Marketing Trend Capsule

   What businesses need to manage across search, maps, reviews, websites, social media, and AI Customers No Longer Discover Businesses Through a Single Path In the past, the customer journey was relatively simple. People entered keywords into a search engine, reviewed the results, and selected a website. Today, customers move between search engines, maps, business profiles, review platforms, social media, websites, and AI services when looking for a business. A customer might ask an AI service to recommend a suitable business, check its location on a map, read reviews, and then visit its website to learn about its services and booking options. The place where a customer first discovers a business may not be the place where they ultimately decide to choose it. Business Discovery is the concept that helps us understand and manage this entire process of discovery and evaluation across multiple channels. What Is Business Discovery? Business Discovery is not simply simply about ach...

  The more you learn about AI discovery, the more practical questions you are likely to have. How do AI assistants such as ChatGPT find businesses? What information do they use? How are Google search results related to AI recommendations? Can a business appear in AI recommendations without ranking at the top of Google? As we explored in What Is AI Discovery? A Small Business Owner’s Guide , AI discovery adds another way for customers to find, compare, and evaluate businesses. But there is no single system that explains how every AI assistant finds and recommends local businesses. Different AI assistants can use different search, browsing, retrieval, and source-display features. Some AI services provide web search and visible citations or source links, but the exact experience varies by product and feature.[1][2][3][4] Results may vary depending on the question, the assistant, the information available to that assistant, and when the test is conducted. Traditional search rankings an...

If your business ranks highly on Google, is it more likely to be recommended by an AI assistant? And if AI recommendations do not simply follow Google’s ranking order, should small business owners start paying less attention to traditional search? In the previous article, we examined why a business does not need to rank first on Google to appear in an AI recommendation. That leaves a different question: If Google ranking does not directly determine AI recommendations, why does traditional search still matter in AI discovery? The short answer is this: Google Search ranking is not an AI recommendation score. But the search foundation and public information a business maintains can affect how easily customers and search-connected AI systems can discover and understand that business. This relationship is especially clear within Google’s own AI search experiences. Google says AI Overviews and AI Mode are supported by its core Search ranking and quality systems. Pages generally need to be in...

If your business does not rank near the top of Google search results, you may wonder: “If customers cannot easily find my business on Google, could ChatGPT still recommend it?” This is not really a question about whether ChatGPT might choose the business ranked #2 instead of the business ranked #1. The more useful question is whether a business can appear in a ChatGPT recommendation without ranking highly in Google’s organic results. Based on the public evidence available today, we cannot say that a business must rank highly in Google’s organic results to appear in ChatGPT recommendations. OpenAI explains that ChatGPT can search the web when a question may benefit from current information, and users can also choose to search manually. Search-based responses can include citations and a list of sources. OpenAI also states that websites must allow OAI-SearchBot access to be included in ChatGPT search results. It does not identify a high Google organic ranking as a requirement for search i...