Heads In Beds Show - Google's Ch-Ch-Changes Across Vacation Rental Search, Agents & More!

Episode Date: September 16, 2026

In this episode, Conrad and Paul talk all things Google, the future of Google Vacation Rentals, AI-powered travel booking, how AI agents could change the guest booking journey, Google AI Mode, what WebMCP could mean for vacation rental websites, and a lot MORE! Enjoy!⭐️ Links & Show NotesPaul Manzey Conrad O'ConnellConrad's Book: Mastering Vacation Rental MarketingConrad's Course: Mastering Vacation Rental Marketing 101WebMCPMuse AIArticle Link🔗 Connect With BuildUp BookingsWebsiteBook A Call With Us🚀 About BuildUp BookingsBuildUp Bookings is a team of creative, problem solvers made to drive you more traffic, direct bookings and results for your accommodations brand. Reach out to us for help on search, social and email marketing for your vacation rental brand.

Welcome to the Heads and Bet Show where we teach you how to get more properties, earn more revenue per property, and increase your occupancy. I'm your co-host, Conrad. And I'm your co-host, Paul. You know, we're starting a few minutes late, Paul, which is actually with the Patriots need last night, maybe a few more minutes to not shoot themselves in the foot. What's happening? How are you? What's going on? It's the first week of school for me. Yes, yes. The smiles over on this side of the screen, and then the frowns over on the side of the screen.

Oh, I survived. It's, that's what I feel like right now. Now, this is a little bit of a breather. Are they enjoying it? The kids enjoying school? Kids are a lot of school. They've been eager to get back. I don't think we realized how eager until we still like it's just they love it. So that's fantastic.

The neighbor kids are more in the neighborhood as well. It's just time feels like it exists outside of a very narrow bubble. So, yeah. I like that. It's, I'm feeling pretty good. So again, come Sunday, I will probably be in a very similar situation to you. But for right now, I'm going to enjoy the next few days and be happy that the Vikings didn't start early this year. Oh, man.

Then you get to sit with a terrible loss for nine days, which is tons of fun for sure. Oh, we like that. Oh, man. It's probably had more wins and losses. That's for sure. In the life of the company, we're talking about one of the most dominant, you know, marketing platforms on the planet. We thought we do, this is a bit of a Google grab bag or Google update. which is not, I mean, there has been a Google up to it recently,

but that's not really the sole topic of today. It's just kind of changes in Google and changes in Google that we find notable, newsworthy, interesting. Maybe they're going to end up impacting you. Some of these things are, like, to be determined, or we're going to figure out where they head over the next 90 days, 180 days, one year, that sort of thing. And then some of these things are stuff that's already happened,

news and events and some other layers here. So it's a bit of a grab bag. Where do you want to start, Paul? What's your favorite Google-related topic for us to dive into today? Yeah, I don't know. Shouldn't we? I think let's do with the, reasonably recent notable news here.

So this is something that we had started back. I think we could touch on this one quick here. This is something we started talking about back a year ago, two years ago, but I actually looked in the article I could find when this all got ruled out. But it was Google, I mean, the United States government saying, yeah, Google, you're a monopoly. We got to stop this.

We've got to break this apart. The search is, you control everything. And the, I remember reading through pre-AI and just, I'm thinking, ooh, this is, this is good, this is interesting. I think when we screenshot at the table of contents, I'd said, oh, there's a dozen topics we can talk about, and I don't know how many of them we use, but I digress. But all that fun stuff came to fruition on the 2nd, September 2nd, that nobody's going to be held accountable. We're not going to need to actually sell off the ad business. it may be a monopoly, but we're going to hear some more things about it. Is it a final win for Google?

I don't know for sure. Because over in Europe... Might be more of a political question than a policy question, right? I think it is. That is. I don't know about that. That's the thing, because over in Europe, they are still getting hammered. And we know GDPR is a way different beast than anything we've got over here right now,

which that's something I'm a little grateful for, we don't have, domestically, we can keep most of the travel here. That's, you don't have to worry about privacy and data and all that stuff because it gets touchy, really touchy-feely with litigation over there. Yeah, I'm not happy about this. How do you feel about this in the fact that? I don't know. I feel like these large, how to describe them, these things have become very newsworthy, the net effects end up being small in most situations for, I don't know if you recall this. This is a total sidebar. Do you remember the whole net neutrality debate? This was probably like five, six years ago. And I remember Ran Fiskin in particular getting on Twitter at the time and rallying against

this idea that if this goes down, if we lose quote, net neutrality, we're going to, you're going to see the end of the open internet as you know it. Your ISP could censor what type of content you watch and not just saying like maybe like adult or inappropriate content, but rather, although that kind of has happened away. But we're going to sponsor, oh, like this is our preferred streaming service so you can't use Netflix. There was all these ideas that were brought up. And then like none of that happened. Net neutrality went down. My experience as an internet user has not changed whatsoever at all in the past few years from this. So I think it let's say Google was forced to sell off an ad platform or forced to sell YouTube or forced to sell Gmail and its own business unit. I'm like,

wouldn't there just be some interoperability between the new company and the old company? It still clicked to sign in with Google. It would work the same way. And it's just what's actually going to change. I think you nailed it. It was the one comment you made in there with this whole The AI conversation has made it. The perception is that Google is in trouble, maybe with AI, that these new companies, we have the, it's almost like that was a problem. And then when the AI revolution happened a few years ago and to this day, a new problem emerged, that was like more important than that.

So now you see the discourse online focused around is AI safe? There's this supposed astroturfing campaign occurring right now where some guy said, I worked at Anthropic. I'm quitting and I'm leaving because these companies are not operating safely, which hilariously, I find to be good marketing for Anthropic and Open AI that like, our stuff is so smart. Our software is so good that if we let it loose, like, it would do things unimaginable in terms of, and I'm just like, I don't know, is that actually true or not?

Or is that a bit of, again, a bit of like facetious. Yeah, it's almost like marketing. There's a totally random sidebar here. I think it's a Netflix show with Owen Wilson and it's a golf show. I think it's called The Stick or something like that. Have you seen that? Where like the guy goes to hit the driver and he's, oh, no, you're not ready for that, man. Like you can't hit that yet.

Then it makes him want it even more. He's like, no, give it to me. Let me see. He's like, are you sure? and then he sells it to him for like $1,000, it's a whole thing. So the moment you're told you have to do this thing or you can't do this thing is the moment we react irrationally. So I think that's what the whole Google thing was. It was irrational from the beginning, to be honest with you some degree.

Yes, they were a monopoly in some areas. Are they acting in a way that's unfair? No, because what we've now, the discourse online is that Google's in major trouble because of chat GPT and these AI tools. You and I think a little bit differently on that. They are in some level of trouble, but not to the immediate sense that people are talking about like it's going to happen tomorrow. but I think that became more of a priority in the minds of like the legal system or whatever laws might come into play around AI. And then it was like, at Google, yeah, they're not as strong as they once were. Maybe in a way here, we're just going to let that go and move on from that and try something else.

So that's my like not super research, but just honest take as like a consumer and also as someone who's like trying to look at the politics of this, which whether you like it or don't like it, that this is a political sort of thing, right? Like the next people that get elected might be pro-Google, they might be anti-Google. And that'll totally paint the picture of how Google and Open AI and Anthropic and all these companies will operate over the next two years. So that's just the nature of it, whether you like it or agree, that's just how these things will go. It's fair. It's sad, but it's fair. That's the reality of what we live in right now. So we got a deal. It's okay. We do. Let's circle back then to the European Union removing Google vacation rentals, because that was a that's like a 2% celebration for me, maybe a 3% celebration for me.

It'll be 100% celebration they do out in the U.S. So to be very specific, there's an article that was posted or a news bulletin or something that Google posted somewhere. they said in the European Union, we are basically removing the Google vacation rental block, which Paul and I have ranted about this for literally years. We've done multiple episodes about it. Yeah, like it's crazy how far back this goes for us. That Google has this vacation rental block. It came out, I think at 21 maybe or 22. It's been on the search results for a while.

It gets all these clicks. It gets all this interest in terms of like the consumer clicking on it. But there's no inventory in there, relatively speaking, compared to going on an OTA site. They've made no meaningful progress, which again is proof too. Because back in 21, 22, people would have been like, oh, Google coming in. how are we ever going to beat him? And like, they've made no progress. So this idea of a big company coming in and just going to automatically capture the market is just not true. And this is proof of it. So Paul and I would love for Google Vacationals to die because it'll help our

organic click the rates, which is obviously what we're biased towards, people that often sell SEO style services or adjacent services to clients in our space. And it's happened in the Europe, but it has not happened at least as of this recording in the U.S. But it's got to be in life support now, right? I feel like we've got to be in the back half of this thing. And I hope that this thing dies very soon. But no guarantees. They could come back and revamp this thing with some weird AI-generated search field. Who knows? But I'm hoping and praying, we're closer now, though,

and I feel like we were two weeks ago when this wasn't the case to Google killed this thing off. What do you think? See, I still want it to work. I just wanted to work the way it should work the way it's supposed to work. And this is just like, but the OTs are never going to. As Conrad rolls his eyes at me justifiably.

It's as a concept, it makes sense. Roll it all in. You have to incorporate that into the future of some type of agentic travel. So, yes, as it is. The one thing I have noticed, it's funny you say, but they're cutting that off, is that I have been doing the testing over the last probably month or so, because it really frustrated me when I did that first search around Verma to see if there were any vacation rentals.

Again, October 4th through 6, all that good stuff. did the search nothing there in the vacation rental tabs. Since that time, I've done the search, random searches every day. They're actually building out more and more of the inventory. Now, again, I don't know where you're pulling it from. Some of the links are certainly not good that are coming through, which is a whole other question. But I think that's the, I want vacation rental somehow

to be on a level playing field with hotels, resorts, and all these other things in the largest search engine in the world. I think that makes sense. I don't know. They've not proven that they're skilled at acquiring inventory, which would tell you that either Google has two problems to solve if Google vacation... So let me take your position for a moment.

If this were to work for Google, what would that look like? It would look like them going to things like VRMA, going to things like these user conferences, going to a user conference for a guestie, for a streamline, for a hostway, for a hostfully, those types of places and saying, we want your inventory. Here's how it's going to be,

we're going to make it easy, click your opt-in. So in the same way that these verb, Verbo, we'll send reps to these big conferences. So we want your inventory. We're going to work hard. We're going to get you traffic. We're going to get you bookings. They need to do it at that level. And they need to do it at the OTA level. So they go to Airbnb and they got to go to Verbo and they got to get them to buy in and say, we're going to put all your inventory that's going to be so valuable in this. You're going to want this traffic and it's going to help grow your brand and platform. Because they have been very successful with this with hotels. So it's not like Google is not skilled at doing that type of acquisition of inventory for their travel portals and their booking portals. They've done the same thing with flights.

Obviously, they're doing this right now. We'll come to this in a second with AI agentic booking. They're kind of trying to play in those waters. But yeah, why wouldn't it work for vacation rentals? Because they didn't really get the managers on board with very much effort. And they didn't get the OTAs on board with their much effort. And as Paul is about to hint at, they made money. So if you don't make any money off of it, that's, and if I was like sitting at the head of Google travel, I'd be like, why in some vacational?

I was sitting in that room talking to myself about, we need more resources. We'll get a lot more inventory. We'll make Google vacation rentals, make a lot of money for Google and for our customers or whatever. I would be like, how? Because right now they don't, there's no, like you said, there's no revenue mechanism. Or maybe what you're about to say, there's no revenue mechanism for it. So that's the only way that it works is that you have an ad unit at the top and you could pay and boost your listing, which is what Verbo's doing right now. That's the only way that they could do it.

And Google knows that it's not their problem. But yeah, it just, they thought about, let's say there's 12 steps that I just highlighted there. They've done four of them. And then there weren't, maybe they're wondering or someone inside of Google HQ is like, why isn't this working well? Yeah, you've done four of the 12 steps needed to get this thing to really work well. No surprise is not doing well. Yes, you have Google. your Google, you have distribution, you have all these clicks going into it.

But if the product is not there for people to be interested in click on, to click on and actually book, then even Google can't win with all their eyeballs. What I think is funny about that is that it was the big companies. It was the OTAs that opted out. That's probably what's the most frustrating from, is that I think they didn't feel, they felt that, and I'm, again, justifiably probably Google is going to have, little more control over that top of the funnel was going to get more of that

attribution coming directly through them. And even though the ad revenue is probably going to go down, the cost-benefit analysis there, ultimately you're going to see less total revenue, less of your chunk of the pie come down. And as Airbnb continues to expand their slice of the pie, I think that makes a lot more sense as to why they, and it, ultimately probably factors into

why our best case is fragmented whatever it is because Airbnb is never going to supply Google with the inventory to compete with it it's never going to diminish the percentage of the pie it's going

to try to take there and we have to continue to be there because it's still where a large amount of the interest, intent. Again, let's put the screenshot into this one just for a little bit of fun and say, go back as far as Google does.

And their search trends, vacation rentals, VRBO, Airbnb. We lost control of the terminology that people use. Because of the fragmentation. Because Airbnb was, why would you want to go to a bunch of different direct booking websites when you can just go to Airbnb and find what you're looking for? And there's a version of it works very well, by the way, too, I think, from a cost perspective and a, when is Airbnb stepping in perspective? For better, for worse, there are hosts that are happier on Verbo, even with less bookings than

they are in Airbnb, because Verbo gives them a little bit more control, not full control, but a little bit more control than does Airbnb. But Airbnb has this idea of we're the platform, we're doing everything end to end. So honestly, credit Airbnb and credit them for holding their ground. I think it's why you're hinting out there a second and go holding their ground and saying, we're not going to let you, we're not going to give you our inventory because that's essentially our company. The moment we give you our inventory, and then you're going to have to sell the click

back to us is the moment we harm our profit margins and we harm our ability to drive a lot of revenue. So if we just, we're the big, we're the 800 pound gorilla and we just don't give you the inventory, you're going to flounder. And Google, this fish has been, Google vacationals, the fish has been flopping on the deck now for literally years, making very little progress. Maybe it's a few percentage points at best of your direct bookings, most likely, or bookings, most likely, I shouldn't say direct bookings, but your bookings. And you're, you're happy. It's there, whatever. It's a little bit of an alternative, but it's not a serious threat. That's what we're talking about you, right? Is this a serious threat to your ability to get

direct bookings? No. Is it a serious threat to Verbo? No. Is it a serious threat to booking.com? Airbnb? No. So if that's not a threat, then just let it die, right? Like, that's, it almost, I wonder how much information goes back between Verbo and Airbnb, probably very little. But that's probably one where, like, they could have a 20 minute phone call and be like, if you guys don't fold here and we don't fold here, this will never happen. Right. Like, that's, that might have been a worthy 20 minute phone call to have if you're like distribution or whatever for those two different platforms because they realized, hey, we can compete with each other. And in some markets, one does better. And other markets, another does better. Obviously, Airbnb is like, long, one.

that race many years ago at this point. But the moment they were just like, hey, don't give in, don't show your inventory here, is the moment that Google vacation rental product was never going to reach this critical mass. Again, unless I go back to my earlier point, Google had been aggressively pursuing how do I get inventory, quote unquote, directly, like on Google vacation rentals from these PMS companies, from all these companies so that I have a bunch of inventory that competes with, competes with Airbnb and the like. And they've never done that. So as a result, it just wasn't enough. They just didn't do enough to make it work. So can we just kill it, please can we move on it's but yeah but and my only in them will close on this because it's too much

we were giving us too much oxygen but the only I think the only problem with that is if we lose that where do we fit where do vacation rentals fit in the hotel Google not hotel Google travel ecosystem moving forward like where does it come through because it's going to have to get fed in somehow like that that that's That is something that Google is still. I don't see billions of people moving away. I see hundreds of millions. That's not a small number.

But we have to still be a part of that conversation. And right now, we're not. Like when you look at the average recommendation that comes in, and again, they're either specifying Airbnb to get there, a VRBO to get there. But they're not getting to many, to as much of the direct areas. It is the inventory, the most direct card piece,

is still always going to be a hotel or resort. That's the scary. Let's think about this for a second. I was trying to think about this. Like the, I did a quick Google search, so this may not be perfect, but this is projected revenue.

We're recording this middle of September, 2026. Projected revenue for Airbnb in 26 is going to be 14.1 billion. And that's their revenue, right? That's not like their gross booking revenue, which is, I think, many billions more than that or something. like that. But last year, it was 12.24. So also, that's another thing. We see all this

discourse online about Airbnb's dead and dying and this and that. But the pie itself is getting bigger. Yes, are there markets where there's winners and losers? Absolutely. And I'm in some of them working with clients who are seeing a decline and things like that. But overall, like the interest in our platform of short-term rentals and vacation rentals as a product is literally going up 15% in a year that we're all told that things are not doing that well. Probably because we saw like these 40-50% jumps. So 50% growth from Airbnb feels low. Like it feels like, oh, that's not much. even though it's actually pretty good, right? Like there's a lot of companies that would kill to grow 50% year every year in a down market,

right, as it were. And part of that is also Airbnb making more money, right, going back to the whole 15.5% fee and they're extracting more revenue and stuff like that. So maybe that's helping them grow their brand and that sort of thing. But to go back to what you're asking there, why would Google Travel want to push aside vacation rentals? I don't think they do because I think they know this product is very desirable. And it's only getting, in theory, more popular over time,

despite the sort of weird online narratives. How would Airbnb be making 15% year over year, where if you go on like Reddit or Twitter or certain Facebook threads, you're like, I'll never use Airbnb, I'll never use a short-term rental site. I had an negative experience. It's like, if that were the case, shouldn't there be a 15, 30% collapse in revenue from Airbnb, but that's like the opposite is happening? It doesn't make sense, does it?

Sometimes when you think about it, which is maybe an interesting sort of a side topic that we can explore on for a moment there. But I wonder, to go back to what you're asking there, does this feed into the next phase of what these companies are trying to do, which is forget your cooperation for a second. our agent is going to be the one that solves this. So are you going to block our agent where the person who is operating this thing wants it to be effective to be able to search on here? And that's the theory that we just have no idea on right now

because I think what Google wants and all these agents want is like a really structured data feed from a big provider where they can go in and ping one API or ping one protocol and say here's all the properties available this weekend in Pioneer, North Carolina, for people. That's what they want to have. But in reality, what they may realize is like the web's a little bit too messy for that. Luckily, agents and AI are really good at taking the mess and making some sense of it relatively quickly.

So, yeah, did they just say forget it? We'll just do it without you. Or did they basically make hotels more of a first-class interface in these products? And maybe it even makes a meaningful dent in the hotel kind of vacation rental market share. But yeah, our product is just too popular for Google to just push it to the side. Like, they know that people want this kind of stuff. And I think they've got to figure out a way to make it happen or risk maybe losing people and saying, well, I'm not going to use this because I'm going to use some other platform that I can more easily

do what I want to do, which is I want to use these tools to make a booking. So I don't know. That's a tricky question, man. Again, if I'm inside Google HQ right now or Airbnb HQ right now, I'm like, doesn't make sense for us to get on the same page with this layer, like the agent layer, versus before we were like, no, we're not in Google vacation rentals. Would it make sense for them to be like, yeah, we're going to give you like an API that you can hit and then you can turn back results and then they click and they book on Airbnb,

but we'll give you like that flow of information? And then Google may say, okay, cool, because that gives us the product that people are looking for them, but does it serve their needs as a business? I don't know. Not if there's not a, as you said earlier, not if there's not a little cash and greenbacks going back and forth between those two, right? And I think previously you could say, add revenue, sure. That's compensation.

That's a classic. It's going to wash out. Yeah. Different conversation. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Or is the consumer going to have enough desire to use one of these AI agents, which I'm still skeptical about, to be honest with the desire to use an AI agent to book travel, or are they just going to use the AI agent with a little bit of discovery? Okay, I'm looking to go somewhere. I kind of believe this is a current AI use case that's somewhat meaningful. I live in Minnesota. I want to go somewhere warm for the fall before we have to deal with winter, blah, blah, blah. Here's my airport code.

Show me some direct flight markets. Using AI kind of for that thing. But it's totally different than, okay, now I've got to pick a place. Now I've got my credit card out. And I'm on my computer phone and I've got to pick a place to give my money to that's going to be the place that I put my head on my bed and sleep at night. And that is going to have to be, what's that process going to exactly look like? I don't know. That's interesting.

One thing it might look like to pivot into another topic that we have here is basically Google's AI mode, which is essentially their hybrid between what Google search is today and what Gemini is today, can discover and book hotels through the following platforms today. This is live as a few days ago or a week ago or something. Booking Expedia, Hilton, Marriott. So interesting, very interesting choice of those four partners, in my opinion, because two OTA platforms, booking Expedia, Hilton and Marriott, two hotel brains. So what a perfect test for Google to say, who do we want to work with long term? Do we want to go set up a relationship with Hilton and with Marriott and with Hyatt and with all these

brands or do you want to set a relationship with booking Expedia, these OTA aggregation companies, and then let them power the results. Because I know, I think they think I can get a lot more ad dollars out of the booking and Expedias of the world. That's going to be more work for me to integrate with Hilton and Marriott and those kind of brands. But maybe they'll pay me a higher fee per booking if I can refer it over just like these lovely OTAs get their 20%.

Google would certainly love 20% of the booking and not a much smaller portion, which is what booking and Expedia and OTAs have to give them because their business model, right? They only get a percentage of their revenue. So they don't get all of it. So interesting kind of concept, isn't it? I think you definitely go with Marriott just because it's the biggest program. That's the thing. If you can get Marriott, you get Marriott.

That's just there's got to be a rule in hospitality. But I do. I think that's something that bookings kind of the same way. Internationally, worldwide, bookings is the leader. Expedia comes into the conversation, certainly domestically here. and I think in specific countries around the world too, but they went big, and I think that's a good evaluation of where they are going to be the most effective.

And again, where I think where they can build the best experience because ultimately that's got to be somewhat of what they're doing here. They're understanding that the machine behind it is still, I think the best machine as far as what they built before. Google had what they built before. Everybody else is ingesting what they built before. And I do. So I think that puts that forward output just a little potentially further on there.

So I don't know. I think that's something that they're going to go big. Let's go see it. What does that next phase look? And I guess what does that next phase look like? Where do you see that going? going after they would do something? And what kind of a timeline would you anticipate there?

It's hard to know because, again, Google is very cagey right now about the actual uses of AI mode. It's just like this goes back to some of the stats they've cited or they've talked about a little bit. There was one that I saw the other day when they were talking about people using AI overviews. And they're like, we've seen like a billion users on AI overviews. I'm like, yeah, dude, because you shove it in the search results, whether you like it or not.

Whereas AI mode currently isn't a button, like you have to click over to go in that interface. And like, I use it. So, like, I know there's value in it. And I ask a question. sometimes of weird things that are like multi-step things. And there's not a doubt in my mind that I'm clicking on content less on Google when I can go and ask it a question, we did it before we hit record.

What was my AIA mode search? Kim Newton rushing yards by here because Paul and I were debating something about rushing and rushing before rushing quarterbacks. But anyhow, pro football reference didn't get that click. They would have before. In fact, their website was almost like hard to navigate. I couldn't understand it. And the AI mode answered the question.

So again, I think the hotels will do better to go back to your original question with AI mode in the short-ish term near term with the early adopters because booking hotel is a bit more of a straightforward. I know what hotel I want. There's three to four room types. Go ahead and book it, not sitting there. Again, our product is so unique. You're a vacation manager listing.

You have 100 homes. You probably have 100 unique homes. Right. Not two homes are probably not exactly the same. So why do people, when we go look at hot jar recordings, when we go look at clarity recordings of property detail pages and how guest shop before they book, what do they sit there and do? They click through every photo basically, or darn near every photo when you go look at it. So why are they doing that?

Because they want to know what it's like. They want to know what they're getting before they get there. So if someone's doing that, again, could we pull the photos in the AI mode? Sure. But like, they want to look at what they're seeing before they book more in our space than hotels where it's like, yeah, dude, like I stayed at a hiat for this day. I just did this past weekend to go see my grandfather. And it's, it's a hyatt. What do you want me to say? It's a nice hotel. It was exactly what I expected. The walls were gray. The beds were clean and comfortable. I had an awesome stay. I will go back and stay there again. But there was no need for me to book

a short-term rental in this case. And it's Boston. Like, the location was good. Everything's fine. Check the box. I would easily book that again through an AI agent. the summer trip we take next year, where it's all of us going and all the kids and all this kind of stuff and where are we going to stay? It's going to be a two-month discussion in this household at some point in the winter or the beginning part of next year. Where are we going to go? What place are we going to stay at? How is it going to work? It is a totally different booking process. So I think that flows back into your original question of the way these AI agents is going to be really interesting. I did a fun one before we hit record, actually. This wasn't in her outline originally,

but I added it in kind of post-taste, which is, the meta's come out with an AI called Muse. And I was like, let's see how this does. So if I go and I picked a random, you mutual friend of Paul's and I put in, hey, go to the website, show me properties available this weekend, tell me the prices, I want to go this weekend, I got four kids, I'm looking for this and this. I gave it a little bit of the thing. And all it does, by the way, this Muse agent,

it just pops open a web browser. It just goes to the web browser and starts interacting with it for you, which is fine, but like this is not an efficient use of AI resources or tokens or anything like that. It's actually some of the worst, like, efficiency when it comes to using the token. So meta just paid whatever 94 cents of compute costs in order for me to browse and not even book anything. And they're not making any money off that.

So how does that make any sense? for meta. And just for fun fact, it was wrong. It went in there and I said, what's the price and it gave me the price per night. It didn't actually go through the process and tell me what the fees were. So it told me that it was going to pay 185 for a two-night stay at one of these properties. And then I go in there and dig further. And it goes, oh, no, there's $186 is the rent. There was $135 cleaning fee, a $25 admin fee, a $9 credit card fee and $46. So it originally told me $186. So it originally told me $186. So these AI agents, as smart as they are, I can't actually click here and tell me what the fees are.

Because they're just using the browser like a person. They don't actually have a data feed or anything like that for an individual vacation rental manager's website. So there you go. My rant's done. Well, now that we have that, I'm interested to check that clarity recording a little later too now. Yeah.

Yeah. I'm going to put a pin on that and see what happened there. We have a little real-time test, so that'll be good. That actually will be exciting. We might have to do a second episode just on that little on-air production meeting. Here's how an AI agent actually uses your website. Yeah. Do you want to pick up WebMCP in the Google notes there and play with that or any response to those things before we go into that section?

No, I think we didn't go to the WebMCP here. All right. I feel bad because it's my topic. I hate to go back to back like that. No, please go back. All right. So I found this. All right, so here's what I got this from.

And it was kind of under the radar. Again, maybe there's so much news nowadays. I just can't keep up with it all. I fully admit that. I frequently miss things just in life and in general. So I pop open a page speed test on, I think it was on Monday, no Tuesday, it was after I was back. And I run a page speed test for a client who had complained the sites loading slowly. And we found some things and images, small things.

We're fixing those. But I scroll down to the page speed audit on Google. And it gives you an agent or an LLM readiness score. And I was like, that's interesting. This is an official from Google sort of proclamation of how quote unquote AI ready or whatever the case may be a website. And so I go in there and I pop it in there and I start scrolling down and looking. And some of the things that were in there were things that I'd seen before or we talked about before, I think LMS.txte is in there funny enough, which is something that we've talked about

is not really a thing, but it's kind of a thing. It's all a bit messy. But one thing I hadn't seen before until I clicked on it was this WebMCP proposed framework or, excuse me, web standard. And this was published back in May, so again, has been around for a minute, but I just hadn't seen it before. But it was updated recently, August of 2026. So within the last monthish or so, a little bit more than that. And basically the premise of it is that agents, back to my earlier point from a second ago, actually have a hard time using your website. Again, they're loading it up in a browser and they're just clicking around. what if you told the agent specifically, here's what this button does, here's what this thing does.

Stop wasting your motion or don't click on certain things or don't use certain things that you don't need to. That's going to be more efficient for the AI agents and it's going to be more efficient for you actually getting the right information back to the person. Again, see the agent example from a minute ago where it didn't actually tell me the full price. It told me just the rent price, not with fact, taxes and fees and things like that included, cleaning fees. That's the direction that they're looking for, looking to go with this end of MbCP. And to be very clear, this is not something that you need to do today or that is in place today. It's basically we are proposing the standard We believe that this will be something that you might be able to do a little bit more efficiently in the future.

And you'll be able to turn this on to your website or add specific code and things like that to your website to tell the agents and show the orchestration of these browser actions how to be a little bit more effective with what the user or agent is actually trying to accomplish. So I think it's super interesting. I don't know where that's all going to net out. But again, it goes back to this idea of like, how would an agent become accessible to every site in the internet and do the actions that you want to if people are going to use these agents at the clip that. that we're told they're going to be using these agents for, not like the weird early adopters like you and I they're using them for right now. And it's got to be able to access essentially every say on the internet and do just about anything in order for them to be useful. Otherwise, if your agents failing nonstop, you're just going to be like, forget this. I'll just go do it myself, which is not what these AI companies actually want you to do.

They want you to be like dependent on the agent to go and do things for you. Almost at the point where it's like, it melts your brain a little bit. Or it's like, oh, I can't do that. I need to have my AI agent do it. It's an interesting philosophical discussion. But anyways, your thoughts on this framework. I think what this could potentially be is a redefinite. of technical SEO.

Because even as I was listening to you, explain through just that last part of implementation and doing all these things, that was us going through and doing page dial to make sure, but this is going to be, I think we have to think of it through that same lens. I don't know how you define it. I don't know what, SEO, A, E, O, G, E, O,

put whatever letters in front of it that you want to. But that is going to be a technical step in the process of building a website and building a digital storefront that is going to be non-negotiable. Again, is that in three years? Probably not at the speed of which things are getting built right now, I would say. I'd say the timeline for things from coming to idea to prototype to beta to whatever we are. Again, however you want to test things through, that timeline has certainly been reduced.

So what does that look like if something like this is implemented or is agreed upon and released? Or what does that look like? Google? Tell us, please. Yeah. I think the truth is they don't know either, right? That's the interesting part about this whole thing, right? They're trying to figure it out the same way that we're trying to figure out what's meaningful here.

And I think that the, again, we're the weirdos, were the early adopters. I think the real question for those that want to have some entertaining conversations around the space is, What is like the mainstream average person going to do who's booking your typical property? Like how long is it going to take them to say instead of using me going on the website and searching? Or even Airbnb going in Airbnb searching? I trust my AI agent to book something for me and I'm going to defer that to them. Like to your point, or is that a thing that's ever going to catch on? Let's talk about things that the nerds had in the past that didn't last and didn't catch on.

And as a result, they kind of got killed. Some of those things getting brought back. When I was in Boston, I saw so many people with those meta recording glasses. And I've been in glasses where since I was like a young child and I don't know how long you've had glasses ball or the glasses. or the glasses gang over here. And I'm just like, the idea of recording everything through my glasses in a way where it's subtle, right? Because you can't tell with these met of glasses right away.

They just look like almost a normal, quote-unquote, normal pair of glasses that you'd wear. It's so foreign to me and so strange to me that I just don't think I could ever do it. But at the same token, people kind of get away with it or they do it because it blends in seamlessly. Whereas go back to like circa 2010, 11, 12 or something with that Google Glass, right? Yeah, it's so awkward and so weird looking. Like, you'd have to be an insane person to wear that are out and about. Apple tried, like they did a whole VR headset thing that like they came out with and now there's like nothing there. Or at least I don't think that there's been another version of it where over the case may be.

So these things are interesting. They come and go a little bit. I'm not saying the AI is going to come and go. I don't believe that at all to be clear. Again, are people going to use these AI agents to book travel for them in a meaningful clip? Or is it going to be, hey, this is one of those weird things you do to optimize for this 2% of people who are doing this. And it makes sense. But people are still going to kind of come to either a website or Airbnb directly.

It's all up in their air right now. Anyone who tells you they know is guessing they may have conviction in their guessing. but they're guessing. They don't know exactly how these things are going to flesh out, and there's a good chance they're going to be wrong. But what's that saying, Paul, there's two things in life that are constant. There might actually be three. Change, maybe four. Sorry, let me redo that whole block there. There might actually be four things that are constant in life.

Number one is death. Number two is taxes. Number three is change. There's always going to change and things changing. And number four is they got to leave us a podcast review before they actually finish the episode. So we appreciate people listening, leave us a podcast review. Any of their odds and ends, Paul, you want to clean up before we put a bow in this one. No, it is. It's good. Can Google is what we have to deal with it is.

It's finding a way to be found on Google is still going to be as important as anything is moving forward in an AI world. A fun question, ask yourself, are you sure that having a different corporate overload with getting your traffic or visibility would be better? Would you rather be beholden to the meta-AI overload? Would you rather be beholden to the open AI one or the anthropic one? I actually feel like as much as we complain about Google, they might be the best ones to deal with of all that bunch in terms of like fairness and having ads platforms and things like that, things that work and drive results. We maybe take Google for granted a little bit because we have our grumblings,

but that's always an interesting one. I already did my review request. I'm not going to do it again. Thank you for making the end of the episode. We hope you have an awesome day. Appreciate you listening. You're an awesome person. We'll see you next time. Thanks so much.