How did they get there?
Why do they look like this is just a normal afternoon?
The ears…LOL🤣
What Does A Dog Say? Roof! Roof!
Last Updated: May 20, 2025
10 Easy Ways To Prepare For AI Dominance In A Post-Search World
Last Updated: June 5, 2025
The way people find local businesses is changing fast. We’re moving away from traditional search engines like Google and toward AI-powered tools like ChatGPT, Grok, and Gemini. These platforms are gaining users at a rapid pace, and taking huge chunks of traffic away from search. If you’re still relying on search to reach new customers, you’re targeting a rapidly-shrinking audience.
AI tools aren’t just smarter, they’re faster, more convenient, and often more helpful than search ever was. That’s why more people are turning to them to ask questions, get recommendations, and even find local service providers. And here’s the key: these tools are already deciding which businesses to recommend… and which ones to ignore.
That’s why businesses like yours need to act now. If you wait until the pain sets in, it’ll be too late, and you can’t just “buy your way in” like you can with PPC ads. Even worse, these AI models don’t refresh daily, weekly, or even monthly. It’s common for AIs to be a year or two behind in their knowledge because retraining can cost millions of dollars. That means new information (like your website), may not be included for many months, or even years.
Here are 10 easy actions you can take today to help AI recognize your business and recommend you to future customers.
1. Ask for Better Reviews
Not just more reviews, but better ones. Ask your happy customers to be specific:
- “They quickly and professionally installed a new water heater in San Marcos, TX” (pure gold!)
- “Good plumber” (mostly unhelpful)
The first one has a specific service, uses some great adjectives (quick & professional), and includes the city and state. That’s the trifecta! The more detail, the easier it is for AI (and customers) to understand exactly what you do and where you do it. If you have to offer a discount or reward for a review, do it. If you have to offer a better reward for the RIGHT keywords in the review…do that too. Be upfront and tell the customer why. They’ll appreciate the candor and think you’re smart for being on top of the AI trend.
2. Get More Reviews
Gone are the days of skating by with 10 reviews. ChatGPT, the most lenient in this category, says that it expects small local businesses to have at least 50 now. Grok wants 100+. If you have fewer than this, the AIs will likely pass you over in favor of a business with a larger sample set of reviews.
Ask every happy customer. Offer a discount or small gift card if needed. Just start getting those numbers up!
If you need some ideas on how to get more reviews, check out these posts we did on that subject:
- Reviews: Why you MUST get them and tips for getting more of them
- Looking to Get More Google Reviews? Here’s Our Strategy
- How to Get More Customer Reviews Just by Asking for Them
3. Reply to Reviews (Professionally)
AI tools (and real humans) pay attention to how you respond to reviews — especially the bad ones.
- Thank people for positive reviews.
- Stay calm and professional with negative ones.
- Never argue or blame the customer.
Good responses show you’re responsible and trustworthy. Believe it or not, these are two traits AI is programmed to value.
Struggling with this? Don’t worry, most people do, but we help customers with this every day. Just reach out and we’ll be glad to help you.
4. Create Pages for Each Service You Offer
You’ve heard us harp on this for years: make a page for each service. Now it’s not just for Google, it’s for the AI too.
Rather than just saying that you offer “plumbing services,” break out each one into separate pages like:
- Toilet repair
- Faucet installation
- Water heater installations
AI can’t recommend you for a service if it doesn’t know you offer it. As smart as AI is, it still needs to be told exactly what you do.
5. List All Services Clearly
If you’re not ready to build out separate service pages, at least make sure all your individual services are listed in one spot. That means, for example, you will list “water heater installation” and “water heater repair” as separate items. Make this list exhaustive. While this is not a very helpful SEO practice, it can give you at least some benefit in the AI optimization realm.
6. Clearly State Your Hours And Whether You Offer Emergency Services
This one’s big and often missed. If you’ll respond to a call 24/7 and offer emergency services, say it clearly and prominently on your website. Why? Because when someone tells an AI, “I need an emergency plumber near me,” you’ll only show up if that term is on your site. Similarly, if it’s 8pm and someone asks for a plumber, being marked as open for business until 9pm gives you a chance to be in the running for that query.
7. Make Your Contact Info Prominent
Make sure your phone number, email, and business address are easy to find. Put them:
- In the header and footer
- On a Contact page
- On your service pages
AI tools can’t recommend you if they can’t figure out how customers will reach you.
8. Show Off Your Experience
Have you been in business for 10, 20, 30 years? Say it! A long track record builds trust. AIs (and customers) are more likely to recommend companies that seem stable, experienced, and reliable.
9. Win Some Awards (And Display The Ones You Already Have)
You don’t need a Nobel Prize, just something to signal credibility:
- A local “Best Of” award
- Chamber of Commerce recognition
- A trade association shoutout
- HomeAdvisor, Angi, BBB, or Thumbtack awards
These third-party mentions tell the AI you’re reputable and that makes you more recommendable. Even if your awards are a few years old, get the graphic and put it on your site with a couple sentences about it. This will tell the AIs that you are winning awards and will give you credibility.
10. Get Listed in the Right Directories
AI pulls a lot of its info from business directories. Of course more is better than fewer, but make sure your info is listed (and consistent) on the ones below, specifically, because the AIs are using these when they formulate opinions about your business.
- Google Maps / Google Business Profile
- Yelp
- BBB (Better Business Bureau)
- Thumbtack
- Nextdoor
- Houzz
- Angi
These listings also give you more chances to collect reviews, which as you know, is critical.
Final Thoughts
As we discussed last week, AI is changing how customers find businesses. Unfortunately, while it’s making things easier for the consumer, it’s making things quite a bit harder for businesses. You’ve got to continue doing everything you’ve been doing for search engines, but now you have more to do and fewer chances to show up in the results. Sometimes, just one…But with a few smart moves, you can stay ahead and make sure your company shows up when someone’s asking an AI for help.
And if you ever need help with any of this (websites, reviews, directories) we’re just a message away.
AI Optimization FAQs
Small businesses can prepare for AI dominance by implementing strategies such as obtaining detailed customer reviews, creating dedicated service pages, listing all services clearly, stating business hours and emergency services, and ensuring contact information is prominent. These actions help AI tools recognize and recommend their businesses to potential customers.
Detailed customer reviews provide AI systems with specific information about the services offered, quality of service, and location. Reviews that mention specific services, adjectives describing the service quality, and geographic details help AI tools understand and recommend the business accurately.
AI tools like ChatGPT expect small local businesses to have at least 50 reviews, while others like Grok prefer 100 or more. Having a substantial number of reviews increases the likelihood of being recommended by AI systems.
Creating dedicated pages for each service offered allows AI tools to identify and understand the specific services a business provides. This clarity increases the chances of the business being recommended for relevant queries.
Clearly stating business hours and availability of emergency services ensures that AI tools can accurately match the business with user queries that specify time-sensitive needs, such as ’emergency plumber near me.’
Purple
Last Updated: May 14, 2025
History Is Repeating: We’re Reliving The Yellow Pages Collapse
Last Updated: June 5, 2025
Remember when people laughed at the iPhone? No keyboard? All screen? Back in 2007, Blackberry and Palm Pilot users thought it was a gimmick. But within just a few years, physical keyboards were basically extinct, and Apple had reshaped the entire mobile industry.
Or think back to 2005. You could run a business without a website and still be fine. But by 2010? If you didn’t have a professional site, you might as well have been invisible. Customers were online, and if you weren’t, they simply couldn’t find you.
And then there’s the Yellow Pages. In 2005, those big fat books were still landing on everyone’s doorstep. A lot of folks thought they’d be around forever. But the internet had other plans. Usage plummeted. By 2015, they were on life support. Today, can you even remember the last time you actually saw one?
These changes happen slowly at first… then all at once.
Right now, we’re living through one of those moments again.
Search (yes, even Google) is on the verge of becoming the next Yellow Pages.
Sounds crazy, right? But AI tools like ChatGPT, Grok, and Gemini are already quietly siphoning traffic away from search engines. Instead of Googling, people are asking their AI assistants, and getting direct, no-click answers on the spot.
It won’t be long before typing a search and scrolling through results feels as outdated as using a Rolodex. It’s faster, easier, and more intuitive to simply ask your AI buddy and get the answer immediately.
For example, why would you search on Google, then read through a bunch of links when you can just ask your super-smart AI buddy. In this example, in less than 5 seconds, Grok searched through 25 websites and produced the below recommendation:
If you can’t see how this is going to obliterate search, you need glasses. This tsunami is coming and there’s no stopping it.
We’re not saying search is dead…yet. But it is 2005 all over again. And if your business isn’t preparing for a world beyond traditional search, you’re setting yourself up to fall behind.
What Should You Do Now?
Here’s the good news: you don’t need to scrap everything and make a hard left turn.
In fact, many of the things you’re already doing to compete in traditional search will still help you compete in the AI-driven future.
Creating fresh, helpful content, getting customer reviews, and building trust and authority online all still matter. Keep doing those things!
But now, it’s time to evolve your strategy. You need to add a few new techniques so your content isn’t just optimized for search engines and human visitors, but also works for AI assistants that are quickly becoming the new gatekeepers.
AI tools don’t search the way Google does. Rather than maintaining a giant file cabinet of documents, they ingest your website’s content, assimilating its information as part of it’s own knowledge. Then they use that knowledge to generate answers directly for their users, much more similarly to how we humans operate. If your content isn’t structured in a way that these models can understand and use, your business may get left out of the conversation entirely.
This shift doesn’t require you to throw everything out, it just means evolving your processes to stay relevant as the landscape changes.
GET OFF ZERO.
It’s absolutely critical that you take the first step in this evolution. Do something. Even a small move today gives you a huge head start over those still clinging to “search is forever.” Nothing will hurt you more in the long run than giving in to static inertia and procrastinating.
Step One: The AI Optimization Quick Start
We recommend starting with the low-hanging fruit that offers good bang-for-your-buck value. A good option is our AI Optimization Quick Start but there are other options out there. We recommend adding:
- An LLMs.txt file on your site to help AI tools find and interpret your content
- A well-formatted FAQ page, written with large language models in mind
From there, you can start layering in Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) and Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) to ensure every page of your site is ready for the next generation of search. These are things that can be done a little each month, so don’t get overwhelmed thinking you have to do this all at one time.
Bottom Line?
We really want you to recognize where we are in history, because we’ve been here before. AI is reshaping how people find businesses, just like smartphones reshaped communication, and websites replaced the phone book.
This isn’t a drill. And it’s not hype. This is your early-ish warning. Don’t go down with the ship. Search is still critical (for now) but it won’t be long before it’s gone. Get ahead now, or you’ll be scrambling later.
Need help getting started?
Let’s talk about how our AI Optimization services can future-proof your website, and keep you ahead of the curve before your search traffic disappears.
AI and Search Evolution FAQs
Yes, traditional search engines are facing a decline as AI tools like ChatGPT, Grok, and Gemini provide direct, no-click answers, reducing the need for traditional search methods.
AI assistants are altering user behavior by offering immediate, synthesized responses, leading users to bypass traditional search engines and directly consult AI tools for information.
Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) involves structuring website content to be easily understood by AI tools, ensuring that businesses remain visible in AI-generated responses.
Businesses should continue creating valuable content, gather customer reviews, and implement AI-friendly practices like adding an LLMs.txt file and well-structured FAQs to stay relevant.
Acting promptly allows businesses to stay ahead of the curve, ensuring they remain competitive as AI continues to reshape the digital landscape.
The decline mirrors the Yellow Pages’ fall, where a once-dominant platform became obsolete due to technological advancements, emphasizing the need for businesses to adapt to current trends.
There’s always one
Last Updated: May 9, 2025
