Go ask ChatGPT what it knows about your business. I'll wait.
Actually, ask it the question your best customer asks right before they hire someone like you. “Who does X in Houston.” “Best tool for Y.” Whatever the real question is. Then read what comes back, because right now, today, an AI is answering that question for thousands of people, and it's saying something about you. Or about your competitor. Or it's making something up entirely and saying it with total confidence.
You just don't know which. That's the part that should bug you.
The clicks aren't coming the way they used to
Here's what changed, in plain terms. You ask Google something now and a lot of the time an AI box answers right there on the page. No clicking. No visiting anybody's website. The answer just appears, the question's handled, and everyone moves on. When that box shows up, the site that used to be ranked number one loses more than half its clicks.
So the old prize — be number one, collect the traffic — is shrinking. The new prize is different: be the business the answer is made of. Get named inside it.
And before you panic: the people who do still come through from these AI tools tend to show up already half-decided. Smaller stream, much higher intent. It's a stream worth being in.
Why “I rank number one” stopped being the whole story
You can rank beautifully and still be invisible in the AI answer, because the AI isn't just reading the top of Google anymore. It's pulling from a wider, weirder set of places — other people's articles, Reddit threads, YouTube — and stitching an answer together from whoever it trusts on that topic. Your ranking is part of it. It's not all of it anymore.
This is the thing nobody selling you a panic about “AEO” actually explains. They just want you scared enough to buy the course.
What to actually do this week
One thing. Open ChatGPT, or Perplexity, or Google's AI box, and ask it your customer's question. Write down what it says about you. Three outcomes:
- It named you. Good. Now you know there's something to protect.
- It named a competitor and not you. That's a gap, and it's fixable.
- It made something up about you. That happens more than you'd think, and it's worth knowing.
That's your starting line. Not a strategy yet — just the truth about where you stand. Most people have never once looked, which means most people are flying blind on the exact channel that's eating their old traffic.
You don't have to become an expert in any of this. You just have to look, and then decide what's worth doing about what you find. If you'd rather someone looked for you and handed you the short list — that's literally a thing I do. But honestly? Start by just asking the robot about yourself. It's free, and it's a genuinely strange feeling to read a machine describe your business to a stranger.
If you want the plain-English version of what to do next, I wrote a guide: AEO Without the Hype. Pay what you want.