Your business is invisible in ChatGPT. That is a problem getting bigger every month.

Open ChatGPT. Type “best [your trade] near [your town]”. See what happens.

If your business comes up by name, you are fine. Skip this article. Go back to running your shop.

If it does not, keep reading.

Here is the thing nobody told the small business world. The way people look up businesses has shifted under our feet, and most of us did not notice. Twenty percent of search queries now happen inside an AI model, not on Google. ChatGPT alone serves over 200 million weekly users, most of them asking practical questions like “find me a plumber in Leeds” or “best independent bookkeeper for a small e-commerce business”.

Those queries used to land on Google, which used to land on your website, which used to land in your inbox. Not anymore.

Google rewards keywords, backlinks, and domain authority. It has done so for fifteen years. Most of us built our websites for that game.

ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews reward different things: