More and more people are finding businesses in a new way. Instead of googling "plumber near me" and scrolling, they ask an AI, ChatGPT, Gemini, or one of the others, "who's a good plumber in my area?" or "where can I get my carpets fitted near me?" And the AI just gives them a shortlist.
That's a genuine shift, and it's worth understanding. It's not hype, either. In the US, Pew Research found 34% of adults have now used ChatGPT, roughly double the share two years earlier, and in BrightLocal's 2026 Local Consumer Review Survey, 45% of people said they'd used an AI tool like ChatGPT to find a local business in the past year. But there's also a lot of scaremongering around it, so let me give you the honest version rather than the sales version.
First, the scaremongering to ignore
You'll see people claim that if you haven't got a website, you're "invisible to AI." That isn't true, and I'm not going to tell you it is.
These AI tools don't only read websites. They pull from your Google Business Profile, from Google Maps, from directories, and from your reviews. So a business with a well-filled-out Google profile and good reviews can absolutely turn up in an AI's answer without much of a website at all. Anyone telling you otherwise is trying to frighten you into buying something.
Now the part that's actually true
Here's the bit that matters. An AI can only recommend a business it can find clear, consistent information about. It's essentially reading everything it can find about you and deciding whether it's confident enough to put your name forward.
So the question isn't "have I got a website." It's "when something goes looking for information about my business, is there a clear, consistent, up-to-date picture to find?" If the answer is yes, you're an easy business to recommend. If your information is thin, scattered across places that disagree with each other, or years out of date, you're a gamble, and these tools tend not to gamble. They put forward the businesses they can describe with confidence.
That's where a good website earns its place. Not as a magic ranking trick, but as the clearest, most complete, most current source of truth about what you do, where you do it, and why people rate you. It backs up and fills in everything the AI finds elsewhere.
An AI can't recommend a business it can't confidently describe. The whole game is being easy to describe.
What genuinely helps (no magic involved)
If you want to be the business an AI is comfortable recommending, the boring fundamentals are what do it:
- A complete, current Google Business Profile. Right categories, opening hours, service area, photos. This is free and it's the single biggest lever. Do this even if you do nothing else.
- The same details everywhere. Your name, address and phone number should match exactly across your site, your Google profile and any directories. Small inconsistencies make you look uncertain to both search engines and AI.
- A site that answers real questions plainly. What you do, where you cover, what it costs roughly, and the questions customers actually ask. Clear answers are easy for an AI to lift and repeat.
- Steady, recent reviews. They're one of the strongest signals of "this business is real, active and good," and they get pulled into AI answers a lot. (Here's how to get more of them.)
When I build a site, I set it up to be read cleanly by this stuff, the underlying data that describes your business in a way machines understand, an FAQ shaped around real questions, and the technical bits that let the AI crawlers read it. That's a real thing worth doing. What I won't do is promise you it'll get you ranked first in ChatGPT, because nobody can honestly promise that, and anyone who does is guessing.
The honest bottom line
AI search is real and it's growing, but it's not a cliff edge you're about to fall off. It rewards exactly what good marketing always has: being easy to find, consistent, current, and clearly better than the next option. Sort the fundamentals, your Google profile, your reviews, and a clear website, and you're not leaving it to chance. You're giving these tools something confident to say about you.
Blair