Most rental owners I talk to are still chasing the top spot on Google. That used to be the whole game, but that game is changing.
On episode 104 of The Rental Roundtable, I sat down with Krista Chapman, founder of Path & Compass. She’s spent 15 years helping rental and event companies with their marketing. We talked about the biggest shift in search in years and what it means for independent operators. Here’s what I took away.
A Shift Moving Faster Than Social Media or Mobile
Krista has lived through three big tech waves: social media, mobile websites, and now AI. The difference this time is the speed. With the first two, you had years to get your act together. With AI, you have months.
The good news for equipment rental businesses: you rent real, physical equipment. You show up in the field, and AI is not going to touch that for a long time. That is your moat.
The hard part: your local internet presence is not safe. Someone can build a sharp-looking website over a weekend. They can fill it with AI-generated content, drive demand in your market, and go buy the equipment later. If you are not paying attention to how AI is changing local search, that change is already at your door.
“The number one red alert that needs your attention in the marketing space is search visibility, and how dramatically that is changing and has changed.” Krista Chapman, Path & Compass, (16:00)
AEO and GEO are the New Front Door
Krista explained that AI search sits on top of regular SEO. Keywords still matter. They are the foundation. But they are not enough on their own.
Two new layers now sit above them.
The first is AEO, or answer engine optimization. That is the AI summary box at the top of Google. People read it and stop. They get the answer and never click a link.
The second is GEO, or generative engine optimization. That is the back-and-forth people have with tools like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude. They ask a question, and the AI hands them an answer.
Both of these decide whether your company shows up at all. Gemini alone has close to a billion users. People are not clicking ten blue links anymore. We noticed this at Quipli about a month or two ago. Our website traffic was down, but our leads were up.
I caught myself doing this a month or two ago. My website traffic was down, but my leads were up. It made no sense until I realized I had stopped Googling and started asking Claude instead. That disconnect only made sense once we realized our customers had stopped Googling and started asking AI instead.
Your Newest Customer is an AI Agent
This is the mindset shift. You are not just marketing to people anymore. You are marketing to the AI agents that answer their questions.
“We have an entirely new audience that has entered the chat, and that is AI agents. Now it’s about how you market to an AI agent so they surface your company and recommend your company. That is the most important real estate.” (13:50)
I have said for a while that the main user of rental software in the future will not be a person. It will be an agent. The same thing is happening with search. The agent reads your whole site. It reads your policies, your reviews, even what an old employee said on Glassdoor or Reddit. Then it decides whether to recommend you.
The goal has changed. It used to be about ranking on Google. Now it is about getting picked by the AI.
“You really have to think about the search as an ecosystem and how you are building AI influence in this entire space and then authority on top of that. So those now become the important pieces. It’s thinking about the ability to be cited by an AI agent versus the ability to be ranked by Google.” (15:45)
How Renters Search Now
The way people search has gotten more specific. They are not typing “skid steer rental near me” and scrolling. They are telling the AI the exact model, size, dates, and policies they care about. Krista calls this subtractive shopping.
The renter filters down by price, delivery terms, policy, even whether you are veteran-owned or focused on sustainability. If your site does not answer those questions, you get filtered out before anyone ever lands on your page.
This changes what you should measure. Krista told me that for her own business, every B2B lead now comes through AI search, and that shift happened in about six months. Total search traffic is dropping across the board, and while that might sound scary, it’s not.
“The people who are actually getting to your site are much more aligned and much more likely to convert.” (22:55)
Fewer visitors can mean better visitors. Stop staring at raw traffic numbers. Start tracking the actions that make you money: form fills, checkout starts, phone calls. About 80 percent of renters visit your website before they rent. The real question is whether the AI is sending the right ones to you.
Recommended Resource: 9 Smart Marketing Ideas for Equipment Rental Companies
Build a Website AI Wants to Recommend
So how do you actually do this? Here’s what Krista laid out.
Get specific and answer questions
AI agents are hungry. They read a lot and they love clear answers. Add an FAQ section because bots pull answers straight from questions. Spell out your pricing, your delivery rules, and your process. The more specific you are, the easier it is for the AI to trust you and surface you.
Find what makes you different
Generic branding does not work here. Krista shared a simple exercise from a venue owner who she learned this from.
“Write down the 25 ways that you are unique and different in your market, then go to your competitors and cross off everything that is said by a competitor, because it is not unique.” (26:24)
What is left after you cross off your competitors is your real story. That is what the AI uses to set you apart from the shop down the road.
Keep a human in the loop
You can use AI to help write. That is fine. But don’t let it run the whole show. Krista warned against content where bots write, edit, and publish with no human involved.
That content is bland, easy to copy, and AI-made images and text cannot be copyrighted. Use AI to sharpen your rough draft or polish your ideas. Keep your voice and your judgment in the mix.
Recommended Resource: Rental Roundtable #77 – Making Marketing Work for Rental Companies
This is a Jump Ball
Here is why I am fired up about this. In most local markets, almost no rental company is doing any of this yet. For years, an average SEO plan was enough to win your town. This is bigger than that. If you build any kind of AI search strategy right now, you get a real head start on everyone around you.
The worst move is to wait. Krista put it plainly when I asked her what comes next.
“The best way to be involved with the creation of the future is to be involved with the creation of the future. Do not sit on the sidelines. Keep engaged, participate, and pay attention what’s happening in your local area as well as national conversations around these things.” (33:37)
That is the whole point. Lean in, get specific, and make your site easy for both people and AI to understand. And if you want a platform that helps you run a faster, cleaner operation while you sort out your marketing, that is exactly what we built Quipli to do. You can see how it works at quipli.com.
