A growing share of people now ask an AI assistant instead of scrolling search results. If it does not know your business exists, you are not in the answer.
Someone looking for a roofer used to type it into Google and scroll. Increasingly they ask ChatGPT, Gemini or Perplexity and get back three names with a short reason for each.
There is no page two. The assistant names a handful of businesses and the rest may as well not exist. Being one of those names is a different job to ranking tenth on Google.
AI systems read structured information far more reliably than they read marketing copy. Schema markup tells them plainly who you are, what you do, and where you work.
Then consistency. Your business name, address, phone number and service list need to match across your website, Google Business Profile, and every directory that mentions you.
Assistants quote content that directly answers a question. Long marketing copy that circles the point tends to get skipped in favour of a competitor who answered plainly.
That means restructuring key pages into clear questions and direct answers, in plain language, with the specifics an assistant needs to recommend you with confidence.
Each month we ask the major assistants the buying questions your customers ask, and record whether your business gets named and how it gets described.
That is a measurable outcome rather than a promise. If you are not being named after a few months, we say so and change the approach.
There is real overlap. Clean structure, schema, consistent business information and good content help both. What differs is the target: traditional SEO competes for a position in a list, this competes to be one of two or three names an assistant mentions. The content that wins is written differently.
No, and nobody can. These systems are not rankings you can buy into and their behaviour changes. What we can do is make sure the information about your business is complete, consistent and structured, which is what they draw on. Then we measure whether it is working.
Enough that it is worth building for, and the direction of travel is clear. For most local businesses this is not urgent yet. It is cheap groundwork now that is expensive to catch up on later.
No. If your website is thin or your Google Business Profile is half set up, fix those first. They feed this anyway. We will tell you honestly if you are not ready.
We record what the major assistants say about your business each month, before and after. You see the actual responses, not a score we made up.
Bring your business name and we will ask a few assistants what they say about you, live. Sometimes the answer is nothing at all, which is itself worth knowing.