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Someone needs a service they have never bought before. Instead of searching Google and scrolling results, they open ChatGPT and type "who should I hire for this in Minneapolis."
They get three names. Maybe four. No page two, no map pack, no ads. Just an answer.
Something decided which businesses made that list. Understanding what that something is has become a real part of getting found, and it works differently enough from traditional search that a business can rank well on Google and still be completely invisible when the question gets asked this way.
Two things are happening at once, and they compound.
The first is AI answers appearing inside Google itself. Pew Research tracked the browsing of 900 US adults across roughly 69,000 searches and found that when an AI summary appeared, users clicked a traditional search result in 8 percent of visits, compared to 15 percent without one. Roughly half the clicks, gone. Users clicked a link inside the summary itself just 1 percent of the time, and they ended their browsing session entirely on 26 percent of pages with a summary versus 16 percent without.
Read that second number again. Being cited inside the answer earns almost no clicks. But being named inside the answer still shapes who the customer calls, because the recommendation itself is what they walk away with.
The second thing is people skipping search engines altogether and asking an assistant directly. That traffic never shows up in your analytics at all. You cannot see it, which is precisely why it is easy to convince yourself it is not happening.
They are not reading your homepage and deciding you seem nice. They are assembling evidence from across the web and looking for a business they can name confidently.
That distinction matters. A traditional search engine ranks a list and lets the human choose. An AI assistant usually gives one answer, or three. The bar for inclusion is higher because there is no page two to hide the uncertainty in.
What they pull from, roughly in order of weight:
Consistency across sources. Your name, address, phone, hours, and services should say the same thing everywhere they appear. Contradictions do not just look sloppy, they actively lower confidence. A system that cannot verify a basic fact about you will name a competitor it can verify.
Review content, not just review scores. This is the biggest shift from traditional local SEO. A four star rating with no text tells an AI nothing. A review that says "they handled our whole office move in Edina over one weekend and nothing broke" is usable evidence about what you do, where, and how well. Descriptive reviews outperform silent five stars.
Third party mentions. Being referenced somewhere other than your own website is what turns a claim into a fact. Local publications, chambers, industry associations, and genuinely relevant directories carry weight. A hundred junk directory listings do not.
Specific, verifiable content on your own site. Pages that name real neighborhoods, describe your actual process, state your credentials, show your own photos, and explain what happens after someone reaches out. Generic service copy that could belong to any business in any city gives a system nothing to grab onto.
Structured data. Schema markup that spells out your hours, services, and location in a machine readable format. It is not magic and it will not rescue a thin site, but it removes ambiguity from the facts you do have.
The old game was ranking for two or three word phrases. The new one is being the obvious answer to a question nobody phrased that way.
Real questions look like: "who handles this in south Minneapolis and can start before spring," or "I need someone who works with businesses my size and can integrate with what we already use."
Notice how much is packed in there. Location, timing, scope, a specific constraint. A page optimized around a two word keyword answers none of it. A page that plainly says which areas you serve, what your lead time looks like, who you typically work with, and what you handle end to end answers all four.
That is the shift. Write what is true and specific about your business instead of what you think ranks. The specific version is the version that gets you named.
This also happens to be good for humans, which is the reassuring part. The content that satisfies an AI assistant is mostly the content a careful customer wanted anyway. It is the same thinking behind the SEO and AEO work we run for clients.
Nothing here requires a rebuild.
That last step takes ten minutes and is the most clarifying thing on the list.
It would be easy to read all this as a reason to throw out everything you know about search. It is not.
The foundations still do the heavy lifting. A fast, clear website. An active Google Business Profile. Real reviews coming in consistently. Content that answers actual questions. Those were the right priorities before AI search and they are the inputs AI search runs on now.
What changed is the penalty for being vague. A business with thin, generic content used to still show up on page two. Now it does not show up in the answer at all, and there is no page two to show up on.
If you want to know what AI assistants currently say when someone asks for a business like yours in your market, that is something we can look at and report back on plainly. Get in touch and we will run it.
Let's build a plan that fits your market, your goals, and your next stage of growth.
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Marketing that drives real outcomes for businesses. Built and based in Minnesota, working nationwide.
