Last week a client called me confused. A customer told him they found his shop by asking ChatGPT for a recommendation. He had never heard of anyone doing that, and he had no idea what the answer said about him.
That is the part most small business owners are missing right now. People are not only typing into Google anymore. They ask an AI assistant, they get one answer back, and they act on it. There is no page two to fall back on.
Run the test on your own business tonight
This takes ten minutes and costs nothing. Open ChatGPT, Gemini, and Google's AI results, then ask the same three questions a real customer would ask:
- Who is the best [your service] in [your city]?
- Tell me about [your business name].
- What are the hours and prices for [your business name]?
Write down what comes back. When I did this for a Rialto client last month, the AI listed hours that had been wrong since 2023, quoted a phone number from an old directory listing, and never mentioned the two services that make him the most money.
A bad answer is a website problem, not an AI problem
It is tempting to blame the robot. Do not. These tools pull from whatever they can find, and if your own site is thin, outdated, or vague, they fill the gap with scraped directories and old reviews.
The pattern I see over and over on neglected sites is the same. Services buried inside a slider with no real text. A homepage that says "quality you can trust" instead of naming what you actually do. No city named anywhere on the page. No prices, no hours, no straight answers.
An AI cannot repeat information you never published.
Fix the pages the AI reads first
You do not need new software for this. You need clear writing in plain HTML text on the pages you already have.
- Put your service list in real text, one line per service, not inside an image or a slider.
- Name your city and your service area on the homepage and the contact page.
- Add a short FAQ that answers pricing, hours, service area, and turnaround in one or two sentences each. Those short direct answers are exactly what these tools quote.
- Make sure your name, address, phone, and hours match everywhere: your site, your Google Business Profile, Yelp, and any old directory listing you can still log into.
Consistency matters more than volume here. Two sources that disagree about your phone number will get you skipped in favor of a competitor with one clean story.
Then keep checking, because the answer changes
This is not a one and done fix. These models refresh, and so does the junk data floating around about your business. I run the same three questions for my clients about once a quarter and it catches problems long before the phone stops ringing.
If you would rather not track that yourself, it is one of the things I fold into my website care plans, along with updates, backups, and uptime. The point is that somebody looks, on a schedule, instead of finding out from a customer six months late.
Do this one thing this week
Ask an AI about your own business and read the answer like a stranger would. If it is wrong, thin, or generic, that is what a real customer is seeing right now.
Want a second set of eyes on it? I will run a site audit for you at no charge and tell you exactly what is missing, what is outdated, and what to fix first. No pressure and no sales pitch, just a straight answer. Send me your website address here and I will take a look.
