If you're a contractor, your inbox and social media feeds are full of promises that AI can do your marketing better, faster, and cheaper than any human ever could, and to great business success. At Energy Circle, we have a front-row seat to all of these AI pitches. And some of them are downright terrifying.
Don't get me wrong: we embrace AI as a tool at Energy Circle that helps us do our job better and helps high performance contractors succeed. But we stand firmly by a human-AI-human approach that puts critical thinking and strategic direction at the center of how we utilize it, never shortcutting our standards or quality.
I posted about this recently on Linkedin and maybe I’ll turn this into a recurring series. Call it Auditing the Audacity? Call it a public service to our clients and the industry we serve. We're going to dig into the worst of what high-performance contractors are being pitched, explain exactly why it's rubbish, and tell you what actually works instead.
The Contractor Trust Deficit
Before I dive into the specific "AI slop" currently hitting your inbox, let’s talk about the stakes.
Contractors already start from a trust deficit; this is something our CEO and Founder, Peter Troast, talks about often. Homeowners are nervous about hiring contractors. They've been burned, or they know someone who has. Over 33% have had a bad experience with a contractor. Before anyone calls you, they're doing research, reading reviews, looking at your website, asking around, and checking whether you seem like the kind of company that will show up, do great work, and fix their problems without the dreaded callback and surprise extra costs.
You spend every day trying to prove you're the professional, the building science expert, and the reliable choice. So when bad marketing vendors cut corners and overpromise, they don't just waste your budget. They actively undermine the trust you've spent years building with your customers. That damage doesn't come with a refund.
AI has a similar trust deficit. Only 12% of U.S. adults said they’d be more likely to buy a product from a brand if they knew it used AI in its advertising. When you lean on it too much, and don't incorporate enough smart human judgment into the mix, your customers will start to associate you with AI slop and your brand will suffer as a result.
A Few “AI Can Do Your Marketing” Greatest Hits
Technically, yes. AI can do a lot of things. So what are some of the traps you should avoid? What's being sold here ranges from lazy to genuinely harmful, and contractors need to understand the difference. Here are a few, but no doubt the hits will keep on coming!
1. Old Hacks in New Hats: The AI/Bot Multi-Site “Strategy”
Most of the "revolutionary AI marketing" being pitched to contractors right now is just early 2000s-era "black hat" SEO wearing a 2026 AI hat.
A client forwarded us an AI/SEO pitch that included this gem: the vendor would "simulate user searches and clicks" across "10+ duplicate content mirror sites" to move rankings fast.
Translation: they were literally selling fake traffic and AI dupe content sites as a premium marketing feature.
In this scenario, bots would inflate your analytics so you can't tell who your real customers are, you’d generate zero actual leads or revenue, and you’d send an open invitation for Google to penalize your site by either lowering your ranking or omitting your site from search altogether. This isn't a gray area. This is fraud dressed up as a premium tactic and directly goes against Google’s Webmaster Guidelines: “Don't create multiple pages, subdomains, or domains with substantially duplicate content.” In the early days of the internet, you could create dozens of identical sites to flood the search results. Google got wise to that many, many, many core algorithm updates ago.
Calling it an "AI-driven multi-site strategy" doesn't make it smart. It just makes it an expensive way to get penalized.
What gets results? High-quality content on a properly structured site optimized for search with an authentic and authoritative voice. You can’t fake your way to lasting, long-term results.
2. Content Scaling Off The Cliff
Another common pitch we hear is "AI content at scale and speed.” Again, this isn’t new but just under different AI packaging. The promise is tempting: why pay a subject matter expert to write a blog post tailored to your brand differentiators when a prompt can generate 1,000 words within seconds and repeat at scale? Can the quality and performance be the same?
The content and SEO industry has been here before, from content spinning to programmatic doorway pages to now AI content farms. The tools may have improved, but you get the same outcome. As Search Engine Journal put it recently in their Scaling Disappointment blog, “Worked until it didn’t. It always does. And then it doesn’t.”
I’ve seen real-world contractor examples of this ‘scaled’ and AI content slop. Like a website content page that still contains placeholder text like “[SERVICE NAME HERE]”. Or a sloppy AI-produced blog, clearly without human review (or sense), where the output is a non-human-readable mess of keyword stuffing, like “Duct Cleaning Cost Portland ME Energy Savings” (yes, this is a real blog header we’ve seen, only edited to anonymize the real location published).
Content that exists to feed an algorithm rather than answer an actual customer question is detectable. Google’s recent core updates have been specifically designed to deprioritize and ignore this kind of "slop" from the search results.
To stand out, quality strategic marketing needs to focus on user intent and authentic and authoritative voices to gain ground. But AI slop focuses instead on low-value volume and careless content generation that doesn’t meet any Google EEAT content principles. One generates visibility, growth, and leads. The other generates "crawler noise."
3. No Code Websites, Just Vibes
The pitch is attractive: no developers, no agency, just point, click, and publish. But the argument against no-code, AI-built websites isn't that the technology is bad. It's the same argument you'd make against a homeowner who buys the parts and attempts their own HVAC install. It'll probably run. The question is whether it'll run right. For a high-performance contractor, that distinction is your entire value proposition.
The same logic applies to your website. The question is whether there's a strategist behind them. The tool is only as good as the judgment guiding it.
Think of technical SEO as the building science of the web. Site architecture, URL structure, internal linking, thin versus substantive content: invisible to visitors, just like duct design is invisible to homeowners. They only become visible when something breaks.
Some of the no-code builders making the rounds use Airtable or Google Sheets as their backend, with a front-end that's basically just window dressing into a spreadsheet. When your site is only as stable as that spreadsheet, a syncing error or accidentally deleted row can take pages down and serve errors to customers who were one click from calling you.
And then there's the growth ceiling. The moment you want to add a custom feature, restructure your service offerings, build out a real content strategy, or integrate with your other platforms, you're hitting walls the tool was never designed to handle. You end up making your business fit the software. High-performance contractors know how that story ends: you end up having to do the job twice.
The trust dimension is worth stating plainly. A website that looks like a template (because it is a template) is one of those signals. A site that performs well in search, speaks directly to the problems performance-minded homeowners are trying to solve, and holds up under scrutiny signals something different entirely. It tells them the people behind it are paying attention to the details.
AI-coded, no-code websites are definitely a path you can take and if we find that AI can help us lower costs and meet our quality standards, we'll explore doing it. But not at the expense of all the subtle and not so obvious elements that make up a high performance web presence.
Another contractor analogy: A box swap might get the equipment running, but commissioning is what makes it run right.
Energy Circle has also developed this prototype to help high-performance contractors translate technical building science into homeowner-friendly language. It demonstrates how to make your expertise visible and distinct online, ensuring the quality of your craft is never lost in a generic template: https://demo.energycircle.com.
(Dis)Honorable Mentions
1. The .ai Domain Bait
A contractor was told that registering an .ai domain would help them show up more in AI overviews. I want to be very clear here: this is not how this works. Google's AI overviews are not scanning the web for .ai domains and rewarding them. The .ai domain extension is a country code for Anguilla. It means nothing to any search algorithm hack. It’s more of a brand strategy adopted for AI start-ups, which you are not.
2. Meta Magic
Technically, this didn’t come from a contractor’s experience but is still relevant. A content writer friend shared this story in the sauna a few weeks ago that someone in her company thought that by having an LLM rewrite all their meta descriptions (the preview text under your listing in search results), it would optimize those pages to show up in AI LLM searches and AI overviews. No strategy, no human review, just handing over the wheel and expecting ranking magic in return. Sounds so simple, right? This is more of a cautionary tale around lack of understanding systems and tools, and how SEO and Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) actually work.
The Reality Check: Meta descriptions don’t factor into rankings! However, a quality meta description encourages a real human to click your link and come to your site and is readable by Google crawlers to get more information about your page, but isn’t going to magically rank you in your favorite LLM. (And yes, full disclaimer, Google may also revise your meta descriptions based on users' searches too.)
The Real Strategy of What Actually Works
AI is a tool, not a strategy. At Energy Circle, we use AI not to cut corners, but to enhance our capabilities so we can deliver higher-quality, more effective marketing and website services that help you achieve your business goals.
That means strategically building a website for your unique goals and positioning, with content that reflects your expertise, voice, and differentiators, and SEO strategies that work with the algorithm, not trying to hack it and outrun the consequences.
Our team are not only digital marketing experts, but we’re building science and industry marketers. Everyone on our team earns a Building Science Principles Certificate of Knowledge from the Building Performance Institute.
We call bullshit on bad tactics and cheap short-term “wins” that have a high probability of blowback to your business and reputation.
The next time you get a pitch that sounds too good to be true, ask yourself if it builds trust or erodes it? I challenge you to send me any pitch to get an honest, unbiased opinion. Stay skeptical, keep your human-in-the-loop, and don’t fall for the slop.