AI Is Already Answering Questions About My Business, I Just Didn’t Know It

A customer told me something a few weeks back that I’ve mentioned before: she’d asked ChatGPT for a recommendation instead of googling one. I wrote about that at the time and thought that was the whole story. It wasn’t. What I didn’t realise until much later is that AI tools had already been answering questions about my own businesses for months, sometimes accurately, sometimes not, and I had absolutely no idea what any of it was saying.

I Went Looking Out of Curiosity

After that conversation with the customer, I got curious and started typing questions into ChatGPT and Google’s AI Overviews the way an actual customer would. Things like “best place for X near me” and “is [business] any good”. Some answers were fine. One was describing services I’d stopped offering two years ago. Another had my opening hours wrong. One didn’t mention me at all, despite a competitor two streets away showing up with a full, glowing summary.

Nobody sent me a notification about any of this. There’s no dashboard that pings you when an AI tool gets your business wrong. You only find out by going looking, or by a customer mentioning it in passing the way mine did.

This Isn’t the Same as Ranking on Google

For years I understood roughly how Google worked. Get your site sorted, build up some reviews, show up in the map pack, done. AI search doesn’t work the same way, and I didn’t understand that until I started digging. These tools pull from a mix of sources, your website content, review platforms, directory listings, and anything else that’s been indexed and deemed trustworthy enough to summarise. If your website is thin on detail, or your listings across the web contradict each other, the AI fills in gaps with whatever it can find, and sometimes that’s outdated or just wrong.

It explained a lot, actually. Why one AI Overview described my business almost perfectly and another got half of it wrong. It was pulling from different sources with different levels of accuracy.

The Fix Wasn’t What I Expected

I assumed the answer would be some complicated technical overhaul. It wasn’t, not entirely. A lot of it came down to making sure my own website actually said clearly, in plain language, what I do, where I do it, and what makes the business different, rather than the vague “About Us” paragraph I’d had sitting there for years. AI tools seem to lean heavily on content that answers questions directly rather than content that’s written to sound impressive.

The other half was consistency. Making sure my details matched everywhere they appeared online, because a tool pulling from five different sources with five different versions of my opening hours is never going to get it right.

I ended up working with **Look First Marketing** on the more structural side of it, the parts I genuinely wouldn’t have known how to fix myself, things to do with how content gets structured for AI search rather than traditional search. It’s a strange thing to pay for, optimising for a robot’s understanding of your business, but it made more sense once I’d seen my own listings coming back wrong in front of me.

Why I’m Not Ignoring This One

I ignored SEO for three years and wrote about what that actually cost me. I’m not making the same mistake twice with AI search. Customers are already asking these tools questions instead of typing them into Google, and the answers they’re getting shape whether they ever pick up the phone. If the answer’s wrong, or worse, if there isn’t one at all, that’s a customer gone before you even knew they were looking.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is AI search optimisation?

It’s the practice of structuring website and business information so that AI tools like ChatGPT and Google’s AI Overviews can accurately understand, summarise, and recommend a business when someone asks a relevant question.

How do I know what AI tools are saying about my business?

Ask them directly, the way a customer would. Try a few different phrasings across ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, and any other AI search tool you can access, and compare what comes back to what’s actually true.

Why would an AI tool get my business details wrong?

It’s usually pulling from outdated or inconsistent information across your website, directories, and review platforms. If those sources contradict each other, the AI has to guess which one to trust.

Is this different from normal SEO?

Related but not identical. Traditional SEO focuses on ranking in search results. AI search optimisation focuses on how clearly and consistently your information can be understood and summarised by an AI model.

Do small businesses actually need to worry about this yet?

Given how many people are already asking AI tools for recommendations instead of searching directly, it’s worth checking sooner rather than later, particularly if competitors in your area are already showing up accurately and you’re not.