We exit markets
when the technology shifts.
We are the agency that exits markets when the technology shifts. Most digital marketing agencies grow by adding services. CI Web Group has grown by removing them — because it is not about building a website or doing digital marketing anymore. We saw it coming. We did not wait to react.
We exited the work while clients were still paying for it.
We exited paid search and social media management in 2024, stopped building new WordPress sites in 2024 and new Webflow sites in 2026 — all while our trades clients were still paying us to do the work. We did it because the work was no longer the work that would carry them through what is coming next. What carries them through is what we still do, for 1,000+ active trades clients across HVAC, plumbing, electrical, roofing, and garage doors. We spent four years building it before anyone else did.
- Paid search advertising — exited 2024
- Social media management — exited 2024
- New WordPress websites — stopped 2024
- New Webflow sites — stopped 2026
- The intelligence layer — the central engine underneath every client
- AI-first sites on Hydra OS, our proprietary platform
- Marketing & strategy agents (arriving Q3 2026) that execute the work, not just advise
- AI search, answer-engine, and generative-engine visibility — the new stack
It is not about building a website anymore.
That sentence is the substantive strategic claim CI Web Group is operating on in 2026, and it is the claim every trades contractor needs to understand before deciding whether to work with us. Websites are now infrastructure, not differentiation. Every contractor has one. The contractors who win the next decade won't win because their website is better — they'll win because the intelligence layer underneath their business is more sophisticated than their competitor's.
The intelligence layer is what we have spent the last four years building. The intelligence layer is what we build now.
The architecture underneath everything.
CI Web Group operates a central intelligence engine purpose-built for trades businesses — the foundation underneath every client we serve and every product in our suite. It integrates retrieval-augmented generation, cache-augmented generation, a proprietary data lake holding twenty years of trades operational data, and the data science layer that turns that data into predictive and aggregate analysis.
The data lake
Twenty years of operational data across roughly 200,000 trades businesses we've worked with, marketed for, and learned from. Service-area demand curves. Seasonal demand modeling. Call-tracking-to-booked-job conversion patterns. Channel-by-channel acquisition economics. Lifetime-value patterns by size, vertical, and geography. The proprietary asset that makes everything downstream actually work — and no other trades-industry agency has two decades of data at this resolution.
RAG — retrieval-augmented generation
How the engine surfaces the right answer from the right source at the right moment. Ask it how your booking rate trends in week three versus week one and RAG retrieves your data and generates the operational answer. When a customer asks an AI search engine who the best HVAC company in Tulsa is, RAG retrieves the structured brand intelligence Hydra V2 exposes — and the AI surfaces you cleanly.
CAG — cache-augmented generation
The newer architecture that takes RAG to the next layer. CAG pre-loads the model's context with your full operational knowledge base, eliminating the retrieval round-trip and making responses to operator and customer queries dramatically faster and more accurate. We've operated on CAG since the architecture became viable. We're running it for clients today.
Data science & predictive analysis
How the engine moves from descriptive to predictive. We model what's going to happen in your service area three weeks, three months, and six months out — seasonal demand inflections, weather-driven spikes, competitive pressure shifts, channel saturation. The predictions are operational: contractors plan crew capacity, inventory, and spend off them.
Aggregate analysis
The layer that makes individual-contractor work worth more than any single contractor's data supports. Across 1,000+ active clients in 48 states and Canada with two decades of history behind them, aggregate analysis produces insight no one operator could generate alone. When we tell an HVAC contractor in Memphis what's about to happen in their market, it's based on what's already happening in comparable markets we have data on.
The intelligence layer is what we sell. The website is just the surface it renders through. The marketing is just the channel it operates inside.
Agents that don't just advise — they do the work.
These are marketing and strategy agents — consultants and marketing experts that actually execute. They don't touch your CRM or your financial data. They work inside Hydra and our Central Intelligence engine: Synapse (our data lake), Google Search Console, and Google Analytics — the data that actually drives marketing decisions.
And they can change just about anything on your website. Add blog posts and pages. Update metadata and SEO. Generate featured images. Update promotions. Write press releases. Give real strategic advice. Need a landing page? Just ask. Want a new city page? Done. No more waiting on a helpdesk queue or hiring an internal marketing team — you ask, and the work gets done.
Wolverine
Hunts the signal in the noise — market data, customer behavior, and performance trends — and turns it into the insight that drives every decision.
Groot
Grows your visibility across search, answer engines, and generative engines — so you're found and cited in Google, ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini.
Goodspeed
Keeps the platform fast, hardened, and un-hackable — monitoring, patching, and defending your site around the clock.
Sarge
Maps the plan — priorities, sequencing, and the next move — so every action the agents take serves the bigger objective.
Buttercup
Handles the human side — HR, compliance, and people — keeping the team and your account running clean, fair, and cared-for.
Neo
Crafts fast, on-brand, conversion-built experiences — where aesthetics meet performance on every page we ship.
Vader
Watches your rivals — their rankings, content, and moves — so you're always a step ahead in your market.
Yoda
Knows your business, your market, and your goals — the guide that keeps everything we do grounded in what you actually need.
The agent suite becomes available to CI Web Group clients in Q3 2026. Until then, the same operators and the intelligence layer behind them are already doing this work by hand — every day.
We restructured the whole company — twice — before the industry moved.
We made the call in December 2022, within weeks of ChatGPT's launch, that the technology layer underneath digital marketing had fundamentally changed. We have been operating on the new layer for four years while most agencies are still figuring out whether to begin.
The AI-first rebuild
Within weeks of ChatGPT's launch, we called that the technology layer under digital marketing had fundamentally changed — and that the agency had to be rebuilt to operate on the new layer. We didn't pilot AI on the side. We restructured the entire company within weeks, exited the generalist services AI made commodity, and invested everything into AI-first platform development: Hydra OS as the foundation, Cortex AI as the visibility platform, and the marketing-agent layer now arriving for clients in 2026.
Hydra V2
We upgraded the platform for the AI-search, answer-engine, and generative-engine visibility stack that replaced traditional SEO, and rebuilt the brand intelligence layer to give every client site 350+ machine-readable data points so AI retrievers surface them cleanly — offered at no cost to every existing client before the August 31, 2026 deadline.
When the trades industry needs AI direction, they call us.
We work alongside the major manufacturers and distributors that shape the trades industry — building and operating digital infrastructure for some of the largest national HVAC, plumbing, electrical, and roofing brands, and running strategy with the OEM teams behind dealer programs that reach tens of thousands of contractors. We operate inside the buying groups, dealer networks, and industry coalitions that organize the trades — with a seat at the table we spent twenty years earning.
Jennifer Bagley is the operator the conference circuit invites to lead the AI conversation — keynoting at HARDI, the most consequential gathering in HVAC distribution, and leading sessions for manufacturer dealer events, distributor summits, and alliance conferences. Most AI sessions in 2026 are still introducing what AI is. Ours are about what operators need to do next — the infrastructure, agent suites, and visibility stack they should be running by year-end.
We built the place the trades learns AI.
JustStartAI is the community we co-founded for trades contractors who want to learn AI hands-on — from operators, not consultants. Daily AI practice sharing, peer learning, and direct access to the people actually running AI-first trades businesses. The contractor figuring out which tools to use, how to apply them to a service-area business, and what the next twelve months look like needs a room full of operators sharing real practices. We can provide that room because we are the operators.
We are not going anywhere.
CI Web Group was founded in 2006 in Dallas, Texas by Jennifer L. Bagley. We started as a small generalist agency, and in 2015 made the deliberate decision to concentrate the entire company on the trades. We have stayed there since — HVAC, plumbing, electrical, roofing, and garage door contractors are the only people we work with. We turn down clients outside that vertical every week.
We did not arrive at that focus by accident. We have built, marketed, optimized, ranked, and grown trades companies across two decades and roughly 200,000 trades businesses' worth of accumulated industry data. We know what a service-area contractor's seasonal demand curve looks like in Vermont versus Arizona, which call-tracking metrics actually predict booked jobs, and what a $5M HVAC company needs versus a $50M roll-up.
An 8-figure platform — a team of 47, a virtual agency by design.
CI Web Group operates out of Houston, Texas, serving 1,000+ active trades clients across 48 states and Canada. We eliminated our physical office over a decade ago so we could hand-select the best talent regardless of where they live — the best account manager for a Pacific Northwest contractor lives in Oregon; the best AI engineer happens to live in California; the best operations director happens to live in Texas. Every one of them is on our team. None of them would be if we'd built the company around a building.
Our leadership has been here for years. Kathy Marshall — head of customer service and our only equity partner — has been with the company since 2010, sixteen years of relationships with contractors who have stayed across that entire span. Chris Heney, our CTO, runs the technology side and architected the central intelligence engine the rest of the company operates on. And Jennifer Bagley still runs the company — on every strategic decision, on every stage, writing the book on what comes next.
Michael Hicklen
Jennifer Bagley
Jazmin Ramirez
Michael Parker
Clay Howard
Melanie Osio
Chelsea Nodine
Camille Porco
Every product is built for trades contractors. Every one is operational today.
The central intelligence engine
RAG, CAG, data lake, data science, predictive analysis, aggregate analysis — the architectural foundation underneath everything else.
Hydra OS
The AI-first website and brand intelligence infrastructure we build every client site on. Hydra V2 exposes 350+ machine-readable brand intelligence data points so AI search engines surface clients cleanly.
AI Marketing & Strategy Agents
Named marketing and strategy agents that work inside Hydra and our Central Intelligence engine — building pages, content, SEO, featured images, promotions, and press releases on request. No CRM or financial access. Arriving for clients in Q3 2026.
Cortex AI
The AI search, answer-engine, and generative-engine visibility platform that gets contractors found in ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude, and Google AI Overviews.
OnePath.AI
The booking and conversion layer that turns AI visibility into booked jobs.
Pulse AI
Daily AI-generated content that keeps client sites and channels current.
AI Local
The Google Business Profile and local-marketing optimization layer.
JustStartAI
The community of 1,000+ trades contractors learning AI hands-on, co-founded by CI Web Group.
Proprietary platform. Your assets, still yours.
Hydra OS is our proprietary platform — but we've honored the same commitment for 20+ years: you own your work. There are no term contracts, ever. If you ever leave, you take your full Hydra content database and front-end design files with you. The only thing that stays with us is the brain — the AI-first operating system and intelligence that powers it.
Your full content database and your front-end design files — yours to keep, anytime.
Month-to-month with 30-day notice. We earn the relationship every month — for 20+ years running.
The brain — the Hydra OS AI-first operating system and intelligence. The platform is proprietary; your assets are not.
Five things, in the order our clients tell us they matter.
We saw it coming
We rebuilt the company in December 2022 and again with Hydra V2 in 2026 — both restructures made before the rest of the industry recognized the technology layer had shifted. Being first to see it is what produced the intelligence layer we now operate.
We sit at the executive table
Major manufacturers, distributors, and strategic alliance groups bring us into the conversations about where the trades industry is going. We work alongside the leadership of the industry, not under it — and that position is the credential that makes our work for individual contractors more powerful.
We operate at the intelligence layer
Most agencies still operate at the surface — websites, campaigns, content. We operate at the architecture underneath: RAG, CAG, data lake, data science, predictive and aggregate analysis, autonomous agents with access. The intelligence layer is what we sell, and it produces every output at the surface.
We restructure before you have to
When ChatGPT launched, we rebuilt within weeks. When AI search became the visibility layer, we shipped Hydra V2. As the marketing-agent layer became viable, we built it — arriving for clients in Q3 2026, ahead of any other trades agency. We do the work of operating on the leading edge so you can hire us instead of hiring it yourself.
Our team has been here for years
Customer service is led by a former Physician Assistant — equity partner since 2011, employee since 2010. Our CTO and his son build agents alongside the engineering team. Named, public, accountable — small enough that the people who run the company answer to clients directly.
The retention is the proof. It is also the work — Kathy Marshall and her customer-service team have been operating it for sixteen years. We will let our clients tell their own stories: if you want to talk to a CI Web Group client before deciding, ask us. We will introduce you to a contractor in your geography and your size who is running on Hydra OS today.
On the stages and in the rooms shaping the trades.
HARDI keynotes, manufacturer dealer meetings, the Daikin NSM stage, the JustStartAI community, and the team behind it all. See where you'll find us.
Open the gallery
We will tell you honestly whether we are the right fit.
Book a discovery call
Tired of agencies that haven't figured out the AI era? We'll tell you honestly whether we're the right fit. If we're not, we'll tell you that too.
Book a discovery callContact our executive team
Manufacturer, distributor, or alliance group leader looking at AI strategy for your network? We work with the industry's executive layer regularly.
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