The Way People Find Businesses Has Changed: Are You Showing Up in AI Search?

More than one in three people now start their search with AI instead of typing into Google. That's not a small shift in habits, that's over a third of your potential customers changing how they look for a business like yours before they've even heard of you.

The difference matters more than it might first seem. With Google, you were competing for a spot on a list, ten blue links, and the customer did the work of deciding between them. With AI tools like ChatGPT or Gemini, there's no list. Someone asks a question and gets one answer back, a recommendation, already decided before they've seen any options at all.

In plain English: what's actually different here

When people talk about "AI search," they mean tools like ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini or Perplexity, which read across the internet, including websites, reviews and directories, and use all of that to answer a question directly rather than pointing someone to a list of links. Traditional Google search still exists alongside this, but a growing share of people are going straight to an AI tool instead, especially for anything that sounds like "find me a [type of business] in [place]."

If your business isn't part of that one answer, the person asking never sees you as an option in the first place. They don't scroll past you the way they might on Google, because there's nothing to scroll through. This is a genuine and practical way this series will help you check where you actually stand, and what to do about it if the answer isn't what you'd hoped.

How to actually run the test properly

The check itself is simple, but it's worth doing properly rather than trying it once and drawing a conclusion. Open ChatGPT, Gemini, or whatever AI tool you or your customers are likely to use, and type in exactly what a real customer would type, not what you'd type as the business owner. A few things worth trying:

• The obvious version: your type of business plus your location, for example "Shopify web designer in Edinburgh"
• A version with a specific need attached, for example "therapist in Glasgow who specialises in anxiety" rather than just "therapist in Glasgow"
• A version phrased as a question, for example "where can I buy handmade candles online in the UK"

Try two or three phrasings rather than just one, since AI answers can vary noticeably depending on how a question is worded, and one search alone can give a misleading picture either way. Note down what comes back each time: who's mentioned, in what order, and whether your business appears at all.

What to do with what you find

If you show up, that's genuinely worth knowing, and the rest of this series is about what keeps you there as AI tools get used more. If you don't, that's not a dead end, it's just the accurate starting point. Over the next few weeks this series works through exactly what AI is looking for when it reads a website and decides who to recommend, and what you can practically do about each piece of it.

This week's checklist

Run the search as your customer would phrase it, not as you would

Try at least two or three different phrasings

Note whether you appear, and where in the answer

Note who else appears, so you've got a sense of who you're up against

Keep that note somewhere, since it's worth comparing against later in the series