Do small and medium businesses need to worry about AI search yet?

There's no need to worry yet, but there is a good reason to check. Spend an hour asking ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity the question a customer would ask, write down what comes back, and you'll know where you stand. Almost everything that hour turns up is worth fixing for ordinary search reasons anyway. The fixes are cheap but slow to take effect, which is the best argument for starting now rather than later.

Why there's no need to panic

Most buying still goes through a search engine, a website and a person making up their mind. An assistant answering a question is one more way in, not a replacement for the others. Anyone telling you SEO is dead and traditional search is finished is selling something, and usually can't show you the measurement behind the claim. Treat AI search as a new shelf in a shop you already trade in, rather than as the shop closing.

Why it isn't nothing either

Two things have genuinely changed.

The first is that an assistant names a few options rather than a page of them. On a results page you can be sixth and still get found. In an assistant's answer there's often no sixth. So the reward goes to being known rather than to being optimised.

The second is that the answer now often arrives before the click. That has already changed local search, and the same pattern holds more widely: the decision moves away from your website and towards whatever the assistant already knows about you. If you'd like the wider picture first, what AI actually changes about marketing your business goes through every channel you use.

The hour, in order

1. Ask for a recommendation in your category, in the words a customer would use rather than the ones you would: "Who's a good accountant for small builders in Epsom?" Note whether you appear, and who does.
2. Ask what your company does, by name. A wrong answer does more damage than no answer at all, and it's the easiest thing on this list to fix.
3. Ask how someone buys from you, or gets started, and check that the steps it gives are the ones you actually use.
4. Ask it to compare the options in your category, and see what it says the differences are.
5. Write down what was wrong, not just what was missing. Wrong is the more urgent of the two.

Ask each question more than once. The answers vary, and a single run tells you very little.

What usually fixes it

This is the unglamorous list, in rough order of how much difference each item makes.

Say what you do in one sentence, in the same words, everywhere: on your homepage, in your meta description, in your directory listings and on your social profiles. An assistant pieces together what you are from scattered sources, and the more those sources agree, the more confidently it can describe you. If you can't yet explain what you do in one sentence, start there.

Put the facts on the page in plain words. Your services, where you work and your prices belong in the text of the page, not only in images or PDFs. Structured data, the hidden labels in a page's code that tell search engines what's on it, is worth adding where it matches the text, because it's accurate and it's cheap. It isn't a key to AI answers, though. Google says there's no special schema.org structured data you need to add to appear in its AI features, and for ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity nobody has published evidence either way.

Publish your prices, or at least your price bands. An assistant can't tell anyone what you cost if the page says "contact us". That's as much a commercial decision as a technical one, and the gap it leaves is real.

Get mentioned somewhere other than your own website: directories, trade publications, local press and review platforms. An assistant, like a customer, has more reason to believe what other people say about you than what you say about yourself. Of the fixes so far, this one is the slowest, so start it first.

Answer real questions in public. A page that answers its question in the first paragraph is far more quotable than one that gets round to it eventually.

Spend the hour, fix what it finds, and ask again in six months. If our free score comes back low, have a look at what it does and doesn't measure before you worry about it.

If you'd rather have all this measured and put in order for you, that list is most of what our AI search visibility service does, and, as you'd hope, the prices are on the page.