How an Austin Plumber Cut Paid Ads to Zero and Set All Time Lead Records

The Short Version

Ashley Stroud, co-owner and COO of Plumbing Outfitters in Austin, Texas, had spent six years on SEO with little to show for it. In October 2025 she hired CI Web Group. We tuned her Google Business Profiles, published daily AI-search content, fixed hundreds of technical site issues, then rebuilt her website. Within two months of launch she set three all-time inbound lead records.

• Unique organic leads: 107, up from 79 (+35%)
• Organic clicks: 709, up from 544 (+30%)
• Average Google ranking: 27th to 21st
• Pay-per-click budget: cut to zero in January 2026

SEO? Yeah, We Tried That.

When I first met Ashley Stroud in September 2025, she had almost no faith left in Google's complicated, never-transparent algorithm or the crazy landscape that drives your online presence. Six years of it. Big budgets. Nothing to show.

Her own words on that first call: "We kind of threw everything out of SEO. We're sick of it. Nothing's working. It's not giving the return we need."

Later she told us we would be shocked at how much she had spent on SEO over the years. Pay-per-click hadn't earned her trust either. She had gone a year getting less than two times back on it at one point. When we met, she was spending several thousand dollars a month on Google Business Profile work (her own math, four profiles), plus several thousand more on pay-per-click she was already trying to wind down. The only thing she really trusted was organic branding, the slow, hard, long-term game.

She was in it to win it, though. She said that on our onboarding call in October. "I'm sick of having a losing strategy." And she meant it.

Drive Traffic First: The First Four Months

So we didn't start with the shiny stuff. The plan was simple, in Jennifer Bagley's words that Ashley repeated back to us: drive traffic first, then tackle the website next. (Jennifer is the CEO of CI Web Group.)

We put AI Local on her Google Business Profiles. That is our way of tuning up those profiles so Plumbing Outfitters shows up when someone nearby searches, and so AI tools can answer questions about her services. We started daily blogging built for answer engines. Plain English: we write content so tools like ChatGPT and Google's AI Overviews cite her business as the answer. And we ran hundreds of technical fixes on her existing site, quietly, in the background.

She asked for biweekly meetings at first, until she had confidence this was actually working. Fair enough. She had been burned before. That January, she killed the PPC budget entirely.

Four Months In: The Numbers Start Stacking

By February, she was posting in Slack that she was actually seeing results. And I told her straight up on one of our calls: I was showing her account off to other clients. "New client, with us since October, and look at this. One of these solutions, we are running for her, the impressions and the clicks stacking up at the same rate." Other clients were blown away by her numbers.

Then Came the Website

In April 2026 she approved the rebuild on Hydra, our website platform. The new site went live on July 29. Her texts came in as she saw it.

When she got to the story page: "The 'our story Page' just gave me all the feels."

And: "you really did hit a home run."

Three Records in Two Months

She kept her edge, though. Even after the results kept coming, she pressed us on the numbers the whole way. On our August call I walked her through the call tracking, and she wanted to make sure she understood exactly what counted as a lead from the services we were offering. She wanted a clear line between what we were generating and what we weren't. Very fair.

On September 23, 2026, she told me what happened after launch. In her words: "The second week after we launched Hydra, we hit an all-time inbound lead record." Then: "That was cool to see, but then two weeks later, we set a new record for inbound phone leads."

My report that day compared four weeks of data from late August through September with the four weeks before:

Metric	Before	After	Change
Unique organic leads	79	107	+35%
Organic clicks	544	709	+30%
Average Google ranking	27th	21st	Up 6 spots

Search data covers August 24 to September 20, 2026; leads cover August 25 to September 21, deduplicated. Our lead count comes from call tracking, so it counts organic calls, not booked jobs. Worth saying plainly.

It was a tag team effort. I was doing the Hydra work on my side. Our project manager Mary Jo did the work that moved the rankings. And at the same time, Ashley knew she needed to refocus on her Google Business Profile reviews because they had fallen off dramatically. On that same call she told me the profiles had "massively fell off a cliff." She figured the review diligence was the likely culprit, and she dove in and was pulling 10 to 20 reviews a week after that.

The records happened, and the profiles dipped, and she fixed the reviews, all in the same stretch. Marketing is rarely one thing. Anybody who tells you otherwise is selling something.

Then it happened again. On Saturday, September 26, Ashley told me they had set another record for inbound phone calls that week. Our call tracking points the same way: 24 calls came through her website the week of September 21, up from 21 the week before, and four of them came from people who found her through ChatGPT.

The Part I Love Most: A Master Plumber Building AI Tools

One thing I forgot to mention: Ashley is a licensed Texas master plumber. Keep that in mind for this next part.

I invited Ashley to a training Jennifer Bagley held on building with Grokbot, a custom AI assistant built on xAI's Grok. She went, then spent 12 hours that Saturday building her first bot. To give you a little backstory, back in July, she told me, "Right now, I only use ChatGPT. I have not graduated past ChatGPT."

Her first project was a consolidated marketing scorecard pulling data from GA4, Google Business Profile, ServiceTitan, Hatch, Cheers, and Yelp into one place. The one piece that still had to be pulled in by hand was her lead data from WhatConverts. Her message to the team said it all: "I've built out my first GROK bot. Super impressed with it thus far! Worked on it about 12 hours on Saturday. Major rabbit hole."

The next day she was back in Slack laughing that she had already managed to break it. "I have a real knack for forcing Bots to turn off," she wrote. "My new Grokbot only survived three days of usage." That is what learning looks like. Nobody's first version survives.

Then on our September 23 call she told me about Muse, Meta's new personal AI agent. I had pointed her toward it and told her linking her Facebook account would skip the waitlist. She got it and told me, "I got Muse over the weekend, so I'm feeling 500 times more productive than I normally do." She connected it to her Gmail and let it manage her inbox. It watches her travel itineraries, her flights and hotels, for trips she is planning through next year. "Pretty much everything I do, I'm wondering, can Muse do this?" she said. She named it Mabel. "Mabel is pretty awesome."

Where This Goes

So why am I telling you this story?

Because the ground is shifting under all of us. The skepticism about AI from 2020 and 2021 should be gone from every business owner's mindset. AI search has changed how customers find plumbers and, frankly, any business. Most are still sitting on their hands, waiting to see what happens. The big corporate marketing agencies and media conglomerates move slow, like they always do.

We are choosing a different route. We are figuring it out in the open, next to our clients, using real data, real research, and Jennifer's vision for where this is all going. Sometimes that means rebuilding a website on a platform most people haven't heard of yet. Sometimes it means telling a client exactly what went wrong with her Google profiles instead of hiding it. Sometimes it means watching a client break her first bot in three days and build a better one.

Ashley came to us having written off Google's algorithm and pretty much every online lead driver. She figured the only way to win was the long, hard game of branding. Today she sets all-time lead records, builds her own AI scorecards on Saturdays, and tells me we hit a home run with her website.

The tools will keep changing. That is guaranteed. The marketing companies, agencies, independent social media planners, whoever it is that's helping you in this ever-changing landscape: one thing you need to remember is that the ones who will win are the ones willing to learn in front of their clients instead of behind closed doors. That is the bet we are making here at CI Web Group. Ashley's story is what it looks like when it pays off.

Frequently Asked Questions

Quotes are lightly edited for readability and shared with Ashley Stroud's permission. Lead figures come from call tracking and count organic calls, not booked jobs.