APRO’s recent webinar, Beyond Keywords: How AI is Reshaping Consumer Behavior and the Future of SEO, brought together rent-to-own (RTO) professionals to unpack one urgent question: In an AI-first world, how do customers actually find you? APRO member Wow Brands CEO Ryan Krass walked attendees through the rapid evolution of online discovery – and what it means for rent-to-own dealers whose customers now start nearly every buying journey on their phones.
The session reframed SEO not as a checklist of keywords, but as a broader “discovery game” where algorithms – not businesses – decide what’s important. Krass argued that the rules have changed faster in the last two years than in the previous decade, and that the RTO operators who adapt now will own local visibility, trust, and growth in the years ahead.
How AI is Changing RTO Discovery
Krass traced how the path to purchase has shifted from driving to a store to starting almost every decision online. Cell phone adoption and e-commerce growth laid the groundwork, but COVID rapidly accelerated the change. Today, 81% of retail shoppers research online before they buy, 74% have already researched the store and product before walking in, and 60% of all shopping experiences begin online. For home goods – the space where RTO competes – a much larger share of purchases now happens digitally, even when the final transaction is in-store.
The Rise of Zero-Click Search
At the same time, AI and search platforms have quietly changed the rules. Zero-click search and AI overviews mean that up to 60% of Google searches end without a click. When an AI summary appears, that number jumps even higher. Large language models like ChatGPT, Gemini, and others answer questions directly, often without sending users to a dealer’s website. As Krass put it, your website is no longer the destination – it’s just one of many data sources feeding the AI engines that decide what answer to show.
For RTO operators, this shift makes AI-first discovery inseparable from digital visibility. If AI tools can’t clearly understand who you are, what you rent, and where you operate, you simply won’t appear as an option when a local customer asks, “Where can I rent a TV today?”
The Three Fundamentals for AI-First Discovery
Krass outlined three foundational steps. First, your site must be technically crawlable and readable to bots: clean URLs, sitemaps, robots.txt, structured data, and accurate business details like hours, prices, and service areas. If Google and AI tools can’t parse your content, you effectively don’t exist online.
Second, you must clearly explain your business, your customers, and your value – in writing. If you don’t publish information about what you rent, who you serve, and why customers choose you, AI has nothing reliable to work with.
Third, you need to audit and monitor what search engines “think” about you using tools like Google Search Console and performance reports, especially on mobile where the majority of RTO traffic lives.
Owning Local Visibility
Local visibility is where independent dealers can win. Krass emphasized fully built-out Google Business Profiles for each store, accurate categories that lean into “rental” language, and strong review volume as the low-hanging fruit. Each location should have its own robust city page under a master corporate site – not a tangle of separate domains that compete against each other. Reviews, he noted, are one of the clearest trust signals for both AI models and human shoppers, and dealers should be intentional about requesting them and responding thoughtfully.
Creating Content That AI Can Understand
Usefulness and proof are the new differentiators in an AI-first discovery landscape. Instead of chasing keywords, Krass urged dealers to answer the real questions customers ask every day: How does rent-to-own work? Can I get same-day delivery? What happens if something breaks? Short FAQ content, simple videos, and clear explanations across your website, Google profile, and social channels all help AI tools recognize your business as a relevant, trustworthy answer.
Visual content now plays a bigger role as well. Photos of storefronts, staff, and inventory – along with authentic short-form videos – serve as concrete evidence that a store is real, local, and active. As platforms increasingly surface video in search results, RTO dealers who regularly show their people, products, and community presence will stand out in AI-driven discovery.
Ultimately, Krass framed discovery as a matter of “cognitive gravity” – people and platforms both follow the path of least resistance. The brands that remove friction, tell a clear story, and supply structured, trustworthy data to AI will become the default answers in their markets.
Watch the Full Webinar
To see the full walkthrough of these concepts, examples, and practical next steps for your stores, watch the full APRO webinar replay – proudly produced and presented by the Association of Progressive Rental Organizations.
