Superintelligence, doomsday device, or overblown buzzword?
AI has many possible futures. But what does it mean for self storage?
However it turns out, we know AI WILL change how we do business.
In this blog, we’ll give an overview of where the industry stands with AI, we’ll dive into how people are using it to find storage and compare options, and we’ll dissect how this impacts the buyers’ journey.
Next, we’ll explore how operators are embedding this technology into operations to save time, make more money, or reduce mistakes.
Last, we’ll take a speculative look at what comes next. We’ll draw on current trends, new capabilities, and company projections to put you ahead of the curve.
Click on the topic you’re most interested in below, or keep scrolling to dive right in.
This chart shows how long it took for different technologies to be adopted by 50% of the populace.
For older technologies, like the telegraph and telephone, this was measured in decades, nearly centuries. Even the television took over 30 years before most people had one.
AI took three. That’s right; in just three years, AI was being used by 50% of the population. Other estimates have it higher than that (up to 80%).
AI doesn’t require any new hardware for users to run. It works on the smartphone or PC you’ve already got. It also doesn’t require learning anything new. Just type your question in the box and it works.
Part of that speed is ease of adoption. Part of it is a user base that’s accustomed to technology! (See the downward slope on the graph; we adopt new tech faster and faster).
That’s the world business operators like you live in now. Whatever new tech comes along, people will use it as long as it’s useful. And AI is proving to be useful.
To really examine how AI is impacting storage, we have to get specific about how it’s being used. Let’s think of it in two ways: external versus internal – how it’s affecting your customers' search and how it could help you run your business better.
When users get this brand new shiny robot, they’re not sure what to do with it. So they start somewhere familiar, and they ask questions like they would of their old favorite robot – Google.
And just like with Google, users go to AI when they have a problem that needs solving. For the moment, AI queries are more information or research-focused. To put it another way, that means users are way more likely to look up something general than they are to use AI as a local search tool.
The pathway from need to solution is changing.
Instead of:
Renters are adding another step in between; they ask AI about their problem. Usually these queries are informational. They ask ChatGPT or Claude what they should do with all this furniture they inherited, or where to put their new mountain bike.
AI will answer these questions with a wide range of solution options, which could include self storage – it could include a specific facility, too!
But searchers aren’t immediately going to a storage facility just because their AI recommended it. Most people will go to a source they trust, one they know how to interpret. This is usually (again) Google.
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The most popular LLMs (ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini) aren’t built for online shopping yet, either. People are using AI for a lot of tasks, including researching solutions and comparing businesses, but not yet for making purchases. AI is an intermediate step between having a problem and paying for a solution.
Over 2025, Pug Pack operators went from less than 100 ChatGPT visits in January to almost 1,000 in December. This is massive growth, but it’s still tiny compared to the number of visitors using Google.
Of course, you want to show up anywhere storage is mentioned. You want to be the brand that people think of when they ARE ready to rent. But AI makes this really hard, because the results change with every user and every interaction.
But we can measure visits and rentals.
We’ve got some 2025 stats from across all our websites here, so you can see exactly how often AI is sending actual renters to a website:
Total online rentals: 111,989 – From AI: 89 – AI%: 0.079%
Total online reservations: 28,501 – From AI: 26 – AI%: 0.091%
Contact form submissions: 57,978 – From AI: 135 – AI%: 0.23%
First-month rental income: $5,163,495.05 – From AI: $5,769.30 – AI%: 0.11%
Less than a tenth of a percent of all rentals over 2025 came from AI sources. No data set is perfect (maybe someone discovered you on ChatGPT, then Googled your facility), but it’s a good sign that AI is not your primary traffic source. So far, it’s not even getting close.
Ask the same version of the same LLM the same question ten times, and you will get ten (slightly) different answers.
This is intentional. AI engineers have programmed randomness into their creations, as well as personalization. You’ll get different answers if you ask rudely vs politely, if you punctuate your query correctly, or don’t use any at all.
Your location, your chat history, and anything else the AI knows about you will change the answer, too. Unless you’re the only storage facility in town, you won’t be able to guarantee that you show up for AI queries. It’s entirely possible for you to show up for all your customers and not for your own searches (or vice versa).
The implication of this new search environment is massive. It means that every search result is unique. It means the concept of “ranking #1” in the ways we’re used to is gone.
Not only do AI results vary from searcher to searcher, but the types of results do too. Sometimes a searcher will see a list, sometimes a map. Sometimes the AI will offer lots of options, sometimes just one.
To complicate matters further, different models pull from different sources! Which means it’s more important than ever to have your business listed online (consistently) as many places as you can get it.
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Summary: Make sure your website works well with AI, but remember, every single AI search result is unique. Don’t expect SEO-style rankings. AI platforms are continuing to experiment with their results, and searchers are continuing to evolve how they use them.
AI search uses a lot of the same signals that traditional search does, but it does not follow traditional search rankings. A good Google rank is a great place to start for AI search, but does not guarantee you a strong AI presence!
If you’re currently in the top 3 for local search and the front page for organic, you’ll do fine in AI search. If you want to do even BETTER for AI search, here’s how:
Important note: AI searches are longer and more detailed than Google searches. Your website needs to answer real questions, not just match keywords!
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There are other factors that are harder for an operator to control. Your website needs to be accessible and easy to navigate for the AI in addition to your renters.
AI companies are paying through the nose to build their platforms – they’ll start making their money back soon, but for now they won't waste power crawling websites that are being difficult.
A website that plays nice with AI has:
Simple is almost always better!
Key Points:
The next area of AI impact to explore is internal – how are operators using AI to supercharge their operations and what does that mean for you?
Maximizing business efficiency is the biggest AI use case in storage – particularly for mid to large operators. In short, that means these companies are big enough and have complex enough systems that the process of outsourcing certain tasks or leveling up their capabilities is providing a significant business advantage.
Our industry is usually ten years behind the cutting edge. After all, Life Storage only offered the first online rentals in the industry in 2018! But operators are knee-deep in tech now. Whatever innovations start to surface in other industries will be adapted to storage quickly. We can’t afford to be a decade behind anymore!
Quick differentiation:
How do you determine which tech will help and which will only cost money? What is AI good at, and what is better left to the humans?
These capabilities play out differently depending on the size of your business. A single-location operation might want a chatbot or call center that can answer questions after the owner has gone home. An enterprise-level operation is going to be thinking about rate optimization and data-crunching (on top of customer service).
Small operators can use the free version of ChatGPT or Claude to:
If you’re looking to leverage the advanced capabilities of AI, there are plenty of ways to do that. We spoke to some industry experts and asked how they’re implementing this new tech.
We’re not going to dive into the specifics of how to set up and implement each of these tactics (there’s just too much to say), but we’ll lay out how our friends in the industry are making AI work.
The first thing any mid-to-large business needs to do is build a unified data platform. You need to have one spot where “truth” lives in your company – your branding, your data, your KPIs, etc. Then all your internal tools need to be trained on that same source.
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Then there are a ton of different use cases for current gen AI models. Most of our experts overlapped in how they’re using the tools, so we’ve put all the purposes together and cited the experts who mentioned each one below.
Revenue Management
— Arty Fonov, Melissa Stiles, Craig Olinger, Simon Berman
Acquisitions
— Craig Olinger, Andrew Capranos, Simon Berman
Operations
— Arty Fonov, Simon Berman
Investor and Corporate Functions
— Andrew Capranos
There are pre-built tools for all of these. Most of the tasks in this category will not work well with an out-of-the-box ChatGPT subscription, though you could build a custom GPT or Claude project if you have the know-how.
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What’s Next for Self Storage and AI
AI is growing rapidly. Even if you’re not blown away by what the technology offers now, the next innovation could be a game-changer.
And innovations are coming faster and faster! Anthropic is using its AI to program the next generation of AI – new features and new capabilities are likely to accelerate.
Here are some of the near-future changes that storage operators should pay attention to!
AI can do a lot of different things, some of which are useful to your business and some which are not. It doesn’t help to have a dozen new companies promising revolutionary uses of AI – again, some are probably great, but it’s hard to sort good from bad.
If you’re looking to take advantage of this new technology, we’ve got you covered.
Great for dipping your toes into the pool. These are ways to use the free version of modern AI to improve your business, usually in just a few minutes!
To learn more about these quick wins, check out our Self Storage AI Prompts download!
Using AI for these tasks is going to take a lot more work, but the payoff will be much bigger. Most operators will need to partner with a new provider or get new software to implement these seamlessly (though some readers might be able to make these work alone!)
Out-of-the-box ChatGPT or Claude would take a lot of finessing to tackle these tasks, though you can build custom programs within them that might work.
Using AI is not a goal in itself. Just like every other metric and tool in our arsenal, AI is only useful if it’s helping the business grow.
As exciting as this new technology is, and as helpful as it can be, the core business proposition hasn't changed. People need more room to store stuff, and we provide it. Technology can be a part of that, but it can’t be the main part.
The fundamentals will still determine the success or failure of your business. No amount of AI prowess will outweigh a bad experience.
Understand the customer journey - not only how people find you, but what they’re thinking when they go looking.
When you do start experimenting with AI, do it with intention. Measure your results, and don’t invest more in AI than AI can give you in return! AI search is still very small compared to Google and other avenues.
Lastly, pay attention. This space is changing fast, and your competition is going to be changing with it. Google is still the big game in town, but that might not be the case in three years (or less).
Check out these other pages to learn more about technology and self storage:
At StoragePug, we build self storage websites that make it easy for new customers to find you and easy for them to rent from you.
