A founder I work with Googled his own company last year and found an AI summary describing his business the way it looked a decade ago. Old positioning, old focus, a competitor with a similar name ranking above him for his own brand. He’d been running a good firm the whole time. The machines just never got the memo.
That moment stuck with me because it’s not rare. It’s the norm. Most of the businesses I sit with are better than they look online, and now there’s a second problem stacked on top of the first. It’s not just what buyers find when they search. It’s what an AI assistant says about you when a buyer asks it directly, and most owners have never once checked.
Open ChatGPT, or Claude, or Perplexity, whichever you have handy. Ask it what your customer would ask. Not your company name. The question.
“Best pheasant hunting lodge in South Dakota.” “Fractional CFO for a growing company.” “Who should rebrand my construction business.” Whatever your version is, phrase it like a buyer who’s never heard of you, because that’s who’s asking.
Three things can come back. You’re named and described accurately, which means you’re winning a game most of your competitors don’t know exists. You’re named but described wrong, old services, old story, which is fixable and urgent. Or you’re not there at all, and some other business is soaking up the recommendation that could’ve been yours.
Then ask the follow-up that stings a little. “What do you know about [your business name]?” Read what comes back like a stranger would. That’s your reputation in the machine’s memory, and buyers are reading it whether you do or not.
The buying journey moved. About 94% of B2B buyers now use AI tools somewhere in the buying process, and roughly three quarters of the journey happens anonymously, before anyone fills out a form or picks up a phone. When Google shows an AI Overview, around 80% of those impressions end without a click to anybody’s website. The shortlist gets built in a chat window now, quietly, and 92% of buyers walk into the process with at least one vendor already in mind.
I call that stretch the silent evaluation. Your next customer researches you, compares you, and half-decides on you before you ever know they exist. It used to happen on Google page one. Now a growing share of it happens inside an AI answer, and there’s no page two.
Here’s the part I got wrong for a while. I assumed AI visibility was a big-company game, something for brands with PR teams and Wikipedia pages. Then I started testing it for my own clients and watched small, well-documented businesses come up ahead of bigger, sloppier ones. The machines don’t reward size. They reward clarity and evidence.
Nobody outside those labs knows the full recipe, but the pattern is visible if you test enough. A few things keep showing up.
AI assistants lean hard on third-party sources. Somewhere around 85% of citations in AI answers come from places other than the company’s own website. Reviews, directories, press, industry lists, other people talking about you. Your website matters, but what the rest of the internet says about you matters more.
They reward consistency. If your website says one thing, your Google profile says another, and your LinkedIn says a third, the machine does what a cautious buyer does. It hedges, or it skips you. One story, everywhere, is worth more than a clever story somewhere.
They reward structure. Clear answers to real questions, pages that state plainly what you do and who you serve, markup under the hood that labels your business for machines. Boring, unglamorous work that most businesses skip because nobody sees it. The machines see it.
And they reward freshness. That founder with the decade-old AI summary wasn’t being punished. He just hadn’t given the machines anything newer to work with.
The industry started calling this work GEO, generative engine optimization. I keep the distinction simple. SEO gets you ranked. GEO gets you recommended. Ranking puts you on a list a buyer has to sort through. A recommendation hands the buyer a conclusion.
The good news is the two aren’t rivals. Almost everything that improves your AI visibility also improves your search, your referrals, and honestly your sales calls, because it all comes down to the same root question. Is your business clear, consistent, and provable everywhere a stranger might check? Most businesses fail that test not because they’re bad at what they do, but because nobody ever sat down and made the decision. It’s a decision problem, not a budget problem.
Run the two-minute test above and write down what you find. That’s your baseline, and you can’t improve a number you never looked at.
Fix the story before the plumbing. One sentence that says who you serve and why they pick you, said the same way on your website, your Google profile, and your social bios. Consistency is the cheapest visibility win available.
Feed the third-party layer. Ask your best customers for reviews. Get listed where your industry gets listed. Every outside mention is a vote the machines can count.
Then handle the structure, the schema markup, the answer-shaped content, the technical layer. It’s real work, but it’s the third step, not the first. I’ve watched businesses pour money into the plumbing while the story stayed muddy, and the needle didn’t move.
Want the full picture with a score? The 2-minute brand audit rates your business across the six things buyers and AI actually check, and hands you the playbook for whatever it finds.
I run GiddyBrands out of Charlotte, North Carolina, and work with founder-led businesses across the US, from local service companies to nationwide brands. The AI visibility work above is baked into every brand we build, because a brand nobody can find isn’t finished.
Ask it the question your customer would ask, like “best [your category] in [your area],” phrased naturally. Then ask what it knows about your business by name. Do the same in Claude and Perplexity, since each pulls from different sources. Ten minutes gives you a real baseline.
Yes, and I’ve watched small businesses outrank bigger competitors. AI assistants reward clear positioning, consistent information across the web, third-party mentions like reviews and directories, and structured content. None of that requires a big budget. It requires deciding what your story is and saying it the same way everywhere.
They overlap a lot, but the goal differs. SEO earns you a ranking on a results page a buyer sorts through. GEO earns you the recommendation inside an AI answer. Most of the underlying work, clear content, consistent facts, outside credibility, serves both at once.
