Goodbye Google, Hello AI: How Self-Storage Businesses Need to Adapt in 2025

UL: Please tell us a little bit about yourself and your company.

My name is Henry Purchase. I'm from the UK in Birmingham, two hours north of London. If you've ever watched Peaky Blinders, you might recognize my accent a little bit.

And I'm the founder of Rough Water Media. We do self-storage marketing for self-storage businesses all across the world. Everything from self-storage SEO, helping your self-storage business rank high up on Google, AI search engines like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI mode, all the way to self-storage websites, and self-storage paid advertising. But we specialize in self-storage SEO.

A lot of people ask me how I got into self-storage. Essentially, three years ago, I started doing SEO for Storeganize, one of the world's leading self-storage software providers. We ranked them in position 1 globally for self-storage business, software, marketing, and the list goes on. As a result, I began working with a number of their clients. I've since expanded to self-storage businesses from Australia and Singapore, all the way across to the US and UK.

UL: How have you seen AI adoption evolve in your industry over the past few years?

I would say there are two sides: there's using AI and then there's interacting with AI. Internally, and in some of the self-storage businesses we work with, AI is used to increase efficiency and streamline workflows. Or to put it crudely: become, do better, faster, but for cheaper before you could only do two of those things, whereas now with AI, it can do all three of them.

Integrating AI is primarily important for self-storage businesses and our customers, because more and more consumers are going through AI search engines in order to find self-storage options near them. An example, I don't really use Google anymore. I primarily use ChatGPT for recommendations. I recently bought five books from Amazon. I asked AI: “Based on what you know about me, recommend me a list of books to buy.”, and it gave me the links directly to Amazon. Even though that's very different from self-storage, we're seeing more and more consumers search for self-storage, and self-storage businesses getting found through AI search engines. That's probably the biggest change that I've seen over the past couple of years.

UL: Why would you say now is the right time for businesses to focus on AI, especially if we consider areas like marketing, customer experience, operations, and reporting?

There's a thing called Moore's law. It predicts the rate of improvement of computers and says that the number of transistors on a microchip will double every 2 years. With AI, it's not like that. It's more of a vertical. Every day, these AI tools are getting better.

Things that weren't possible even a year ago are now possible. For example, we now have AI agents, or how good voice is becoming, particularly for self-storage call centers. AI has improved so much, and it's so cost-effective compared to the human equivalent.

The second thing is, if you look at the interest in ChatGPT over time, right now, it's comparable to Google in 2005. If you're a self-storage business, it’s crucial that you get found by people looking for self-storage. If the trend continues, engines like ChatGPT will overcome Google. Already, Google’s top result spot is the AI overview. So it's a golden opportunity in terms of how early it is in the cycle to put yourself in front of the competitors now because things are moving so fast. ChatGPT is equivalent to 2005 now, but it's not going to take 20 years for it to mature as Google has in that time.

UL: What are the most impactful ways that you see AI reshaping digital marketing strategies?

I would just loop back around to discovery. How consumers are finding self-storage is changing. Google, Google Maps, and Google business profiles – all of these are still the dominant factors for self-storage businesses to fill up their facilities. But more and more things are moving to AI search engines, which currently still use Google business profiles. That's probably the biggest change. The customer discovery and customer journey processes are changing.

Self-storage businesses across the world are going to see less traffic to their websites, but if they focus on the right things, they're going to see higher conversion rates. The amount of conversions and move-ins should stay the same or go up. The reason is, let's go back to my Amazon example earlier: To get those five book recommendations, I didn't have to go on Amazon, search through tons of different titles, or go through different pages. It was five clicks on the books, added them to my basket, and bought. And that's what you're going to see in self-storage.

The discovery is going to happen on AI search engines. Traditionally, what would happen for self-storage is, someone would type in “self-storage near me”, they'd click on the top five options, and they'd look at which is the cheapest, which is the most secure. Now they will speak to AI, and AI is just going to recommend the best one. They will go straight to that website and book. , which means there's going to be fewer clicks total to different websites. But when you get a click, when you get a visitor, in theory, it should be higher intent. So we need to look less at traffic and more at visibility in these search engines and how that visibility leads to move-ins.

UL: How can AI create operational efficiencies, and do you have a tool that you think is the best or prefer using?

What we use, and there's probably better combinations out there, is just Zapier and OpenAI's API. Take, for example, the Storeganize API, and we'll use Zapier to connect with

that. Say our goal is move-ins. We can take that information, and we can create personalized messages with ChatGPT, for example, to personalize the discovery experience and messages, to increase the rate of conversions.

UL: Shifting to customer experience, can you list some potential benefits, but then also risks or pitfalls of using AI specifically in the area of CX?

If you implement it, you're going to get faster, better, and cheaper. You’re getting something that is 24/7. It can be more personalized, and you can have it for cheaper compared to hiring people to do the same job.

But, I think AI stinks when it's obvious it's AI. I wrote a LinkedIn post about this recently: About cases when it's so obvious when people write their emails with AI, because you see em-dashes. I even had it the other day when a client of mine kept in like the pre-line from ChatGPT where it said, “Sure, here's an email that's more polite”. That's funny, but we can’t do that to our customers. If it feels fake, forced, and like AI, that's a massive turn-off to customers.

AI tools are great, and we need to use them, but we need to make sure that they're still authentic. People want to work with people. The human side of business is still so important. You've got to do your best to make sure that remains.

UL: How is AI impacting data analysis and reporting in companies? And also considering that AI tends to sometimes hallucinate, what can you do to make sure that those insights that you're getting are trustworthy?

This is a good point. I think it links back to what I said about people blindly using AI. It's a tool that's going to make things faster, and it can do things that you would have had to have hired a data analyst to do before. But you still have to go through the results with a fine-tooth comb, just as if you'd have hired a data analyst to do it. So, don't just use it blindly and look at the output. Ask follow-up questions, test the assumptions, and recheck them.

I've had it recently where ChatGPT said it was creating a report for me, and it said, “Come back in five minutes and I will have made the report.” I came back in five minutes, no report. And every time I asked it, it said it was making it, it was making it, but it was actually just lying. It doesn't have the ability to magically create reports in the background, maybe now in agent mode, but then it didn't.

It's important to always test the assumptions and go through it with a fine-tooth comb as if an analyst that you'd paid had done it. Don't just assume it's right, because it's a computer.

UL: Which area of business will AI impact the most in the next one to three years, in your opinion?

I'm slightly biased because of the marketing side, but I believe it's just the customer journey and customer discovery process across everything, not just self-storage. I think the way that people buy is going to change massively. There's going to be fewer people going to websites, but I think there's going to be more purchase events, because of personalized recommendations. Hopefully, AI will drive down the cost of goods and services. I think people will buy more in total. That's what I feel is going to be the biggest change.

UL: If you could go back a year ago, would there be something that you would do differently, for example, implement a different tool, implement something sooner, change something about your strategy, or your approach?

I would have focused on creating more specific agents and workflows using AI in self-storage, because I think it's always harder and more overwhelming for a business when they decide to go from no AI to trying to use AI all over the place. It doesn't work like that.

It has to be an iterative approach. You have to buy in your team members, and you have to slowly build up. I would say, just start using AI as soon as possible, but the smaller you start with, the easier it becomes to build it up to something bigger in the future.