I’m on a call with a client every day of the week, Charlotte to South Dakota to India to New Zealand. Somewhere in the last few months, AI search stopped being a thing we talk about and became a thing that moves their numbers. Two calls last week showed me how, and neither went the way I expected. Ranking in ChatGPT turned out to be the easy part.
We pulled up the ten questions his buyers actually ask ChatGPT before they hire someone like him. Not the questions we wished they’d ask. The ones they type. Who’s the best at this in his city, what does it cost, who do you recommend for this specific problem.
He comes up first on seven of them. First. He was grinning about it, and honestly so was I. That took a good bit of time and strategy.
Then I opened his traffic.
Flat. Same as June. The phone didn’t ring any louder.
He wasn’t mad. He was curious. Okay, so how do we turn that into something.
That’s the million dollar question right now, and I don’t think most people running a business have been told the answer yet.
Different client, different industry, wants what the first guy has. We’re working on it every week. And what I told him is that the roadmap for what happens after you get there matters more than getting there, because I’d just watched someone arrive and it didn’t move the needle on its own.
When an AI answers the question, the click is gone.
Pew Research looked at about 69,000 real searches last year. When Google shows an AI Overview, roughly 8 percent of people click any result at all. Without one, it’s 15 percent. Only about 1 percent click the citation links inside the AI answer itself.
ChatGPT is worse for your website, in the sense that matters. Cloudflare’s May data put ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and Perplexity combined at about 0.29 percent of referral traffic to websites. It reads your site, says your name, and sends you almost nobody.
But people are still choosing who to go with. They’re just choosing before they ever land on your site.
That’s the shift. Ranking in ChatGPT used to look like the finish line. Now it’s the starting line.
Someone asks ChatGPT who to call. It names you and two others. Then one of three things happens, and none of them is a click on the citation link.
They search your name on Google. That’s the most common one, and it means your brand results page has to close the deal. Your Google listing, your reviews, your LinkedIn, and your site all showing up together and saying the same thing.
They ask a follow-up question. What does he charge, how long does it take, is he any good. The AI goes back to the same sources. If your site answers those questions plainly, it quotes you again. If it doesn’t, it quotes someone else.
They go straight to your site, which is the rare one. And when they do, they know more and stay longer than a normal visitor, so that visit has to land on something with an ask on it, not a blog post that dead-ends.
What gets you the lead is a digital presence the AI can read as one story. Your website, your Google listing, your LinkedIn, your reviews, all saying the same thing about who you are and who you’re for. That’s what the models crawl before they answer. When it lines up, the person searches your name next and you win. When it doesn’t, you’re a name they read once.
That’s brand. Not a logo, the one clear story every channel repeats. It’s what turns being the answer into being the one they choose.
Here’s what we’re doing for both clients now.
Say one thing everywhere. Site, Google Business Profile, LinkedIn, and the reviews, all describing the same company in the same words. Not similar. The same.
Keep the reason to visit. Let the AI tell people what you do and where. Keep how you do it, what it costs, and how to start on the site, because those are the questions that still earn a click.
Own the follow-up. Every page the AI is quoting now has a real ask on it. A visitor you can’t reach again is a visitor you rented.
Watch the right number. Clicks are down for everyone. Brand-name searches going up is the win, and Google Search Console shows you that for free. That’s the metric in the monthly report now, not traffic.
A year ago, about 6 percent of people used an AI tool to find a local business. This year BrightLocal puts it at 45 percent. That’s not a trend, that’s a switch flipping, and it happened inside twelve months.
Best time to plant a tree was twenty years ago. Second best time is now.
Want to know where you land? Send me your website and I’ll check the ten questions your buyers ask ChatGPT, tell you where you show up and where you don’t, and what I’d fix first. Takes me a day, no charge, and it’s me doing it, not a bot.
GiddyBrands is a senior-led branding studio in Charlotte, North Carolina, working with founder-led businesses across the US and abroad. No account manager layer, the person you talk to builds the work. The portfolio shows what that looks like in practice.
Not much. When an AI answers a question, about 8 percent of people click any result, and AI assistants combined send under a third of one percent of referral traffic to websites. Being named matters, but the decision usually happens without a visit, so the win shows up as brand-name searches and inquiries rather than clicks.
Make sure the person who searches your name next finds one consistent story. Your website, Google Business Profile, LinkedIn, and reviews should describe the same company in the same words. Keep pricing, process, and how to start on your site, since those questions still earn a click, and put a clear ask on every page the AI is quoting.
Ask it the questions your buyers ask before they hire someone like you. Who’s the best at this in my city, what does it cost, who do you recommend for this specific problem. Ten questions is enough to see the pattern. If you’d rather I run it, send me your website and I’ll do it in a day.
Sources: Pew Research Center, “Google users are less likely to click on links when an AI summary appears in the results,” July 2025. Cloudflare Radar, AI referral traffic data, May 2026. BrightLocal, Local Consumer Review Survey 2026.
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