I build websites, brand identities and email marketing for small independent businesses, so I spend a lot of time watching how people actually find the businesses they end up using. And over the last year something genuinely shifted. People haven't stopped Googling — Google isn't going anywhere. They've just added a second place they ask: an AI assistant. ChatGPT, Google's Gemini, Microsoft Copilot, Perplexity. And the way those tools answer changes everything about how you get found.
Search didn't die. It split in two.
Traditional Google gives you ten blue links and lets you choose. An AI assistant does the choosing for you. You ask it a full question — "I need a good wedding photographer in Edinburgh, not too expensive" — and instead of a list, it hands back a short, confident answer naming two or three businesses, often with a sentence on why. There's no page two. There's barely a page one. The shortlist is the whole game.
This is being called a few clunky names — AI search, answer engines, generative search, "AEO" — but the idea is simple: more and more buying decisions now start with an AI giving someone a recommendation. Which raises the only question that matters for your business: when an assistant is asked about what you do, does it know you exist, and does it say nice things?
And this is the bit that catches most business owners off guard: it's not really AI versus Google any more. It's AI inside Google too. Even your customers who'd never dream of opening ChatGPT are now handed an AI-written summary at the top of their Google results — Google's "AI Overviews" — answering the question before they scroll to a single link. So whether someone uses ChatGPT or plain old Google, an AI is increasingly the thing deciding what they see, and whether your name is in it.
How AI decides which businesses to name
Here's the part most people get wrong: AI doesn't recommend the best business. It recommends the business it can most easily understand and trust. It builds a picture of you from whatever it can read across the web, and then it repeats that picture back to whoever's asking. So the businesses that win are the ones whose information is clear, consistent, current, and easy for a machine to read.
In practice, four things shape whether you make the shortlist: whether your basic facts (name, services, location, hours) are clear and identical everywhere; whether your website actually answers the questions people ask, in plain language; whether other places — reviews, directories, listings — talk about you; and whether your site is structured so a machine can read it properly rather than guess. None of that is glamorous. All of it is doable.
"AI can only recommend a business it can understand. Most small firms are invisible to it — not because they're bad, but because nothing about them was written for a machine to read."
Four things you can do this week
You don't need to hire anyone to start. Before you spend a penny, do these — they cost nothing but an afternoon, and they'll tell you exactly where you stand.
- Ask the assistants about yourself. Open ChatGPT, Gemini and Copilot and ask "who's a good [your trade] in [your town]?" and "tell me about [your business name]." Whatever comes back — glowing, wrong, or nothing at all — is your starting line.
- Make your facts identical everywhere. Your business name, address, phone number and list of services should match exactly across your website, your Google Business Profile and every directory you're on. AI distrusts contradictions, and small businesses are riddled with them.
- Answer real questions on your website. Write down the questions customers actually ask you, then answer each one clearly on your site, in the words a normal person would use. Clear answers are exactly what an AI lifts and quotes.
- Collect a few recent reviews. AI leans heavily on what other people say about you. A steady trickle of recent, specific reviews does more for your AI visibility than almost anything else you can control.
Underneath those four is a more technical layer — schema markup (code that spells your business out to machines) and an llms.txt file (an emerging standard for AI crawlers). That's the part I handle for clients, and it's exactly what powers my dedicated Get Found by AI service. But the four above? Start them today.
The honest bit nobody else will tell you
You'll soon see agencies promising to "guarantee you the number one spot in ChatGPT." Run a mile. Nobody controls what an AI says — not me, not them, not the businesses being recommended. Answers vary by how the question's phrased and change from week to week. Anyone promising a guaranteed result is selling you smoke.
And about that llms.txt file everyone's suddenly excited about: it's worth having, but be clear-eyed. Google has publicly said it doesn't use llms.txt, and the big assistants haven't committed to it as a ranking signal either. So I include one because it's cheap and future-facing — but I'd never pretend it's the thing that gets you recommended. The unglamorous work — clean schema, clear answer-first content, consistent facts, real reviews, a site a machine can read — is what actually moves the needle. That's the whole game, and most of your competitors haven't started playing it.
It mostly comes back to your website
Here's the thread that ties it all together: AI reads your website to understand you. A clean, fast, well-structured site is one an assistant can actually parse — a clunky, bloated template often isn't. Which means the same things that make a properly built website good for humans make it legible to AI too.
It also reframes a few things you might already be thinking about. Local SEO used to mean "get found on Google" — now it means found on Google and AI when someone asks "near me." Consistent branding isn't just about looking sharp; it keeps your facts and identity consistent everywhere AI looks. And regularly publishing content — a newsletter, a blog, the kind of email and content work that keeps you visible — is how you build the authority assistants lean on. It all compounds.
If your site's on Wix, Squarespace or something you don't control, you're not stuck — you can still get a clear audit of where you stand and a report you can action yourself. And if I build or rebuild your site, all of this is baked in from launch, so you're AI-ready from day one rather than retrofitting it later.
The bottom line
Your customers haven't stopped Googling. They've just added a second place they ask — and that place gives them one short answer, not ten links to weigh up. There's a bonus, too: when an AI does point someone your way, they tend to arrive already half-sold, which is why AI-referred visitors so often convert better than a cold search click. Being inside that answer isn't luck, and it isn't magic. It's groundwork: clear facts, content that answers real questions, reviews, and a site built to be read by machines as well as people. Do it now, while your competitors are still pretending it isn't happening, and you get to be the name the assistant gives back.
Want to know exactly where you stand today? Have a look at how I help businesses get found by AI, or just book an AI Visibility Audit and I'll tell you straight.