Do you feel like you were meant to have a kick-ass career as a hairstylist? Like you got into this industry to make big things happen? Maybe you’re struggling to build a solid base and want some stability. Maybe you know social media is important, but it feels like a waste of time because you weren’t seeing any results. Maybe you’ve already had some amazing success but are craving more. Maybe you’re ready to truly enjoy the freedom and flexibility this industry has to offer. Cutting and coloring skills will only get you so far, but to build a lifelong career as a wealthy stylist, it takes business skills and a serious marketing strategy. When you’re ready to quit just working in your business and start working on it, join us here where we share real success stories from real stylists. I’m Britt Sieva, social media and marketing strategist just for hairstylists, and this is the Thriving Stylist Podcast.
What is up and welcome back to the Thriving Stylist Podcast. I’m your host, Britt Siva, and this is gonna be one of those like really geeky, really techie kind of episodes. And it’s also one of those that I feel like a lot of people are gonna skip over and that’s so great. For those of you who actually listen to it, like that is gonna be your cutting edge advantage. When I talk about the great divide and the ways in which I see the industry shifting in the next three to five years, like it’s not even gonna be a long time, there is gonna be a real shakeup. We have felt the ground moving underneath us as an industry for probably a decade. Things have changed so much so fast in recent years. And I’ll be honest, I know stylists and salon owners are like tired, like tired of internet, tired of social media.
I hate to say this, it’s gonna sound so flippant, like too bad. The world we’re living in is becoming more contingent on digital, not less. What our secret sauce is as an industry is the fact that we are service-based so we’re local small business and we offer a service, not a product. Like that’s huge, huge, huge, huge. Our industry is on the scale of industries most likely to be disrupted by AI. We’re one of the lowest. Like the only thing, I looked at a recent scale. The only thing that ranks any less risky than ours is grounds maintenance. Like it’s grounds maintenance and it’s like personal services. So we’re very fortunate in that regard. That being said, we are blind and ignorant if we don’t think that every person who is business savvy is going to look for ways to optimize the trades. And if we as an existing industry don’t get smart about optimizing our own businesses first, we will lose.
And so it’s really important right now that any stylist, any salon owner, not digitize less but lean in more. And I wanna talk about really tactical, tangible ways to do that as a stylist or salon owner based on the new changes that Google just announced. So Google have its annual IO conference May 19th and 20th, 2026. I’ve never reported on this before because I’ve never felt it was like overly relevant to our industry. This is the year that changes. So IO stands for input output. It’s kind of like how Google shares what they’re up to as a company. Think of it as like a state of the union, okay? And so Google is a search company and the little updates they would give annually were like cool little tips and tricks, but it was nothing really revolutionary. What was announced in 2026 was a game changer.
And I think it’s incredibly important for us as stylists and salon owners to pay attention to the changes that are coming. If you wait and try to adapt to these things three years from now, you’re going to be so far behind. It’s going to be very challenging to catch up. So now is the time to really dive in. I understand that as we talk about things like AI and search engines and social media and online marketing, it can feel really heavy. Like we got into this industry to like create and, and be with people and to do fun things in the salon every day. And this is the side of the industry that we don’t super love as much. It is also the side that is going to set you apart in the next few years. Like this is going to be the great differentiator, like learning and understanding all of this versus ignoring it and hoping it goes away and it’s not going to.
We just announced our Thriver Society X Club Retreat 2027 is coming to Park City, Utah. It is almost 90% sold out and our main focus is AI. That is going to be the keynote speaker is an AI expert. That’s the primary focus of the entire event. We’re doing a whole workshop on it. And those who are going to be onsite with us in Park City are going to be offensively and defensively setting up their businesses as stylists and salon owners against this, you know, futuristic world of AI to make sure that their businesses are set to grow fast. One of the predictions that I’ve been making is I do think that business people and investors are going to invest more in trades. Our industry is a trade. It doesn’t mean they’re going to invest in your business. It means they’re going to build a competitive business that’s going to work against yours.
And the only way that we can keep the upper hand advantage is by playing the game better. And some of these updates that Google just shared are important to understand now so you can stay competitive and continue to play the game better. So one of the things that Google Change recently was the way that Google Business reviews are managed and like how they’re filtered out and all that kind of stuff. I did a whole episode on that. It was episode 439 and the title was Google just changed the rules on reviews. It came out May 25th, 2026. If you want to talk about Google reviews specifically, go back and find that one. Funny enough, I just want to address there was a comment made on my podcast page on Apple where somebody said, you know, “I hear what you’re saying, Britt. Some of my … ” Actually, let me read it.
Let me read it so I’m not doing a butchered quote here. This person said, “I just listened to the new changes on Google Podcast. I have over 30 reviews and I never asked for any of them, not one. They’re all organic and unsolicited. And still, Google has filtered several out. There is no winning with technology. It feels like a game I’m not interested in playing. Disagree. There is winning in technology. I’ve never seen this person’s Google. I’m going to guess they do not know how to use the tool properly. When I see comments like this and stylists or salons saying like, ” My reviews are being filtered, it’s not fair. “I’m like, ” How do you feel about Instagram? Like, how do you feel about the fact that when you make a post, over 90% of your followers are never gonna see it, it’s never gonna make their feed.
“That every single social platform has an algorithm. They’re all unfair. I totally understand that. When you look at people who use any social media platform, including a review site properly, they’ve learned how to use it. So my question to this person is, how often are you logging into Google? How are you nurturing it? Do you know how to nurture Google reviews? Do you know what to do to make reviews stick? It has nothing to do with paying. You don’t have to pay to make reviews stick. In fact, paying accounts are having reviews filtered to. It has nothing to do with it. Do you know why a review would be filtered versus not? Do you know what the people who are leaving reviews can do to prevent the filtering? My guess is no. And so the reality is we just don’t know how the tool and the technology works and that’s totally okay.
That’s why programs like Thriver Society exist is when you go in and you coach with me and my team, we teach you how all the platforms work. But until you know how the platforms work, yeah, it does feel like technology is winning and I totally get it. So if anybody feels like reviews aren’t worth it because it’s too hard, everything I’m about to share is gonna change that. So learn to love them. They’re very important. So there’s two big updates I wanna talk about. The first being that Google announced it will now be connecting Google Business Profile to social media search in the feature called Social Media Updates Carousel. This is really cool. So now on Google Maps, it’s just rolling out. So I looked and I don’t have this feature yet. It’s gonna start rolling out. What it’s going to do is if somebody is looking you up on, let’s say Google Maps or they’re checking out your Google Business profile, formally Google My Business.
So when I say Google Business Profile, it’s like your reviews and your online Google listing, okay? When they go there, there’s now this section that they can scroll through that is a carousel of your recent social media posts and/or potentially your highest performing. We don’t know about that part yet. We’re not sure yet if Google is always gonna be showing a carousel of your most recent or your highest performing, what we do know is you’re not gonna be able to like pick and choose what they show. So if you’re like, “Oh, I’d like to choose what they show.” Too bad. I don’t know what the criteria will be and it could change over time as well, but that link to that visual on your Google of your social is huge. Part of what makes that possible, and I announced on this last year, in 2025, Instagram for the very first time ever allowed your social media posts to index individually on Google for a decade or however long Instagram’s been around, that wasn’t available because Instagram prevented it.
Instagram decided in 2025 that now individual posts can index through search and they did that to stay competitive with AI. They didn’t do it because they wanted to, they did it because they had to. They realized that AI search was becoming the way that the world is moving and if they didn’t do it, Instagram potentially could die off. And so they did it as a survival technique. I totally understand and I think it’s great. Now that they’ve done that, there’s this integration that’s possible and it’s gonna be really cool to have that visual of your social media post connecting to potentially your Google business listing. There is something you can do to make sure that this technology continues moving forward for you, but in everything I found, you can’t like force it to start. I’m gonna explain how to prep your account so that when this does become available in your area, it’s already happening for you.
So you’ll go to your Google Business profile and then you’ll go to edit your profile and navigate to the content section. You’ll see an area to add links. If you do not already have your social profiles linked, more than likely like your Instagram or your Facebook is what you’re gonna be leaning into, click the edit button there and then choose the platform from the dropdown and paste your web address. So you’ll have a unique web addres for your Instagram or your Facebook. You’ll just put that in there and it’s gonna create the link. It tells Google what you want to be showcasing and then when the technology becomes available at scale or in your area or however Google’s doing the rollout, that should start indexing for you. So you can kind of be on the offense with that and just make sure that you’re set up for it.
With that, it’s very interesting. For those of you who have spent the last few months or few years either taking a really soft approach to social media and when I say social media, I literally mean Facebook and Instagram. If you have been allowing Instagram or Facebook to be a place where you just like share your vibes or like share funny, viral content, that is gonna bite you in the butt. So now when you look at the recommendation, you wanna be showcasing products, services, your team, like coming through with an authentic professionalism if you wanna index versus like funny viral content or like joke stuff or like random retail posts, like don’t do stuff like that. If it’s not authentically coming out of your brand with your voice and your messaging and your services and like you’re indexing your captions properly, these are all things we talk about in our program, right?
You wanna make sure that you’re doing those things so that you can make the most of this feature. Potentially if you’re not posting good content, Google’s just not gona index it. Like it’s not gona show users a bunch of garbage content. It’s not the way the platform optimizes. So it’s more important now than ever that the visual content you’re posting on platforms like Instagram and Facebook really represent your brand and it cannot just be good hair. Like it has to be that brand connection and that content that really plays well in all the algorithms in order for this to be effective for you. Now another update coming out of Google that I’m really excited about is what Google is openly calling a new era for AI search. So Google came out and made a bold statement. They said this is the biggest update to the Google search box in over 25 years.
That’s like basically my entire adult lifetime. For a lot of you, you’ll say the same. This is massive. And this is the reason why I’m reporting on this is what I find to be interesting about Google is they move in business in a similar way that I choose to move in business. They might not be the first to market, but they will come to market the most researched in the most sophisticated way and be the most revolutionary in groundbreaking. They like to be a disruptor. The way they’re innovating search is incredibly disruptive. I feel like this is gonna be a really big deal. If you know, you know, I have actually been very chat hesitant as a business coach. A few years ago, you were seeing a lot of buzz, especially on like business, like business coaches for our industry were making a lot of posts about like, how to use ChatGPT to write your captions.
And I was always like, “Don’t do that. Like don’t lean into ChatGPT to take shortcuts.” I was very slow to adopt AI, like just barely started at the end of 2025 because it’s still very much in its infancy and there was a lot of like training the bots and training the, the machine that was happening for the first few years and I was like, “I don’t want any part of that. I don’t wanna be teaching this thing anything.” And I wanted to just like slowly see how it was working before I jumped in and understanding how to use it as a tool versus a shortcut. I personally don’t use a lot of ChatGPT. I did for a while. I use a lot more Claude and there’s lots of other really cool, you know, AI tools that we could lean into, Notebook LM, like all kinds of stuff that’s pretty cool.
But the reason I talk about all of that is Google has spent the last several years like really researching AI and Google Gemini has been around and it’s basically been it’s like training AI tool and what they’re now rolling out as the next innovation of AI with Google is going to shake every local small business and digital business to its core. Google announced it’s going to be leaning into something it’s calling search agents and the technology they’re using that’s basically gonna house these agents is called Gemini Spark. And I’m gonna read you their description verbatim. Gemini Spark is a twenty four seven autonomous personal assistant that runs in the background to handle tasks across your Google Workspace Think Docs, Drive, Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Maps. It can proactively manage your inbox, automate schedules, and complete repetitive tasks all under your supervision. Gemini Spark helps you navigate your digital life.
Give it a task and it works in the background twenty four seven, even if your phone and laptop are turned off. It operates autonomously but always under your direction. You can choose to turn it on or off and it’s designed to check in with you before taking any major actions. Well, any other standard chatbot, meaning any other AI platform is what they’re trying to say. They’re not gonna name, you know, Claude, they’re not gonna name ChatGPT, but that’s what they’re alluding to. So it says, “While standard chatbots wait for a prompt, Gemini Spark can take proactive action on your behalf under your direction. It doesn’t just answer questions or wait for you to tell it what to do. It completes a multi-step task across all applications making it a true AI agent rather than just a conversational tool. This is gonna shake shit up. This is a huge deal and even if you’re like, I hate AI, I’m not gonna use it, your clients are.
So you can’t avoid this one. This one’s coming and I think it’s important that we understand how to navigate it and use it to the best of our ability as stylists and salons and like really take a proactive approach here. I want you to think about how Gemini Spark is gonna integrate, so I’m gonna name those platforms again. Google Docs, Google Drive, Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Maps. When you look at how many users there are across Google, it’s 260 million a day just in the US. That’s like two thirds of the US population. And when you think about the US population, when you think about who’s not using it, it’s kind of like infants and grandparents and everybody in between is gonna be part of this 260 mill. Versus when you look at a platform like Instagram, like Instagram is important for sure. 172 million users, not even daily active users.
Google has 260 million daily active users. So Instagram can’t touch it. Like learning that this is going to be the search and the local small business research tool of the future is incredibly important to understand. A few days ago, I got a DM from a stylist who said, Hey, I was just on a paid class, paid marketing class with another coaching company and they told me that websites weren’t important anymore. It really is all about social media. That is devastatingly incorrect advice. I told her, I was like, “I’m so sad that you heard that. It could not be further from the truth.” And what I tend to think is like, I’m gonna give this other coaching company the benefit of the doubt. Maybe they didn’t know what new technology was coming, maybe they’re speaking for personal experience. I’m not sure. But when you look at how all of this is going, it just couldn’t be further than the direction that literally the world at scale is heading.
When we look at Gemini Spark and its potential impact, this is like one of the most revolutionary shakeups to local small business probably in my lifetime. I, I just, I cannot under- emphasize how big I think this is gonna be. So the way that it’s going to work is instead of you going to Google and typing in, you know, whatever into the search bar, you know how you and I use Google now. So if you go to Google, the search bar is up at the top and it’s kind of like a blank screen with the search bar. So maybe I could type in what are some great Mexican restaurants in San Francisco, California and I’m going to click search. And actually even before I hit search, you and I both noticed there’s like little suggestions that are like populating as we’re typing. Like Google is trying to anticipate what we’re going to type in, right?
So it’s already thinking ahead of us. And then what happens when you get to the landing page is two things. One, up at the top there is this Google Gemini AI summary. You’ve probably seen that. That’s not the same thing as Spark. That’s not what I’m talking about. So the Google Gemini summary, you kind of open it up and it’s, it shows where it’s sourcing data from and it might give you like three hot places that you might want to consider. Like, you know, quick start, quick jump. If you just kind of want to get to the answer, there’s this. But then you look below that AI summary and more often than not, there’s a series of Google small business listings based on Google reviews and stuff like that. And then you look a little lower and there’s Yelp reviews and Yelp listings. And then if you keep going down, there might be websites or social media posts, but it’s a series of like links and usually it’s weighted in the sense of like Google business listings are at the top, Yelp is kind of off the next and then it falls into local small business websites.
And your hope as a stylist or salon is to kind of like fall somewhere into that mix based on the search term. That’s what’s gonna change. So what Google’s gonna do now is it anticipates, and I kind of have to agree with it, that people are gonna like this Gemini Spark way of searching instead. So the reason why they’re calling it search agents is Gemini Spark has the power to create almost like your own personal staff. So what they’re explaining it like is that you’ll have your coordinator, specialized helpers and tool access. So Gemini Spark, the primary tool is your central point of contact. It’s kind of the search bar you’re gonna be entering into. It’s like the main VIP, what they’re calling search agent that’s gonna be integrated into your Gmail or your client’s Gmail, your G calendar or your client’s G calendar. Like you can already see the potential here.
It’s crazy. The network this is gona create is wild and it’s kinda like the person in charge, like your executive assistant. But the great thing is it can also delegate. So what Spark is gonna do is route tasks to experts. So there’s gonna be a research agent and a scheduling agent and a document retrieval agent. So versus when you use search in any other platform, it’s question, answer, question, answer, question, answer, and people talk about training their bot or people name their ChatGPT agent or they call Claude Claude. I asked Claude, blah, blah, blah. Imagine if instead of having one person, it’s like having a team. It’s gonna be very intricate in a new way. Then the tool access piece. So this is where Google really wins is it’s going to be able to leverage things like Google Docs, Google Drive, Google Calendar, Gmail. So as our business and probably yours, we have thousands of photos.
Think about all the photos that live on your phone. Imagine this. If you upload all those photos to Google Drive, which can be done in a matter of hours, like it would probably take you, depending on how many photos you have, it’ll take you a day, but you could be done. And then being able to go to Gemini Spark and saying, “Hey, Spark, can you pull up all of the photos of clients who before were a mousey brown and then I transformed them into a copper red?” And they’ll say, “I’m on it. ” And it’ll come back with just the photos that are in your Google Drive that match that criteria. I mean, the power is unbelievable. The way that you’ll be able to organize yourself and save time is like kind of unreal and this is where I think it’s, it like this is actually going to shake up every industry, not just ours, but we can’t ignore this one.
Imagine if you could say, “Malia is looking for an appointment. Can you search both of our calendars and find a time we’re both available?” It’s like crazy. It’s crazy what’s gonna be possible with this technology. Like that’s what we’re looking at with this Gemini Spark piece and where I think that if you’re smart, you can really leverage it. So looking at how this could help our industry specifically imagine this. Now you’ll have to set up these sparks and you’ll have to set up this tool and all this kind of stuff, but like you set up your agent to be managing your inbox for you and maybe one of the commands you give it is at 5:00 AM every day, take a look at the new emails that hit my inbox. If clients are requesting appointments, ask them to share a link to their calendar, do a sync search and based on both of our availabilities, suggest three appointments time that might work well.
Like it becomes your virtual assistant for you without having to have another human, without any other integration. The power of it is just kind of unreal. The other thing that it can do is if you’re getting things like credit card statements by email, you can set it to browse those statements and find anomalies or look at subscriptions and give you a reminder on them. Just the capability with this is like really, really significant and I think it’s technology to watch. Like I said, if you’re in Thrivers, our entire X Club Retreat next year is dedicated to AI. I’m going to be watching this closely and when we look at like our monthly trainings coming up and everything that we’re really focused on, it’s making sure that we serve you at our highest here and keep you truly at the forefront. This is exciting stuff. For all of you who are techiques and like to be at the forefront like me, I hope this was as exciting for you as it is for me.
I think it’s gonna be pretty huge. Um, if you have any questions, you can always leave me a rating or review on iTunes or hit me up in the DMs and as I always say, so much love, happy business building and I’ll see you on the next one.
