Search platforms are deciding who gets found
Google has decided which local businesses get found for more than 20 years. Now ChatGPT is making those decisions too.
For years, being found online was fairly predictable. Build a website. Implement a little SEO. Google would tell people about you.
Then Google and ChatGPT launched AI-based search, and the experience changed. Instead of giving customers an endless list of blue links to explore, these platforms are generating conversational answers.
When someone asks who they should trust, Google and ChatGPT decide which one or two local businesses they trust and directly recommend them. Everyone else who used to be part of those blue links disappears from the answer.
Great local businesses are completely disappearing from online search.
I learned this after my own agency disappeared from search
I’ve spent my entire life around entrepreneurs. My granddad, Daddy Bob, put me to work pushing a broom as soon as I could hold one. I later spent a decade serving small-business leaders on Dave Ramsey’s leadership team, then built an agency that helped owners launch and run organizations across the country.
Different businesses. Same passion and reality.
I understood online visibility really well. That is, until I didn’t. Seemingly overnight, our own marketing agency disappeared from search.
It wasn’t long until we felt the impact in site traffic, incoming leads, and ultimately our revenue growth. A humbling experience. Also a little irritating.
The algorithms do not know you the way your customers do
Your customers can see the late nights. The years of experience. The way you take care of people when nobody is watching.
Google and ChatGPT cannot see any of that. They can only see what they can access, understand, and verify.
That means a great local business can do everything right in the real world and still be invisible online.
They can only see what they can access, understand, and verify.
You do not have to love AI search to understand it
This is why we created the course, and why we created Atlas.
The goal is not to turn you into an AI-loving tech nerd or hand you another pile of homework. It is to show you what changed, how it is affecting your business, and why this can be a tremendous opportunity to become the local organization Google and ChatGPT recommend.
None of us has to like the new rules of AI-based search. But all of us need to understand the game we’re playing.