Google Charges for Missed Calls: Sell the $397/Mo AI Receptionist

0:00As of October 1st, 2026, a business can miss your call, lose your business, and Google can still charge them for it. Which means missing the phone is a whole lot more expensive than it used to be for local businesses advertising with Google. But this also creates a very profitable opportunity for you if you're trying to land your first client or your next one. Because with a simple 20-se secondond test that you can do from your phone, you can find the businesses that Google charges for their missed calls, then help them install a system that answers those calls, collects the customer's details, and even books that

0:31customer directly onto their calendar. So, you're not just stopping them from paying for calls that go nowhere. You're actually making them money. And you can charge them $397 a month for this service. Now, the system you're going to use to do that is called an AI receptionist. And I'll show you exactly how it works in just a minute. But before I show you how the AI receptionist works, you need to understand why this Google updates creates such a simple opportunity. You see, Google's made missed calls far more expensive for these businesses, which means they now have a very obvious problem because now not picking up the

1:04phone actually hurts their bottom line. And if your first thought is there's no way that Google actually charges businesses for calls they don't answer, trust me, I thought the same thing. But Google sent this to businesses running its local services ads. Those are the ads you see under the word sponsored at the very top of the results when you search for a plumber or an electrician or an appliance repair guy. These ads are the ones with the get quote, book, and get phone number buttons. These

1:30businesses don't pay Google for clicks. They pay Google per lead, which means they're paying per call, per message, or per booking. And as of October 1st, 2026, a missed call counts as a lead, too. So, if the caller stays on the line for more than 20 seconds during the business's posted hours, Google charges

1:49them whether anybody picked up or not. Now, I want to be straight with you about one thing right up front because this is going to matter for how you sell this. Answering the phone doesn't make the charge go away. An answered call was always a paid lead. What changed though is that the missed call now costs the exact same as the answered one. So, the business is paying either way. The only question is whether they get the job for it or whether they're just wasting money paying Google for unanswered calls. And I saw exactly how fast a missed call turns into a lost job just this past

2:21summer. See, our air conditioner died in the middle of a heat wave. I've got four kids. The house was brutally hot and we needed it fixed pretty much right away or nobody was going to be getting any sleep. So, I did what pretty much everybody does here. I went on Google. I typed in air conditioner repair and I started calling the companies at the top of the results. First one I called, no

2:41answer. Second one, no answer either. The third one picked up though and they had somebody at my house that afternoon. Now, what's important to know here is that those first two companies didn't lose that job because they were bad at fixing air conditioners. They lost it because somebody else picked up the phone and they didn't. And if they were advertising with Google under these rules, they'd have paid for my call on top of losing the work. So, Google gets paid, their competitor gets the customer, and they get a bill, which is a pretty impressive way to lose two times on a single phone call. Now, over

3:12the past 10 plus years, I've built three sevenfigure agencies, worked with over 1500 small businesses, and run thousands of campaigns. And today, I do it all as a oneperson agency with zero employees. So, I'm not kidding when I say that fixing this is [clears throat] one of the biggest opportunities that I see right now. And by the end of this video, you'll see it, too. And I'm going to give you three things to help you do this. First, the 20 second test that shows you which businesses are missing calls. Next, the exact messages you can send that turn that test into a paying client. And I'll give you those messages

3:44word for word. And third, the simple system you install that solves the problem and gives them a reason to keep paying you $397 every month. Now, here's where I want to pause for a second because maybe you're not running an agency and you don't plan on starting one. Maybe you're just looking for a real way to build income online and you've watched a hundred

4:02videos that never actually panned out. So, if that's you, you're exactly who this is for because all you need is one problem to solve and one simple system that solves it. No tech skills, no audience required. And that's what I'm going to show you. So, here's the whole plan in three steps. Step one, find. Here you find a business running Google's local services ads and you give them a call with a timer running. And before that sounds scary, you're not cold calling. You're not selling anybody anything. You're literally just seeing how long the phone rings. And if somebody does pick up, you can just say, "Sorry, wrong number and hang up." But

4:35I'll walk you through exactly how to do all that in just a minute. Step two, send. Here you send them a short email showing them what happened, why it matters, and what that missed call could be costing them. Again, there's no sales call. There's no pitch over the phone. Everything happens in writing here. And finally, step three, install, where you

4:52install an AI receptionist for them. Sounds fancy, but all it really is is a piece of software that answers their phone, books the job, and takes the caller's details. So, the call never gets missed again. And you don't have to build that from scratch. I'll just give you mine, but more on that later, too. Now, before we dive into the specifics, we first have to overcome what is probably the number one obstacle that most people face here, which is, what type of business should I go after? Now, I've got a list of 30 boring but incredibly profitable niches I'll put down in the description below this video

5:21for you to take a look at. But if you don't know where to start, let me just make the decision for you. Today, we're going after appliance repair businesses. The people who fix your fridge, your dishwasher, your dryer. So, let me show you a real one. I'm going to use Spokane, Washington for this, but you can run the exact same search in your own city or any city you like really as this is a completely location independent business. So, you can work with any business anywhere in the world that uses Google. So, if I search appliance repair Spokane, the very first thing at the top is this block labeled

5:52sponsored. That's Google's local services ads. So, every business in this block is paying Google per lead. Obviously, this is just two of them, though. These are typically the top listings, which aren't going to be ideal clients for us in most cases as they typically already got their stuff together. So, I'm going to click the show more button here. And now I've got a full list, and I think there's

6:12something like 11 or so of them here. Now, skip the ones at the very top here with the hundreds of reviews as these are typically the big companies with somebody sitting at a desk all day. So, they pick up the phone. What you want is a little further down. These are the ones with a few dozen or maybe a hundred reviews, normal working hours, and ideally a business that closes at like 5 or 6 p.m. because that's a real person running a real service and who isn't operating a call center behind the scenes. For example, here we've got Nate's appliance repair. uh Avery appliance services, Apollo appliance

6:46repair, that kind of thing. Now, this next part's important because you do not want your test call to cost the business money. We are trying to help them after all. So, when you find a business in the sponsored section, don't call the number that shows up when you click get phone number. Instead, once you found a business you want to test, Google the business by name. Go directly to their website and call the regular phone number listed there. But let me show you what that looks like real quick. If I click into Mr. Appliance Repair of Spokane Valley, for example, and hit get phone number, Google gives me this phone

7:19number here. That is the forwarding number connected to their local services ad. And we can prove it by going to the business's actual website. See here that the phone number listed on their website is completely different. That's because Google uses the number in the ad to track the calls coming through it and obviously to charge them for it. So, if you call that number and stay on the line for more than 20 seconds, your test could become a billable lead for that business, and we definitely don't want to do that. So, by doing it this way and calling the number on their website, you're testing how quickly they answer

7:50the phone without generating a paid lead through their Google app. So, call that then start a timer and see what happens. If the phone keeps ringing past 20 seconds, write down how long it rang. And if it goes to voicemail before 20 seconds, don't ignore that business either. You see, most people don't leave voicemails anymore. They just hang up and move on. And even if they do leave a voicemail, Google can already count that as a valid lead. So, what you're really looking for is simple here. Is a real person answering the phone? If not, write down the day, the time, how long it rang, and whether it went to

8:23voicemail. So, let's say you call one of these shops Thursday at lunch, and it rings for 24 seconds, then goes to voicemail. Well, write down Thursday lunch, 24 seconds. That's pretty much everything you need for the message. And if somebody does pick up before 20 seconds, no problem. Just say, "Sorry, wrong number." and hang up. Or if making calls really freaks you out, you can honestly just hang up without saying anything. But that's the worst case scenario here. Anyway, do this for 10 businesses. It's about 20 seconds a call plus the time it takes to actually dial the phone. So, you can do it on a lunch

8:52break. So, that's step one. You found a business that's missing calls. But before you reach out to them with the solution, it helps to know roughly just how much money one of those missed calls could be costing them. So, for that, we need to know about how much they're paying Google for each lead. So, what

9:07does one of these leads actually cost? Well, one large study found that the average home services lead from Google local services ads costs about $53. And that number comes from Searchlight Digital that analyzed almost $7 million in local services ad spending across $888 home service contractors. Basically, a lot of people and a lot of

9:26money. Now, $53 per lead is an average. Some are obviously going to be higher and some are going to be lower. So, a business's real CPL or cost per lead depends on their industry and their city. Let's say our appliance repair guy in Spokane, though, pays a bit under that average. Let's say 35 bucks per lead. And let's say he misses seven

9:44calls a week that ring past 20 seconds. Well, that's roughly $245 a week in leads that he's paying for but never answering, which works out to around a,000 bucks a month. And that's just the Google bill. It doesn't count the jobs themselves that he's missing out on because a lot of those callers are going to do exactly what I did with my air conditioner. Whoever answers first gets the job. So, charging a business like this $397 a month to make sure that every one of those calls gets answered, it's a pretty easy yes. I mean, he's already paying for the lead. The AI receptionist just makes sure that the

10:16call gets answered, so he's actually got a shot at getting the job. Okay, next step, send. Here's where you reach out. Now, the nice thing here is that you can do the entire thing in writing. Like I've already said, there's no sales calls and there's no cold calls either. Email is probably the easiest place to start, but if you can't find an email for the business, you can also use a Facebook or an Instagram DM or just a contact form on their website. For the subject line, keep it simple. Just quick question, all lowercase. And if you can find the business owner's first name, that's even better. So then it would be

10:45something like, "Hey Mike, quick question." Then here's the exact message to send word for word. You might want to screenshot this one or write it down. Hi, Mike. I gave your shop a call on Thursday around lunch. It rang about 24 seconds and went to voicemail. Don't worry, I dialed the number on your website, not your Google ad, so you weren't charged for it. But as of October 1st, 2026, Google bills local services ads for missed calls over 20 seconds during your business hours, whether you get the job or not. I put together a short video showing an easy way to make sure every call gets

11:16answered without hiring anybody. Would it be all right if I sent it over? Now, obviously swap in whatever actually happened, the real day, the real seconds that the phone rang for, that kind of thing. And obviously, obviously, only use the name Mike if their name is actually Mike. Everything else stays the same. Tell them what you noticed. Tell them why it matters. And include that

11:34free, no pressure offer to show them. That's it. No pitch, no pressure, no selling of any kind here. Then, when they say, "Sure, send it over." And some will, you send a quick two-minute screen recording video using a free software like Loom with just three things in it. First, you just tell them what happened straight from your notes, which in this case would be, "I called Thursday at lunch. It rang 24 seconds and it went to voicemail." Second, you walk him through the Google announcement showing the 20 second rule. And I'll just put that up on the screen now so you can just screenshot it. And third, you show the

12:04AI receptionist actually answering a call. And it's that last part here where things really click because now they can actually see the problem getting solved in real time. And when he asks, "How much does it cost?" Here's exactly what you send back. Again, just like before, feel free to write this down or screenshot this one, too. Because this is the message that turns him into a client. So, here's what you say. It's $3.97 a month. That covers the setup, the AI, answering every call during hours and after hours, and booking the jobs onto your calendar. You don't need to send me anything. I'll pull your hours and services straight from your

12:34website. If you want to go ahead, here's the payment link, and I can have it up and running in the next 72 hours. Once they say yes and pay through the link, you're on to step three, install. And this is where you actually set up the AI receptionist for their business. And I do all of this inside a piece of software called Highle, which is the same software I use to run my entire oneperson agency. So, let me show you what the setup actually looks like. Now, like I mentioned briefly before, the AI receptionist is really just a fancy name for a piece of software that

13:02automatically answers the phone with a natural sounding voice, has a real conversation with the customer, answers common questions, takes down their name and number and what they need help with, and it then books the appointment into the calendar. So, here's what the setup page looks like. You give it a name, pick a voice, and set the business's hours. Then instead of typing in all of their services manually, like what they fix and what they charge, you can just paste in the address of their website and it reads all of that off of the website itself. Then you give it a phone number. Finally, you connect it to their

13:34calendar or you can create a new calendar so it can book appointments automatically. Call it yourself once to make sure it does what you told it to. And well, that's the whole setup. And you don't even have to build this AI receptionist from scratch. I'll just give you mine. And then you can copy and paste it into your client's account, put in their website details, connect the calendar, and you're done. And I'll show

13:51you how to get that in just a minute. But first, here's what the customer hears when they call. There's no hold music, no voicemail, no 20 seconds of nothing, it answers, it asks what's wrong, it gets the address, it books the time, and the whole thing that was going to be a missed call and a bill from Google is now a job booked on their calendar. And of course, if you don't like the AI voice that I picked, you can change it. There's a ton of different options available, but between you and me, I might just leave it as is, as this one seems to convert really well. As

14:16great as all of this is, though, here's the part that makes this such an easy yes for the business owner. You're not taking anybody's job. If he wants to keep answering the phone himself, the AI can just pick up first and then pass the call straight to him. Same goes for his team if he has one. The only thing that matters here is that it picks up every time, so the call never gets missed. And you can take care of almost everything from your end. The only thing he has to do is forward his existing phone number to the new highle number that you set up

14:43for the AI receptionist. That's usually just a quick call forwarding setting through his phone carrier. Just one code to turn it on, something like star 72, and then one code to turn it off if he ever wants to turn it off, something like star 73. But a quick Google search here is going to tell you the most up-to-date codes for pretty much all the major carriers, whether Verizon or AT&T or T-Mobile or whatever. His existing phone number doesn't change, so he doesn't need to update his website or his Google listing or his business cards or anything else. And his customers can keep calling the exact same number they

15:14always have. The call just gets rooted into High Level where the AI receptionist answers it. And once it's running, there's very little for you to do each month. Just check the call log, skim a few transcripts, and fix anything the AI got wrong. That's it. Now, real quick here. If you want the exact AI receptionist I just showed you, here's the fastest way to get it. I've got a link in the description below this video where you can grab an extended 30-day free trial of HighLevel. And when you start through my link, you'll also unlock my complete agency OS, which has over $15,000 in pre-built funnels and

15:44follow-up automations and client outreach scripts and sales scripts and a 30-day highle quick start, all installed into your account with just one click. There's private community access as well and a whole lot more and the links in the description below. Now, the nice thing is that the numbers here are pretty simple. Everything I've shown you runs inside High Leo, and the plan I'd recommend is the 297 a month unlimited plan, which gives you unlimited client accounts. That means your very first

16:07client covers your entire software cost. And every client after that is nearly pure profit. Texts, calls, and AI usage add small costs as you grow. So, you build those into your price. And you don't have to build any of this from scratch. I've already built the entire AI receptionist for you, and it's inside my agency OS. You just copy it into your client's account, customize it for their business, connect their phone and calendar, and you're done. Quick tip for when you're signing up for your free trial, and this is just me looking out for you, you're going to see a few different plan options, and I just go

16:36with the 297 unlimited plan, as that's the one that gives you unlimited client accounts, which is everything you need to run everything that I've been showing you today. You really don't need the 497 plan. The 297 plan is more than enough, and I'd hate to see you paying for stuff you're not going to use. And just so it's clear, you get full access to my agency OS and all of the bonuses no matter which plan you pick. So there's no wrong answer here. Plus, it's a free trial anyway, and you can always upgrade or downgrade later. So don't overthink this one. Now, before you go do this,

17:03I've got three warnings that I need to share with you. Warning number one, only say what actually happened when you call them. If it rang 12 seconds, say 12. If voicemail picked up, say voicemail. If a real person answered and you hung up, well, that business doesn't get a message at all. Congratulations, they passed. The reason this message works so well is because every word of it is true and the owner can feel that. The second that you round 12 seconds up to 24 because it sounds better. You're not a guy that noticed something anymore, you're spam and he's going to know

17:31because probably has his own call log. Warning number two, never tell him this makes the Google charges go away. An answered call was already a paid lead. What the AI receptionist does is make sure that when he pays for a call, somebody actually answers it. though he's got a shot at a job instead of

17:47paying for a voicemail that nobody left. And warning number three, and this one's the biggest, don't tell him the AI receptionist is live until you've watched it work. Call the AI yourself and have a real conversation with it. Ask it weird questions. Try to stump it. Be a mildly difficult customer. Then look at the calendar and make sure the appointment actually landed. Then have him forward his number and call his number, not the highle one, and hear the AI pick up. Then a month after you turn it on, take a screenshot of his call log that shows every call answered and the appointments it booked. Obviously,

18:18you're going to want to blur out the sensitive information like customer names and phone numbers. But this screenshot then becomes the proof that you show the next business and the next one after that. So, here's exactly what I'd do right now. Grab the extended 30-day free trial of High Level through the link in the description below. So, the AI receptionist is already sitting in your account when you go make your 10 calls. Then go make those 10 calls. But here's the thing. Everything I showed you today is just one piece of how a oneperson agency actually works. If you want the full picture, how to pick your

18:47niche, how to price your services, and how to put every system together, I put together a complete free master class that I've got linked up right here that's going to walk you through the entire thing step by step. So, feel free to tap or click that now. I'll see you in there in just a second.