesn't care that you're 20 miles from my shop. It answers the question with whatever it has decided is the right answer. And apparently, for some queries in some cities, it is deciding Colorado Choice Carpet Cleaning is the right answer.
I don't fully understand why yet. But I know it's real because my customers are telling me.

WHAT I THINK IS HAPPENING — AND WHAT I DON'T KNOW YET

I have a theory and I want to be honest that it's only a theory.

We have spent the last year building a very detailed website. Every city we serve has its own page. Every service has its own page. Every page is specific — not just "we clean carpet," but the actual soil conditions in that city, the actual water hardness, the actual fiber types in that neighborhood's housing stock. Real information, written from twenty-three years of cleaning those specific floors.

My guess is that specificity is what AI is feeding on. When someone asks ChatGPT for an affordable carpet cleaner in Parker with good reviews, the AI has to pull from somewhere. If you've built content that actually answers that question in detail — service area confirmed, reviews present, pricing signals present — you may be more likely to surface.

That's a guess. I'm not an SEO expert. I'm a carpet cleaner.

What I know for certain is that something changed six months ago, our Others attribution went from 5% to 25%, the jobs coming from outside our normal radius have increased, and when I ask those customers directly what they used, a meaningful number of them are telling me ChatGPT

WHY I'M WRITING THIS

I'm not writing this to sell you anything. I'm not a marketing consultant. I'm not launching a course. I clean carpet.

I'm writing this because I spend a lot of time reading about AI's effect on local business, and almost everything I read is written by people who are theorizing. Marketers. Agency owners. SEO consultants. People who are smart and who understand the systems, but who are not standing in a customer's living room on a Tuesday afternoon asking how they found you.

I am.

And what I'm finding is that the shift is real, it's already happening at the ground level, and most small business owners have no idea because they're not asking the right follow-up question.

"How did you find us" is not enough. You have to go one level deeper. You have to build enough of a relationship in the time you're with that customer that they'll actually tell you the truth about their journey.

That part doesn't scale. That part is just showing up and doing good work and being the kind of company people want to talk to.

WHAT COMES NEXT

I'm going to keep asking. Every job. Every customer.

Every quarter I'm going to post an update — what the attribution looks like, what customers are saying, whether the geography keeps expanding, and whether we end up going from three trucks to five because we figured out how to be the answer an AI gives when someone asks who to call.

If you run a local service business and you're seeing anything similar, I want to hear about it. Not from an analytics dashboard. From your customers.

That's the only data source I trust right now.

Call Colorado Choice Carpet Cleaning: (720) 730-8055