Be Solvers, Not Sellers: How to Beat Big Box in the Age of AI
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Be Solvers, Not Sellers: How to Beat Big Box in the Age of AI
Matt Bradley
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The Changing Game
For the last 20 years, countless customers have answered the question “How’d you hear about us?” with the same one-word answer, over and over again: “Google.”
But recently, you may have started hearing some different one-word answers:
“Claude.”
“ChatGPT.”
“Gemini.”
That’s because more and more customers are skipping Google search entirely and asking AI for recommendations instead. And when they do that, AI has to decide which businesses to recommend—and which ones to leave out.
If you’re like most hearth retailers, that might make you wince with worry.
After all, you’ve probably spent significant time and money figuring out how to get your company to show up at the top of Google’s search results. But now, just as you’ve learned to keep up with Google’s ever-changing algorithms, it’s not just the rules that have changed—it’s the game itself.
It’s like you spent years getting really good at hockey, and suddenly the internet said, “Sorry, we’re playing lacrosse now.” But you never had the chance to learn the new rules, recruit new players, or get new gear. And all the while, the big-box stores and hearth e-tailers you’re competing with responded the way they always do—by hiring the most expensive coaches, poaching the most expensive players, and buying the most expensive gear.
At first glance, that picture may look pretty bleak. But before you despair, let me tell you some good news that took me—a long-time AI skeptic—a few years to accept: AI is predisposed to recommend local hearth shops over big-box stores and hearth e-tailers.
If that statement sounds too good to be true, then don’t take my word for it. Instead, open up your favorite AI tool and type in something like this: “I have an old, ugly gas fireplace in my living room. It doesn’t have any way to turn the heat up or down, so it’s always either too hot or too cold to do any good. I want to replace it with something clean and modern that gives me more control over my heat. Where should I go in [city name] to get help with a project like that?”
I’ve asked this question and hundreds like it to all sorts of AI assistants, and not one has ever answered by recommending a big-box store or hearth e-tailer. Instead—time after time and question after question—AI has consistently recommended local hearth shops with solid reviews, and it usually notes that the job will need a permit, a vent kit, and some finish work.
These types of AI responses reveal a critical difference between the old game and the new: When it comes to hearth retail, Google search is a paid product finder, while AI tools are practical problem solvers.
Here’s what I mean by that: To get to the top of a traditional Google search, a company just has to buy the right keywords for the most money, which means the one with the biggest wallet dictates what products show up first.
But AI doesn’t work that way—and that’s great news for local hearth retailers like you. Because you don’t just sell fireplaces: You also install them to code, maintain them every year, and service them when they break. A big-box store won’t do all that, and neither will a hearth e-tailer.
So when AI goes looking for a business that can sell, install, maintain, and service fireplaces, it doesn’t point customers to them.
It points customers to you.
It turns out that the rules you’ve been following all along, the players you’ve been working with for years, and the gear you’ve already got are exactly what you need to win back the market share you’ve been losing for the last 20 years.
Because when it comes right down to it, you’re not just a product seller—you’re a problem solver.
And that’s what AI is too.
That said, a home-field advantage isn’t the same as an actual win. To turn one into the other, we need to focus on local referrals and online reviews, build our websites for the AI internet, and make it easier to buy from us.
Let’s take a look at each of these strategies now.
Google search is a paid product finder, while AI tools are practical problem solvers.
Focus on Local Referrals and Online Reviews
For years, the email signature of my friend Peter Parsons didn’t say he was the “Owner,” “Principal,” or “President” of his business, The Tin Man. Instead, his signature said he was a “Problem Solver.” That’s how he presented himself to every customer who ever got an email from him, and that’s how other local hearth shops should present themselves today—because it’s the key to winning more business in the age of AI.
Of course, that raises an important question: How can you make it abundantly clear—to confused customers and their AI assistants—that your company specializes in solving people’s problems?
The answer is strikingly simple: You have to focus on local referrals and online reviews more than ever before.
I want to double down on the phrase “more than ever before,” because it runs counter to what most people expect. After all, it’s reasonable to think that a digital tool like AI would reward the big-box stores and hearth e-tailers that have whole departments focused on winning web traffic.
But strangely, I’ve found that it actually works the opposite way.
You see, the more AI floods the internet with synthetic and gilded content, the less people trust what they read online. And as trust in online content continues to erode, one thing that AI can’t manufacture becomes more valuable than it’s ever been: a real human being giving an in-person referral. When a neighbor walks up to a potential customer and says, “These guys solved my problem, so I’m sure they could solve yours too,” that referral can’t be beaten. And when hundreds of online reviews—real names, real neighborhoods, real jobs that actually happened—confirm that you fixed their problems, a big-box chain headquartered a thousand miles away has no answer for it.
The best part is that all this works on two levels at once. On the human level, your customers lean on the neighbor they recognize. On the machine level, AI leans on the reviews it can get from Google and the rest of the internet. No matter the source, the logic is the same: If you successfully solved the problems of past customers, you can probably solve the problems of future customers too—and that’s why local referrals and online reviews are more important than ever.
At this point, a second question arises: How do you win more local referrals and online reviews? Contrary to what you might think, you don’t need to spend thousands of dollars a month on clever marketing. Rather, you just need to show gratitude to your customers and automate your review process.
Let’s start with winning more local referrals by showing gratitude, which is a strategy I first heard from my good friend Tim Reed. After every installation, have the salesperson who closed the job send a handwritten thank-you card to the customer, with a gift card to a local coffee shop and a couple of business cards tucked inside. The note can be as simple as this: “Thanks for letting our team bring a little warmth into your home, Mrs. Jones. I saw the finished photos, and your new fireplace looks incredible. If you ever have any questions about it, or if you have a friend or family member who could use the same kind of help, my cards are enclosed.” When was the last time a business sent you a handwritten card like that? If it’s ever happened to you, you likely told someone about it. And the power of word-of-mouth referrals like that can’t be overstated—because, as Tim often says, “People who buy $10,000 fireplaces have friends who will buy $10,000 fireplaces.”
Next, let’s look at how to get more online reviews by automating the process as much as possible. Many of you already pay for some sort of software that could automatically ask customers for reviews once their installations are complete. If that’s the case and you just haven’t turned it on yet, flip the switch as soon as you can.
But if you don’t already have a tool that can do this, I’ve got a simple fix for you. Just copy and paste this prompt into your favorite AI tool, filling in the templated parts with your actual information:
“I own a local hearth shop, and I want a simple, automated way to ask my customers for Google reviews after my company finishes their installations. I usually use [program name] to create spreadsheets, and I send emails through [program name]. Help me build a spreadsheet that will keep track of customer installations and automatically send out emails that ask for reviews once jobs are done. Walk me through creating the spreadsheet and setting up the automation one step at a time.”
The best part is that you don’t need to pay for expensive software or be a tech person to make any of this work. You can just paste that prompt into your favorite AI tool, answer the follow-up questions it asks, and let it walk you through the process step by step. What used to take weeks and a huge marketing budget now takes hours and a handful of AI tokens—and once the automation is up and running, it keeps working long after you’ve moved on to the next task.
When you put these two halves together—when you send handwritten notes no machine can fake and build out a review process that runs on its own—you create an asset that big-box stores and hearth e-tailers can’t buy: a growing group of local people who insist that you solved their fireplace problems.
You’re not just a product seller—you’re a problem solver. And that’s what AI is too.
This article is brought to you by Valor Fireplaces.
Build Your Website for the AI Internet
Of course, after AI assistants give their initial recommendations based on online reviews, many customers will want to go deeper by comparing the top few choices. Given that, you’ve got to build your website for the AI internet, which really means building it for two audiences at once: the machine deciding whether to recommend you, and the human deciding whether to buy from you. Both come down to fast load times, effective trust badges, and high-quality content.
Let’s start with fast load times—because if AI can’t find you quickly and consistently, none of the other strategies matter. One easy way to assess the current speed of your website is to feed it into Google PageSpeed Insights. In about 10 seconds, this free tool will tell you how well your site performs in five key categories: Performance, Accessibility, Best Practices, SEO, and Agentic Browsing. All five are useful, but I want to focus on Performance here, since that’s the score that measures how quickly and consistently a site loads. After running hundreds of these tests, I’ve found that most hearth retailers’ homepages score somewhere between 45 and 65 out of 100, and they usually take about four to eight seconds to load.
Now, four to eight seconds may not sound like much, but consider this: If your homepage loads in under a second while your competitor’s loads in four to eight, AI can read and digest your entire page before theirs has even rendered. That speed alone won’t automatically put you at the top of AI’s recommended businesses, but it does ensure AI can find you fast, so the odds of it researching and reviewing your company first go way up.
What’s more, you can actually use AI to improve your Google PageSpeed Performance score. Instead of wading through all the technical jargon Google gives you when you complete the test, just copy and paste that feedback into your favorite AI tool. Then ask it for the three simplest, most specific things you could do to improve your score, and hand those three points to whoever manages your website.
In addition to ensuring that AI can find you fast, you also need to make sure that it can trust you—and the best way to do that is with objective, verifiable facts that build your credibility. So on virtually every page, give AI at least four trust badges about your business that it can quickly confirm. Here are a few examples of what I mean:
- 150+ 5-star reviews on Google
- 40+ years of serving our community
- NFI-certified fireplace techs
- CSIA-certified chimney sweeps
- In-house installation team
- Licensed contractors (with the number attached)
Notice what all these trust badges have in common: Each one is rooted in an objective fact AI could quickly confirm through other sources—and that’s the point. So don’t write that you sell the best fireplace brands, because that’s an opinion anyone could dispute. Instead, tell AI you’ve been in business since 1986—because that means you’ve been solving customers’ problems for four decades, which is precisely the kind of evidence that makes AI confident enough to recommend you to new customers.
The third and final way to build your website for the AI internet is to add quality content that answers the common questions that customers ask. Again, you don’t need to be an AI expert to score points here—and you definitely don’t need to hire one of big box’s expensive coaches. You just need to be a fireplace expert, which is exactly what you are.
Given how much AI and humans alike value your industry expertise, here’s what I’d recommend: Once a week, stand in front of a stove in your showroom, prop your phone on a table, and record a three- to five-minute video that answers a customer question you get all the time. The video doesn’t have to be polished; it just has to be you. Then, copy and paste the transcript of that video into your favorite AI platform, along with this prompt:
“Here’s the transcript of a short video I recorded answering a common question my hearth customers ask. Turn it into a clear and concise blog post for my website. Keep my content and voice intact—don’t change what I said or how I said it—but feel free to improve the organization, cut filler phrases, and fix writing errors. Open with a short introduction that states the post’s main claim or central idea and previews the key points that support it. Use subheadings to break up the body as needed. Close by briefly pulling everything back to that main idea and giving the reader one simple call to action (for example, ‘Get Instant Estimate,’ ‘Schedule Showroom Consultation,’ or ‘Book Service Appointment’). Finally, give me a title, a meta description, and a list of keywords that will help this post rank in both traditional search and AI browsing.”
Once you get a polished blog back, post it on your website alongside the original video. This simple strategy takes the expertise already in your head and makes it legible to the two audiences mentioned above: the machine deciding whether to recommend you, and the human deciding whether to buy from you. And that’s a one-two punch that’s hard to beat.
Simply put, if you build your website for the AI internet—if you make sure it’s fast, trustworthy, and useful—you’ll start winning back the traffic that big-box stores and hearth e-tailers have been taking from you for far too long.
Make It Easy to Buy From You
Building your website for the AI internet will bring more customers to your site—but the work doesn’t stop there, and hard-won visits are easy to squander. If buying from you is confusing or difficult, customers will click away and spend their money elsewhere. That brings us to the third strategy on our list, and it happens to be the one our industry struggles with the most: making it easy for customers to buy what we sell.
As Tim Reed has insisted for years, most hearth retailers make it incredibly difficult for customers to buy fireplaces. Fortunately, you can make it easy by using your website to answer the three essential questions that most customers have:
- “Which fireplaces will work for my project?”
- “How much will it cost?”
- “What do I need to do to move ahead?”
Let’s start with the first question, which is often where hearth websites miss the mark without knowing it. Most websites in our industry use insider language to categorize products—fireplace inserts, zero-clearance fireplaces, gas logs, freestanding stoves, and so on. The problem is that most customers don’t know what those words mean. When we use them, it’s like we’re speaking Dutch to people who only speak English.
So instead of organizing your website around product categories, organize it around customer scenarios: new construction, blank wall, fireplace replacement, open fireplace, or old stove. More often than not, customers know which term best describes their situation. When they choose the one that fits, show them only the products that will actually work for it—and if you want to go further, let them filter by fuel type, room size, or decorative style. Simply put, if you can help customers find fireplaces that will work for their projects in a few quick clicks, you instantly show them that you understand their problem and know how to fix it.
The second question is the one folks in our industry are often most afraid to answer online: “How much will it cost?” Given that reality, let me say something that sounds obvious but usually gets ignored: It’s really hard to buy something if you don’t know how much it costs.
With that in mind, I’d encourage you to post average installed prices—for product categories or particular models—right on your website. And it’s crucial to use the word “installed” consistently. When customers see a fireplace listed for $2,500 on some hearth e-tailer’s site, they have no idea the figure leaves out the front, the interior, the gas line, the finish work, and the chimney—which means the real project is closer to $8,000 (or more). So when you post an honest installed range, you set yourself apart as the opposite of the store that hands over a box and walks away—because you don’t just sell it. You also install it, maintain it, and service it. In other words, you solve the whole problem and show real prices—and when AI sees that combination, it’s more likely to recommend you over hearth e-tailers that don’t install and local competitors that don’t post pricing.
The third and final question—“What do I need to do to move ahead?”—should be the easiest one to answer, yet it’s often left ambiguous on industry websites. Again, the fix here is super simple. Just make sure your website gives customers one clear, compelling call to action (CTA)—“Get Instant Estimate,” “Book In-Home Appointment,” “Schedule Showroom Consultation”—over and over again. A strong CTA tells customers exactly what to do, and it does the same for their AI assistants, which will enthusiastically report back, “This shop offers free in-home visits, and you can book one right from their website. Here’s the link.”
In short, answering questions about which options will work, what projects will cost, and how to move ahead removes the friction that sends ready-to-buy customers to your competitors.
The Solver’s Advantage
At the end of the day, AI wants to recommend businesses that can fully solve people’s problems—which means the rules of the new game now favor our team.
After all, countless members of our industry have spent decades running gas line through customers’ crawlspaces, carrying pieces of pipe up their roofs, crouching inside their brick hearths, and fixing their fireplaces in the dead of winter. Big-box stores and hearth e-tailers can buy all the keywords they want, but they can’t buy 40 years’ worth of turn-key installations and next-day repairs. Today, we can capitalize on this advantage like never before—but only if we work for referrals and reviews, build our websites for the AI internet, and make it easy to buy what we sell.
So the next time a customer answers “How’d you hear about us?” with “Claude” instead of “Google,” don’t wince or worry.
Smile instead.
Because in the age of AI, victory won’t go to the sellers with the biggest budgets.
It’ll go to the solvers who can tackle their customers’ toughest problems.
And that’s exactly who we’ve always been.
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Matt Bradley
Matt Bradley is the partnership manager at WhyFire and the editor of The Fire Time Magazine.
