AI Search Is Replacing Google for Your Customers. Are You Visible?
Recently, one of our LaunchPad customers mentioned that ChatGPT had recommended the product. LaunchPad is the $50 one-time store builder we make for people selling digital downloads, so it felt like proof: buyers were asking an AI, and the AI was sending them to us.
On November 3 we tried to reproduce it. Signed out, no brand name anywhere in the question, we asked ChatGPT the way a buyer would: "I want to sell digital downloads online, like graduation photos, but I don't want monthly fees or a platform taking a cut of every sale. What are my best options?" It recommended Payly first, then WooCommerce on WordPress, Stripe Payment Links, and Payhip. LaunchPad never came up.
Both answers were real. The recommendation our customer got happened, and so did the one where we were invisible. Which answer a buyer gets depends on the wording they use, the session they are in, and what the tool can find about you that day.
The audience moved first
BrightLocal's 2026 Local Consumer Review Survey found 45% of consumers now use ChatGPT or another AI tool for local business recommendations, up from 6% the year before. ChatGPT alone accounts for 31%, Google's AI Mode for 23%. AI is now the third most used source of local recommendations in that survey, behind Google and Facebook.
The click math changed with it. Pew Research Center tracked 900 U.S. adults through 68,879 Google searches in March 2025 and found that when an AI summary appeared, people clicked a regular result on 8% of visits, against 15% when no summary appeared. They clicked a link inside the summary itself on just 1% of visits. Getting named in the answer is the visibility now. The click is a bonus that rarely arrives.
Ask the tools about your own business
Take twenty minutes and run the test we ran. Open ChatGPT and Google in a fresh, signed-out session and ask the questions your customers actually ask, in their words: "best electrician in Missoula for a panel upgrade," "who fixes water heaters near me," whatever fits your trade and your town. Write down what comes back before you change anything.
- Are you named at all, or does the answer go to competitors?
- Are the details right: hours, phone number, services, service area, prices?
- Which sources does the answer lean on: your website, your Google profile, Yelp, a directory, a review site, a forum thread?
- Ask a follow-up the way a nervous buyer would: "Are they any good?" See what it does with your reviews.
Our earlier post on how businesses get into AI search results covers the mechanics behind those answers. Run your test first, while the answers are still the ones your customers are getting today.
Fix it where the answer found it
The pages an AI read are yours to edit, or at least yours to chase down. When an answer quoted our product category wrong during the audit, the fix lived on a page. When an answer gets your hours wrong, the wrong hours are sitting on a listing somewhere: an old directory entry, a stale profile, a page on your own site nobody has opened in two years.
One wrinkle from that BrightLocal report is worth the extra errand. Their CEO points out that ChatGPT cannot see inside Google's reviews, so a reputation that lives only on your Google profile may never reach ChatGPT, which 31% of consumers in that survey asked for a business recommendation in the last year. Reviews on the platforms each tool actually reads are the safer bet, and the checking habit on the buyer side is strong: 88% of AI users in the survey fact-check the reviews an AI cites, and 97% double-check its recommendations against real reviews at least sometimes.
What Google says to skip
Google's own guidance for AI Overviews and AI Mode says a page only has to be indexed and eligible to show in Search with a snippet, with no additional technical requirements and no specific optimization required. Anyone quoting you a monthly fee for a special AI file or a secret AI markup package is selling something Google says you do not need.
What our own audit actually found
Brand searches were fine. "LaunchPad by BrucePro" puts our product page first, and its Product structured data, the $50 price and the stock status, is being picked up in results. Generic buyer questions were the gap. For "sell graduation photos online" and similar phrases, the answers and rankings went to Zenfolio, Sellfy, SmugMug, and listicles we appear in nowhere. We also had no listing on AlternativeTo or Product Hunt, two places comparison answers pull from.
The work that follows from that is unglamorous. Get listed where buyers compare tools in your category. Keep one page on your site that answers the exact buyer question in plain text, with real prices and real comparisons. Then rerun the same questions, same wording, signed out, and see whether the answer moved.
We will know within a minute of asking whether any of it worked. When did you last ask an AI what it says about your business?
