A year ago, six percent of Americans asked an AI for a local business recommendation. Today, forty-five percent. The same survey projects seventy percent by next year.
That’s a phase change. Not a trend.
Most small business owners in Columbus think we’re a year or two away from this mattering. We are inside it. And on Monday, Google announced something that compresses the timeline further. Starting this summer, when a homeowner in Dublin or Westerville asks Google to find them a plumber, a dog groomer, or a hair stylist, Google is going to place the phone call for them. The customer never types your number. The customer never opens your website. The AI calls the businesses it decided to recommend. If your shop is not on that list, your phone does not ring.
There are talks of an agentic AI calling restaurants to book a table directly. Some of that sounds far-fetched until you remember the same announcement carried the data that one billion people are now using Google’s AI Mode monthly and that the query volume is doubling every quarter.
What’s actually happening
Two channels opened cheap in the last twenty years. Google Ads in 2010. Facebook Ads in 2014. In both cases, the owners who showed up early got leads for a dollar or two. The ones who waited a few years paid five to ten times as much for the same lead. The pattern is the same every time a new ad channel opens. Early window is cheap. Late window is competitive. The compounding only goes to the ones who built early.
Paid AI search ads opened two weeks ago. The fifty-thousand-dollar minimum on AI search advertising dropped to zero on May 6. Self-serve, any U.S. business, cost-per-click in the three-to-five-dollar range right now. That’s the cheap window. It does not stay cheap.
But here’s the part most owners are missing. The interesting move is not buying paid AI ads. The interesting move is locking in organic AI visibility while it is still essentially free. Four structural signals decide whether AI knows your business exists. Most owners have never heard of any of them.
Signal one. Schema markup.
Schema is the structured-data layer of a website. It sits inside the HTML where humans do not see it, and it tells crawlers: this is a business, this is a service, this is a price, this is an FAQ. Plain English version, it is a label maker for your website.
Without it, AI looks at your homepage and sees prose. It might guess what you do. It might not. With it, AI looks at your homepage and sees the answers tagged. Business name. Address. Phone. Service offered. Hours. Reviews. Pricing.
The cost of guessing wrong is real. AI tools that lack pricing data can quote dramatically low or dramatically high to the customer. Both end the conversation before the customer ever calls.
Signal two. llms.txt.
The newest of the four. llms.txt is a plain-text file you put at the root of your website. It tells AI crawlers what is on the site, in what order of importance, and what the business does. Think of it as the executive summary you would hand a smart visitor who has sixty seconds to understand your business.
Most small business websites do not have one. Most owners have not heard the term. It is the lowest-effort, highest-leverage move of 2026. A single text file. About two hundred lines if you do it right. Updated maybe once a month.
The owner does not write it from scratch. The owner gives the answers, an AI tool like Claude builds the file, and a developer installs it. That is a single ninety-minute session.
Signal three. Definition-style content.
AI quotes paragraphs. Not pages. Not site sections. Specific paragraphs that answer a specific question.
The structural rule: every page should open with a definition sentence. Business name is a category in location that helps customer do outcome. Plain. Direct. Quotable.
Most websites open with marketing copy. Hero headlines. Adjectives. Brand voice. Beautiful for humans. Useless for AI.
Before-and-after I see all the time:
Before: Transforming spaces with intention.
After: Company name is a home organizing business in Dublin Ohio that helps families clear kitchens, basements, and garages with a minimalism-first approach.
One of those gets cited by AI. The other does not. Same business.
Signal four. The review-rating threshold.
This is the cutoff nobody warned the local business community about.
The major AI search engines have hard rating cutoffs. The strictest engines now require 4.3 or higher on Google to consider recommending a business. Perplexity, 4.1. Gemini, 3.9. A 4.0 rating, the rating that used to be respectable, is on the wrong side of every threshold but Gemini.
And here is the cruelty of it. Google itself still ranks 4.0 businesses on the first page. The owner’s dashboard looks fine. Map pack steady. No alarm fires. Meanwhile customers ask Claude or Gemini and never hear the business’s name.
Birdeye published a study this month. Google Business Profile impressions are down fifty-three-point-eight percent year-over-year. But customer actions, calls, direction requests, website clicks, only dropped five percent. Fewer people see the listing, but the people who do see it are higher-intent. The funnel did not break. The funnel got smaller and more qualified at the same time. The owner’s dashboard does not tell them why.
Oleg Levitas, an eighteen-year local SEO veteran, wrote in Forbes last week: I’ve been in local SEO for eighteen years, and I’ve never seen a funnel compress this fast.
What to do this week
Three concrete moves. In order of leverage.
Move one. Write the definition paragraph today. Open your homepage. Look at the first paragraph. If it does not start with Business name is a category in city that... rewrite it. Ninety minutes. Zero cost. Permanent improvement. This is the highest-leverage move because it costs nothing, ships in a day, and feeds every other signal.
Move two. Audit your entity consistency. Google Business Profile. LinkedIn company page. Wikidata. Local Chamber of Commerce. Yelp. Local directories. Same business name everywhere. Same address. Same phone. Same description. AI builds entity recognition from repeated consistent signals. If your name is spelled three different ways across the internet, AI treats you as three different businesses with three thin profiles.
And while you are cleaning that up, work on your rating. Under 4.3 on Google is a problem you did not know you had. Ten reviews from your best customers over thirty days will move the average. Not all at once. AI tools pattern-match for review-velocity manipulation. Ask honestly: tell the customer you are trying to stay competitive against bigger companies, that reviews are how a local small business holds visibility in this new AI environment, that you would appreciate a fair review. People will write them when you ask.
Move three. Ship schema markup and llms.txt. These two are technical. Do not write JSON from scratch. Use Claude or Grok to generate the schema and the llms.txt with your business facts, and hire a developer for two hours to install both. The work is small. The compound is large. Once your schema is right and your llms.txt is clean, AI starts citing you within weeks. That citation flow keeps working with zero ongoing cost.
The closing window
I spent sixteen years running Friendship Fitness here in Dublin. I lived through every advertising shift of that period. Yellow Pages ads nobody read. Newspaper inserts. Direct mail. Radio. Local TV. Facebook ads that worked for a year and then stopped working. Google Ads that worked until the cost-per-click tripled. Every couple of years the customer would move to a new channel and the business owner would chase.
If the AI calling technology Google announced this week had existed in 2010, half my advertising budget would have been pointless. Not because the ads were bad. Because the customers were not on the channel I was advertising on.
That is what is happening to every small business in Columbus right now. The customers moved. Most owners have not noticed. And the businesses that get structured right before the rest of the field figures it out are going to compound for the next ten years.
Open Claude tonight. Type best [your business category] in Dublin Ohio. See who comes up. If it is not you, that is a problem worth fixing this week.
If this episode hit close to home and you want a free AI visibility audit on your specific business, there is a thirty-minute strategy call on the site.
Talk soon.
— Jeff
Full transcript
All right guys, what’s going on this week we’re going to be talking about when AI recommends your competitor, some new breaking news that Google dropped this week, how that’s going to impact the entire landscape, oh Google and ChatGPT, how that’s going to completely change the overall landscape of how people find businesses, how people interact with businesses. If you guys are a business to business customer, how that’s going to impact the businesses that you work with every day, this is really going to hit quick serve restaurants, you know your fast food places, any of your service businesses, so plumbers and landscapers and all those things, it’s going to completely change how we’re going to interact with those businesses. So we’re going to talk a lot about that and then obviously what I want to focus on for us is how we can kind of jump out and get ahead of this, understand that this is coming and understand the opportunity is that it presents and just real quick I’ll flash back. If you guys remember, there were two periods in time that you could advertise, the first was through Google and Google ads and the second was through Facebook and meta ads where if you got ahead of the game, you could grab a huge amount of market share and it’s more and more importantly, you could do it for extremely cheap. So there was times where people could get, you know, Google clicks for like under a dollar if they were running Google ads early enough and there was they were running Google banner ads on their website and they were making a ton of money doing this and if you were early to the Google ad game, you were able to jump way out ahead of other businesses that weren’t advertising it all during that.
The same thing happened with MetaWin, Facebook released their first opportunity to advertise with them and people started to kind of figure out the best ways to do this back then they took you off platform. So what you would do is you would actually run Facebook ads that would take you to a separate website and funnel. They’ve since changed a lot of that, but back then you used to be able to get leads for under a dollar and the like, if you I think back to that time, we were early, but like maybe a touch passed that we were getting leads for like $2 and he can tell you our first ad campaign that we ran at a friendship when he was just coming on as our sales guy. We were getting like $1 or $2 leads for this ad campaign. We were running and we literally turned it on and within like a day we had like 30 or 40 booked appointments, which is like normally we would do like 30 booked appointments in like a month or two months.
So we were like drinking from the fire hose and we were like, holy crap, this works really well. And then quickly what happens is businesses share ideas, leaders in marketing, start to understand this is a massive opportunity for you. And then that starts to dilute and more people enter the market. Now you’ve got competition, your cost per lead goes up and now your cost per lead is, you know, times 10 or 20 more cost prohibitive than that, right? So it’s more expensive.
And so what happens then is every time Facebook or meta or Google or these these companies, every time that those get diluted, it people actually have to make this decision every month if it’s worth it or not to advertise. And it kind of like levels out right around where it is or isn’t, right? So it ends up sort of being like a break even, right? And companies that have huge margins, like 50, 60, 70, 80% margins, so software companies. Actually you can actually tell exactly what type of companies have gigantic margins based on who floods your inbox with marketing, right?
So like for a long time it was like cold plunges, right? They were selling for like $3,000 and you’d get marketed like crazy because a cold plunge tub probably costs like 300 bucks. So they’ve got this huge budget potentially for marketing. Why does this matter for us, right? Well, what’s coming out and what we’re going to talk about today is a new new opportunities to market number one, but then also a complete flip reversal and change of how people are going to interact generally within these markets.
So this is what Google just dropped this week is they now are going to change the way that people interact with Google Maps and with googling local businesses generally. So this is going to roll out this summer, June, July and Winahome owner in Dublin asks Google for a plumber or a restaurant or a landscaping place or a dog room or whatever. Google is going to actually place the phone call for them, right? Now there are talks of an actual AI agent calling to book for you, right? So Google is actually going to look into and potentially get to a point where they have agentic AI that will call a restaurant for you and reserve a table, right?
So like and some of this I know sounds like a little bit wild and far fetch. But this is where Google is walking towards is being able to book and call businesses and appointments based specifically on AI and AI recommendations. And so like this is a pretty big shift in how they’re trying to make recommendations generally, but also how people are interfacing with Google. I think and again, if you guys have been reading the blog or listening to the podcast, you already know that I don’t Google match anymore. I will go to one of my AI’s and different ones and I will start to have a conversation with the AI, give it context, tell it what I’m looking for and why I need it and then start to look for like DIY things, right?
Is it something I can do myself? And if it’s not, then with context, I start to ask the AI for specific recommendations. You know, you can give it dollar amounts, right? You can say I’m looking to spend, you know, hey, I need a exterminator for my house, right? I’m not looking to spend more than $1,500.
Here’s what I’m looking for. And they might be like, you’re never going to be able to get an exterminator for under $1,500. Here are three DIY options. Here’s where you can order the product and you know, and they might just not recommend a local small business because I put in the context ahead of time. Can’t really do that necessarily with Google right now.
And so I think they recognize that that’s a huge risk to their business model and they’re going to start to shift and pivot as you can see with this new announcement. So this is the biggest thing that has started to change is last year it was 6% of US customers were asking AI for local business recommendations. It is now 45% with projections of being upwards of 70% by next year. All right. So now this is becoming, if you are a local business, this is going to be existential, right?
It’s it’s going to be you have to get on top of this and have some of these things or you will not be able to stay in business. So this is like the change, right? And we talked a little bit about if you guys haven’t been around for a while in business, if you guys are a newer business or you’re thinking about getting into business, this is going to be like this is kind of the stepwise shift, right? Somewhere around like 2008, 910 was when it was just like all Google and website and SEO and ranking and then Google ads, right? A few years down the road from that maybe 2014, 15 was when meta ads started to come in, Google started to get diluted.
It wasn’t as cost effective anymore. So people started to shift to meta ads and then it was meta pushed to your website or a landing page. And then you would start to kind of create this like funnel around Google to a landing page, Facebook to a landing page. This has been the trajectory, right? Now there hasn’t been a huge shift in that for eight years, I would say.
Okay. Facebook ads have got more a lot more complex. There’s a lot more AI and learning and they know a lot more about people and they’ve started to put the things that they know about you into ads, same with Google. But now this shift of how you rank on Google, SEO, as that’s called, right? How you rank across the internet is going to matter significantly less.
Okay, because Google in how you use to rank for it is not how Google recommends from an AI perspective. They are not the same thing at all. And really, unfortunately, they’re not actually even very linked. And so that’s what I think is throwing people off. I think a lot of people are like, oh, well, you know, I have all these five star reviews and I’ve been ranked really high by Google forever.
And so I’ve just got this kind of like leader mentality, like I just I’ve always led. And because I’ve always led, I always get more clicks. And because I’ve always led and get more clicks, I just have more business than everybody. So that’ll just keep staying that way. And it won’t necessarily be true for them.
So this is the the stat that people have been coming out with a lot of these local SEO experts have started like really diving into GEO, right? And really started paying attention to this. But 83% of restaurant locations are invisible to AI recommendations. So I’ve been talking about this with all of my clients. And I’ve tried to express the importance of getting some very low level, very simple things from a GEO perspective implemented in their systems.
Now the system that I give to my clients has the GEO like software audit, look fixes, everything that you need to do to be hitting and be number one recommended in AI, that comes preloaded with what I give all of my clients, right? But as we start kind of looking into what people are doing, there’s not a lot of urgency right now, even in the businesses that I’m working with that are very forward thinking with AI, they’re still not having a huge sense of urgency with this. Now a lot of the customers I work with are more business to business. They’re maybe not required or relying on being recommended by Google for their business. A lot of their stuff is referral based.
It’s because it’s business to business. There may only be a few options. There might be dashboards that they can go to find jobs and things like that. But if you guys are working with local restaurants, this would be something I would be suggesting to talk to with a more local service businesses generally. It’s going to start to become extremely important.
And if you guys are building quick server restaurants or if you guys are building or doing landscaping for clients and they’re not in this and you’re just kind of talking with the owner and going through these things, these might be things that it would be a conversation to start having if they’re thinking about it. So as we kind of think about this, this is the general, this is like what we need to just set up. And it’s not super complex. The big one I talk about on this list is number two is the LLMS.txt. So this is sort of like just a basic text file that LLMs or AI models can read very easily.
That gives them the information that they need in a very easy to read platform. It’s not something that like lives live on your website. It’s not like people are going to be able to like click this and then open it up and read this weird TXT file. It’s mainly just specifically because of how it’s named and what it is and how it’s read is just very easy specific to AI. Little like, you know, hey, read me AI who’s searching for my site.
Read me and understand what we’re trying to do and how we’re trying to get business. That’s what it is. schema markup definition style content and review rating threshold. Some of these other things are just signals that the AI is looking for for brand authority, making sure you’re still in business, making sure you’re legitimate, making sure that you do a good job, trying to understand pricing structure like schema markup and some of that. Just kind of thinks about when customers are asking me the AI for recommendations.
What are the things they ask for, right? And you can just run this through in your head. If you guys have ever searched something or done a local search on AI, go back through like what you asked. You know, a lot of it is like, where are you located? Do they have good reviews?
Are they highly recommended? Or are they a piece of crap company who takes advantage of their customers? What are the pricing mechanisms? How much is it going to cost me? What are the next steps?
Right? Do they do a phone call? Do they do a quote? Do they do a proposal? Do they come out?
So like, you can kind of generally walk through some of those things that you might ask as questions when you’re looking for a new local business. And those are the things that we need to set up from a schema and these other pieces. That’s what these do. And they answer those questions so that the AI is even capable of making a proper recommendation for you in your business. So really important.
I know for us at friendship, like we moved locations, we changed phone numbers. You know, we had some time where we were on Yelp. We had some times where we were on not on Yelp, like in like local rev stuff and all these other companies that we advertise with and work for. And they all had somewhat conflicting information around there. So this is like your one-stop truth source for the AI.
So it doesn’t have to go out to all these other places. So this breaks down just a little bit more. Generally, schema markup is the label maker for your website. So it tells you and kind of gives you, you know, this is your general FAQ as people might ask it for the AI. Right?
So then if you don’t have this, AI is either just not going to show your business and make recommendations because it doesn’t have enough information or worse, maybe it’s going to guess, right? And what it’s guessing from, man, I don’t know, right? That’s scary proposition. Somebody’s like, hey, like what does it cost, right? To go to friendship.
Like the AI, if that information is not on the website, if it’s not in the schema, it might guess super low, like $40, right? A month and then somebody calls and they expect, hey, I heard your gym’s $40. That’s awesome. And you’re like, no, and, or they might go crazy high. It’s like, oh, it’s $1,500 a month.
And you’re like, what? And so then the person never calls. Both are bad for business, right? So it would just be better if it had the actual schema dialed in for it. This is the plaintext file, the llms.txt I was telling you about plaintext file that lives at the root of your system.
So again, this is not necessarily outward facing. This is not something that like other, you know, potential clients or leads are going to be able to see. As we go through these other two and three like, this is just kind of where we start thinking about how the shift is going to change, right? As we start thinking about what is important, if you Google review wise, right, a 4.0 Google rating would basically be your average Google star review, right? If you are looking at this, Google and the other AI, so this is your strictest AI engines perplexity, Gemini, ChatGPT.
If you are under 4, you will not get recommended by AI, right? So that’s a cut off that they all just announced. They will not recommend sub 4 star businesses. So if you guys have some low ratings, number one, like you have to try hard to get new reviews that will hopefully outrank those and pull your rating up. But number two, you have to really start thinking about looking at this, your Google reviews as a way to be seen as an authority in AI.
I find that a lot of businesses just are not aggressive with this. They do a great job. I’ll go back to my tree cutting business, right? At some point, I probably need to reach out to these guys. These guys came in, did an incredible job, bang up job.
They were so impressive, right? And I had a great experience, right? Once they were done, they left. I wasn’t here when they left, right? So I was gone.
I was not the house. They finished their job and they left the house. Nobody ever asked for a Google review. Nobody called me. Nobody emailed me.
Nobody text messaged me. Nobody dropped back by the house, right? We spent a lot of money on this, okay? Not an insignificant amount of money, all right? And nobody reached out to see if I was happy.
Nobody reached out to get a five-star review. Nobody reached out at all to even know what we felt about, you know, a $10,000 plus dollar service. And because of that, like they’re missing out on free AI, I would give them a five-star review. I would write the review. And I still probably will because that’s who I am, but not every customer is that way at all, right?
So if we aren’t doing these things, if we aren’t thinking about this, we have to start setting up systems where the customers that we go out of our way to do a bang up job for are being asked to give reviews. And you can just tell it like it is. You can tell your customer, hey, we’re really trying to get more five-star Google reviews. You know, if you would just take a second to tell a little bit about your job, I’ve attached a couple of photos from the job that we did. If you could post those with them, it really helps the ranking system.
It really means a lot to us. It helps us, you know, stand out as a local service provider so that we can stay competitive in this crazy world, right? Like, that can be the message that you send, something very honest and transparent. But if you bring it home to people and just tell them, like, this is something that we really need to stay competitive as a local small business, people will do it for you, especially if you do a good job with your service. So add this to your thing, like, it is a cutoff.
You will not be ranked if you don’t have a high enough ranking, okay? All right. So this is what I would start doing. If we want to start thinking about, okay, we’ve got to start getting dialed in on our website, but also our AI readability. How do we get ranked ahead of our competitors from a AI readability standpoint?
So first is just kind of thinking number one, I would if you guys have an AI system locally, I would start asking it, right? Like, if you guys have one of my systems, you use GEO audit, it’s going to give you this lately list of things you need to do. But if you guys don’t, I would get on whatever AI you are currently using. And I would start to say, like, hey, I want to start ranking higher for all of these incoming AI recommendation platforms, Gemini, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Grok, and Claude. And I need to see where we have gaps, right?
Then I would start to run through these three things. So the first is just writing a definition paragraph super easy. Second is trying to think about are we universal across Google business profile linked in, if you guys are business to business, or this is Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, other social medias, if you guys are business to customer. And then wiki data, which also kind of looks at like wiki goes to Wikipedia, making sure all that stuff’s the same everywhere. And then your last one is do your scheme and mark up in your Lllms.txt.
This is like a half days work and you can get all this stuff done. Again, you can use the AI’s to help you with this just to see have them pull because you want it from them because they’re going to be the ones searching and pulling for this data. So just ask them, right? Go on ChatGPT and ask them be like, hey, review my business and how I look to you. If you were making a recommendation for a Gem or a construction company or a landscaper in my area, how do I look to you?
Would you recommend me? If you would recommend me, what would the recommendation look like? What questions do you have that are unanswered from my website, from my web profile? And go through that and just take a little bit of time and ask it, you know, the same series of questions across, you know, the three or four main ones, which is like Gemini Perplexity, ChatGPT and Claude. And see what you get.
And then just as they tell you things, how can I fix that? That’s all you have to prompt it with. How can I fix this? Right? And it’s got a lot of it’s going to give you these three things.
But, you know, once you have these done, it’s kind of like, what is the next question? All right. Now, as we start kind of looking at what is happening, this is what we were talking about a little bit with the ads perspective. So, ChatGPT just dropped what their ads platform is going to look like. Okay.
Now, it’s a $50,000 minimum for AI search ads. All right. Now, as we start kind of looking at that, they are, so ChatGPT has had this $50,000 floor on AI search. All right. So, you used to have to have a $50,000 minimum to even be able to apply and go into ChatGPT’s recommendation services.
Now that’s gone. They’re going into, they’re opening it up. They are expecting this to drive, get this $100 billion in revenue within the next three years. So, this is going to become big business. They use the $50,000 floor.
So, it was big platforms that were advertising with them. Major companies, big franchises, you know, a lot of pizza places were in there. And I’ll talk about this more what it looks like on the consumer. And so, you guys are aware of this. In a second, but I want to focus on the business end of it.
They’re targeting right now two to $5 cost per click and somewhere around a $20 cost per acquisition. So, as you look at that, like that’s pretty good. That’s competitive. That’s, I would say, ahead of the game. But the other thing that I look at is that is a very sticky customer.
That is a high likelihood to close customer. So, what you need to be thinking about and how you always think about ads, if you guys have never done this, you need to understand what your cost per acquisition is. You need to understand what your value per customer is or your lifetime value of a customer. All right. So, if we don’t understand those numbers, that’s like a whole different conversation.
I’ve done, but I’ve done it. There’s a handful of things I think that exist on the internet of me talking about those things in depth. But if you guys ever have questions about that, like reach out, I can send you those. Those are with another consulting company that I worked for. But as you kind of understand those values, you have to understand if a $20 cost per acquisition is worth it for you.
Most businesses that would be very much worth it. The average customer, like friendship fitness, for example, stays for a little over two years on average, the average revenue or lifetime value of that customer is somewhere around $25 to $3,500. If I spend $20 to acquire a customer that might spend $3,500 over the next two or three years, that’s worth it every time. So, that’s how you think about that generally when you’re thinking about advertising. Now, why this is important is different advertising platforms have different stickiness.
Or I would say really conversion percentage. Google costs more per lead generally. But the customer is a more likely buyer because they are actively going out in searching and googling. Compare that to TikTok or Facebook or Instagram or X, where honestly, if I’m on Facebook or Instagram and an ad comes across my stories or my platform, I’m more annoyed that it’s being forced or shown to me than I am likely to buy. It’s making assumptions that maybe I want to buy because I googled something.
Maybe somebody googled how to get a six pack and then all of a sudden, now all these gyms start getting recommended to you. But their infrastructure is just more annoying in the way that they present it. So people click on ads, but they are not necessarily likely buyers. However, if I’m interfacing with an AI, looking for a local gym and I’m asking it all these questions like, Hey, I’m interested in strength training. I really want to get stronger.
I’ve heard that lifting weights is good for our long-term health. I’ve heard that is good for your bone density. I’m a post-menopausal woman. I’m looking forward to doing whatever. And you’re asking it and giving it this context of who you are and what you’re looking for.
And then it says, based on everything that you just told me, I think the best gym for you is this. That person, then, like, if you can put yourself in that brain space and they say, like, this is by far the best recommendation. Here’s what it’s going to cost. Here’s what their, you know, next steps are they can prepare you for it. It’s almost like they’re teeing you up like a friend would or a family member would as a referral for that business.
That is a potentially very high likelihood to conversion clients. So I think the ads on these platforms are going to be very powerful, much more powerful than other ads on other platforms. And I can see exactly how these guys get to a hundred billion dollars in revenue when you look at how much Facebook and Google already bring in from an ad revenue standpoint if theirs is just straight up better, right? And they can quantify that. So that’s kind of like the business facing end of it.
Now, if you guys are in consumer, you have to understand that they will not tell you the AI’s will not tell you when they’re making a recommendation based on a paid-out, which I thought was fascinating. I actually just read a huge article about this. And it’s not like I don’t, I have a tough time with it. I don’t think it’s good, right? Like, I don’t think that we want to get to a point where AI, like what I just told you, right, I think about it again through the lens of like this local business.
So like a local gym, I started this. I wasn’t with a franchise. I didn’t have a ton of money. I started it with $5,000 in my pocket out of my garage, right? Like, I think about that entrepreneur who’s trying to like get this started up and trying to, trying to go through this, this world and navigate to start a business and what it takes.
And I think it sucks that like you might not be able to break through in that world because some AI, you know, some orange theory out there is going to have all this money and it’s throwing it all at AI so that the only gym that ever gets recommended in your area is just an orange theory. Well, based on everything you said, I think the best gym for you is this orange, orange theory on every road, blah, blah, blah. And what it doesn’t tell you is like, oh, I’m actually doing that because orange theory corporate is paying me a boatload of money every month, right? So, you know, pluses and minuses, right? Like, this is just the reality of the world.
It’s important that we understand this and it’s important that we understand it as a consumer that the AI is maybe making a recommendation based on its best bet, but, you know, you can also then prompt it and be like, okay, or, you know, hey, are you making this recommendation because of a paid ad, right? And if you are, please give me the recommendations outside of the paid ad. May or may not be able to do that. I’m unsure. I know ChatGPT seems to be the least ethical with this, right?
And so there are the ones kind of getting raked over the coals and hammered for it. Again, there are also the first who are doing it on a big level. So, I assume it’s going to make things worse for AI. Like, I do think Google got worse because of sponsorships. Amazon is the worst right now because of sponsorships.
You want to find something on Amazon. Now, the first six things you get recommended are just sponsored. They’re just paid. And then you scroll down a little bit. I don’t know if you guys have seen this.
You scroll down a little bit. You’ll find the exact same product for $10 cheaper. If you just scroll down beyond the sponsored, the sponsored one because they’re paying for it, they make it more expensive. When the exact same thing is available down below, maybe from a different seller, maybe from the same seller sometimes for just cheaper. It’s Asinine.
It makes me very angry. And I think the same thing is true. Obviously with all social media, social media has been completely ruined by ads and sponsorships. So it’ll be interesting to see how AI kind of combats that. I think Gemini Google specifically is still going to be the market leader once they roll these things out.
And how Gemini makes those recommendations. I think because they’re Google, I think they can do that in a transparent way. I think they can tell you these are the recommendations. Here’s what I would do for you. Here’s the two sponsored results, the two unsponsored results and just put them in those orders.
But we’ll see how all that stuff shakes out. For us right now, just important for us to make sure we’re doing everything we can to be seen by the AI. As I said, 83% to 90% of businesses right now are unsurchable by AI. They are invisible, blind. And that’s just insane.
That’s just opportunity for us. So if we get out ahead of that, more power to you. That’s you’re just going to crush it. And then as these ads start getting rolled out, again, if you can be on top of it, understand, pay attention to some of these things. And you can go out and get two dollar cost per clicks instead of ten dollar cost per clicks.
And you can do it with sticky customers that are willing to convert. And you have your margins and your pricing rate. That’s like you can start to really get ahead and compound your business. So I think it’s super powerful. I think it’s a cool thing that’s coming up.
So as you guys are kind of thinking about this, think go into your AI’s today. Take some action on this and prompt it for whatever you would search for. What are the best gyms in Dublin, Ohio? See what comes up? See who comes up?
Ask it. Why did you recommend those? Why are those recommended over insert your company? Why is the recommendation more powerful for those guys instead of us? What do we need to do to get ranked on this?
And just start asking those questions. I think that this is going to be something that is super important for us, especially if we are a business that relies on people finding us. If you guys are old school, like you guys have just been in business, you have great relationships. I think number one, keep on that. I think that is incredibly powerful.
Me practicing this, I am spending and spend a lot of time researching this and trying to make my site like incredibly searchable. But so far, guess how many customers I’ve gotten from somebody just searching, I don’t know what for AI, consultant, local business, consultant, whatever it might be, zero. All of my stuff has just been from referrals, word of mouth, all those things. And I actually think that as we get into this world where AI’s trustworthiness, sponsorships, paid ads, blah, blah, blah, as we get into that world, I actually think old school relationships, word of mouth, high trust, people I know and like, people I know and trust, making recommendations for me. I think that that actually becomes more powerful.
So I never want to tell people like, hey, just like stop focusing on customer relationships and all that like and focus on this. It’s just like, this is a yes and right. My primary is always word of mouth, doing an incredible job being personable, helping people to the best I can. And then hoping that they will tell their friends and family about me and that that will help me continue in business moving forward, right? That has always served me well.
I am a firm believer in that. But I can do that still and also put my best forward for my company online, right? On every platform. And I’m a big believer in that like, if you’re a business, if you say like, we are the best, we are excellent. Number one, like I always want to say that on every business that I’m ever involved with is like, I want to have that like, almost like cocky, egotistical.
Like, I think we are the best because if you don’t think that way, like, why the hell are you doing what you do? Right? And if you don’t think you’re there yet and you do agree and acknowledge and think that somebody’s better than you, like, bust your ass to competitor. Like, that’s just my mentality, right? And so I truly believe that like friendship and this is the best gym.
I don’t think I’ve been to a million other gyms. I don’t think any other gym comes close, right? So like, I truly believe that in my heart, right? A part of that is having everything else buckled up, dialed in best possible practice we can, right? So always staying ahead of the game.
And I always operated that way, right? Like, when we were starting to look at like, okay, some gyms have an app for their clients where they can book classes and see workouts is like, and we don’t have that right now. And we can’t say that we are the best if we don’t have that. So then you take immediate action that day, we’ve got to get on top of that, right? What’s next?
What’s next? What’s next? And constantly trying to stay aggressive on how we stay at that tip of the spear mentality. And I think it’s going to be impossible for people to say, oh, I’m at the tip of the spear when my website looks like it’s from 2010 or my website was made in 2014 or my website doesn’t have any of these little things that help us get seen by AI when 90% of the people who search for businesses are using AI, right? It’s not a huge ask.
It’s not super challenging. It’s not anything that we should feel intimidated by. And as we go through the process, we are using AI like our customers might like our other businesses might like people who interact with us might. And that teaches us something teaches us something about our business. It teaches us something about ourselves.
And we need to as business owners be trying to think about how do we stay the tip of the spear. So that’s it for this week guys. If you guys have any questions on this stuff or you guys are diving into anything, shoot it to me in an email. I always love to have kind of interaction on my podcast and a little back and forth on kind of what people are experiencing and seeing themselves. It helps me understand what to research, but also how if people are thinking and feeling about this stuff.
So I’ll talk to you guys next week.
