Your customers are asking AI which business to use. Are you the answer?

Your customers are asking AI which business to use. Are you the answer?

By Heather Baker, The AI Edit

Here’s something that’s happening right now, whether you’ve noticed it or not.

Someone needs exactly what you sell. In the past they’d have Googled it, scrolled a page of results, clicked around a few websites and made a shortlist. Today, a growing number of them do something different. They ask ChatGPT. Or Perplexity. Or Google’s own AI. “Who’s the best [what you do] near me?” And the AI gives them two or three names.

If you’re not one of those names, you don’t exist for that customer. They won’t scroll further. They won’t find you later. They’ll pick from the shortlist the AI handed them, and you were never on it.

It’s not giving no answer. It’s giving your competitors’ names.

The problem you can’t see

What makes this dangerous is that it’s silent.

When your Google ranking slips, you can see it. The traffic drops, the numbers move, something in your analytics tells you there’s a problem to fix. AI recommendations leave no trace. There’s no lost ranking to spot. No bounced enquiry. Nothing. The customer asked, got their answer, and went elsewhere, and you have no way of knowing it happened.

So it’s easy to ignore. Which is exactly why it’s worth paying attention to now, before your competitors do.

The good news is that AI visibility isn’t mysterious, and it isn’t separate from the marketing you already do. It’s an extension of it. Here’s where to start.

How to become the business AI recommends

1. Don’t confuse the algorithm. Be clear and consistent about what you do and who you do it for. If a human can’t work out your offer in five seconds on your homepage, an AI can’t either. Vague, clever, look-at-us language is the enemy here. Plain and specific wins.
2. Write for three readers at once. Every page now has three audiences: the search algorithm, the chatbot and the actual human. Good writing serves all three. Clear structure and honest headings help the machines. Warmth and specificity keep the human reading. You don’t choose between them. You do both.
3. Get your SEO working. A lot (but not all) of AI visibility is just good SEO, already done. AI engines are trained on and pull from the same web that search indexes. If your SEO is solid, plenty of these boxes are ticked without you doing anything new. If it isn’t, that’s the first job.
4. Build your profile beyond your own website. AI doesn’t just read your site. It reads what the rest of the web says about you. Mentions on other people’s sites, directories, press, guest articles like this one. The more the wider web confirms who you are and what you’re good at, the more confidently an AI will put you forward.
5. Answer the questions your buyers actually ask. Not the questions you wish they’d ask. The real ones, in their words. When your content directly answers “how do I choose a [what you do]” or “what does [your service] cost”, you become the source the AI reaches for when someone asks it the same thing.

The businesses that win

The businesses that come out ahead over the next few years won’t necessarily be the best ones. They’ll be the ones AI can recommend with confidence, because they made themselves easy to understand and easy to trust.

That’s not a technical job and it’s not a quick fix. It’s part of building a proper lead generation engine, and it rewards the businesses that start early.

Heather Baker is an AI trainer and a B2B lead generation specialist, and the founder of the AI Edit.