Does my business need to worry about AI search yet?
Probably yes if your customers ask for recommendations before they buy. Probably not yet if they don't. Here is how to tell, without paying anyone.
Signs it does not matter much for you yet.
Your customers buy on impulse or proximity: a coffee shop, a corner shop, a petrol station. Nobody asks an assistant which one.
Your work comes almost entirely by referral and you have as much as you can handle. Visibility is not your constraint.
You are the only option: the one dentist in a small town, the sole supplier of something. There is no choosing moment for an assistant to influence.
You have run the ten-minute check below and the assistants already describe you accurately.
Signs it does.
The purchase is considered: a wedding venue, a dentist, a solicitor, a software supplier, a golf membership. People ask around before committing, and increasingly they ask a machine.
Something about you changed recently: a move, a new name, a new service, a branch that closed. Assistants answering from memory are slow to learn this and will describe the old you with complete confidence.
Your website draws its content in with code after the page loads. You may be invisible to the things that read on the assistants' behalf. The previous post explains how to check.
You are in a category where assistants give confident shortlists, "best X near Y". Being absent from a shortlist is a silent loss; you never meet the customer who didn't come.
The honest scale of it. For most small businesses today, search engines still send more customers than assistants do. The assistants' share is growing; it has not taken over. The reason to look now is that the fixes are slow. What an assistant remembers takes a long time to update, so what you change this year shows up in answers later.
A free check that takes ten minutes.
- Open ChatGPT, Gemini or Perplexity. Ask, as a customer would, for a recommendation in your category and area. Do not name yourself.
- Ask again with your business named: "What do you know about X?" Read what comes back and check whether it is true.
- View the source of your homepage (Ctrl+U) and look for your own words.
- Ask a friend to repeat steps 1 and 2 on a different device. Answers vary from one run to the next, and one answer is not a measurement.
If step 1 names you, step 2 is accurate and step 3 shows your content, you can leave this alone for a while. If not, that is what I measure properly, across hundreds of repeated questions, and the first look is free.