Consumers have always wanted to know what a home improvement project will cost before they pick up the phone. Now Google and AI are forcing contractors to put that information online or risk losing leads. Marcus Sheridan, founder of contractor pricing platform Price Guide, told the Pro Remodeler podcast that the industry is facing the biggest shift it has ever seen in pricing transparency.
The shift is not subtle.
Google recently added a “get competitive quotes” button to local search results for contractors. The company is testing an “Have AI get prices” feature that asks homeowners a few questions, then emails them back with cost estimates. In one example Google sent Sheridan, it listed a company called Drain Doctor but noted the firm “did not include a price estimate.” The message was clear: no pricing, no recommendation.
He said AI is now combing through a contractor’s entire digital footprint to decide which businesses to surface. “It’s going to reward the companies that have real-time information about pricing,” he said. “Full stop.”
Contractors who refuse to discuss money until they’re in a home are finding it harder to win jobs. “Call for quote has become the middle finger of the internet,” Sheridan said. “People absolutely hate it.” He described call center directors reporting that homeowners are getting increasingly aggressive when they can’t get a ballpark number over the phone.
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Why pricing estimators are suddenly critical
His company, Price Guide, builds pricing estimator tools for contractor websites. He said that the moment a contractor adds an estimator, they see three to four times more leads. The data, he argued, is hard to ignore. “You can’t argue with the data,” he said.
For paid ads, the effect is even more dramatic. When a contractor runs a Google or Facebook ad that leads directly to an estimating tool, conversion rates jump from below 5 percent to between 40 and 50 percent. “That’s basically an order of magnitude,” Sheridan noted.
Not every contractor is ready to change. He said many educational membership groups in the home improvement space still teach that pricing should be hidden until a salesperson is in the home. He called that approach “proven to be false” and “not the way of the future.”
The industry is being pushed toward transparency from two directions. AI agents, like those being tested by Google, will not recommend a contractor that doesn’t talk about cost. And homeowners, the report noted, are more frustrated than ever with sales tactics that dodge their first question.
What forced transparency looks like in practice
Sheridan emphasized that contractors don’t have to publish exact prices. “That’s not the point,” he said. What matters is showing the range of costs and what drives them up and down. A roofer, for example, could say an asphalt shingle roof on a typical house costs between $12,000 and $18,000 depending on factors like pitch or number of layers. That kind of information, he said, satisfies both human curiosity and AI crawlers.
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The trend started in roofing, where real-time estimators first appeared, but it is spreading fast across all of home improvement. Sheridan predicts it will eventually sweep through consumer services and then into B2B. “When your special agents are talking to special agents at the lumber yard who are talking to special agents on the job site,” he said — the idea of agents communicating with agents is already here.
He called the current moment “the Great Awakening for pricing.” Contractors who resist, he suggested, will simply disappear from search results. Organic traffic has already been declining since AI summaries were added to Google about two years ago. The chatbot explosion of 2025 accelerated that decline.
A skeptical note on voluntary change
Still, Sheridan acknowledged that forced pricing transparency is not actually mandatory — yet. “It’s still voluntary,” he said. “If you can convince all your competitors not to play AI’s game, you don’t have to volunteer.” That comment hints at a possible collective resistance, though he didn’t offer evidence that it works.
The podcast also covered a broader generational gap. AI usage among U.S. adults is estimated at 60 percent, but younger users dominate. ChatGPT hit 100 million users within two months of launch in November 2022. A year later, a third of adults under 30 had used it. The infrastructure for rapid AI adoption is already in place, unlike the slow uptake of websites in the 1990s.
For contractors wondering why their lead volume has dropped in the past year, his answer is blunt: if you’re not discussing pricing online, you’re being filtered out — by Google, by AI, and by homeowners who have run out of patience.
