Customers used to find service businesses in the yellow pages, then it was Yelp and Google, now it’s ChatGPT and other AI-enabled search engines. If they aren’t relying on word-of-mouth recommendations from their friends, neighbors, and family members, they’re stuck sifting through an overwhelming number of results online.
You might feel you just mastered how to stand out online in terms of SEO, but now you need to consider what LLMs are saying about your business, too. Imagine a potential customer opening ChatGPT or Gemini and asking, “What is the best pest control company in my area with appointment times on weekends and specializing in wasp nest removal?” That’s specific, more specific than they might be if they were using Google. On top of that, you might not even show up in query results, or know why you didn’t.
This is exactly why you should be thinking about and optimizing your business’s online presence for AI-enabled search.
The buyer's journey has shifted. For years, being found online meant ranking on page one of Google. Savvy business operators obsessed over local SEO, map placements, and click-through rates. This isn’t to say those fundamentals have disappeared, but they aren’t the entire picture anymore, either.
Your customers are doing their research across multiple platforms now. Research from BrightLocal found that when it comes to local recommendations, the use of ChatGPT and other similar tools has skyrocketed, from 6% last year to 45% this year.
Potential customers might still start with a Google search, but then turn to AI tools like ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Perplexity to help summarize what they find. These tools don't just return a list of links, they pull out differentiators and highlight pros and cons. They read between the lines of your digital footprint, taking anything and everything they can find about your business into consideration.
Reviews have always played a significant role in the decision-making process for potential customers. BrightLocal found that 97% of consumers read reviews for local businesses. But those reviews are no longer simply social proof, they’re raw data for AI tools.
The reviews for your business that appear across sites like Yelp, Google, and even the Better Business Bureau are coming up in the information that these AI tools are providing to customers.
Collecting reviews, responding to them, and maintaining them across the web has never been more important to your acquisition strategy. This matters across locations too. If a potential customer is looking into one specific location of your business, the reviews for that location are what will matter. Your brand consistency and experience have to be consistent across locations more than ever before.
Large language models are trained on the vast expanse of the internet, continuously updating through retrieval systems that pull in live data. When a customer asks an AI about your business, it synthesizes information from multiple sources in real time. Understanding those sources is the first step to managing them.
Your uncomfortable reality is that your AI reputation is largely being written by your own customers, and if you have no systematic way to monitor what story is being told, or shape it, you’ve already lost.
It should be clear by now that ignoring your business reputation and how it appears across AI search tools is not an option. But what should you be doing next? Come up with a strategy, or adjust your old one, for how you manage your reputation. For businesses with multiple locations, the gap between your best-performing location and your worst is almost certainly wider than you think.
The good news is that this isn't a technology problem requiring a technology budget. It's a reputation management problem, and the tools to address it are already available to you. The operators who will win in an AI-first discovery landscape are the ones making intentional, systematic moves now.
Book a demo today to see how AskNicely can help you manage your reputation and grow your business.
