Your next customer is asking AI about you
AI now answers the question your customers used to ask a friend. What it says about you depends on how clearly your brand is written down.
The referral conversation has moved. Where a customer once asked a friend for a name, they now ask a chatbot. And where a friend might give five names, AI tends to give about three, with no page of results underneath to sort through yourself. You are either in the answer or you are not.
This piece argues that AI did not change what makes a business worth choosing. It changed who does the choosing, and how few names make the cut. What gets picked up is what is legible: a clear one sentence answer to why you, a consistent read on your business at every point a customer meets it, and a promise that holds from the ad all the way to the handshake. If what makes you different lives only in your head and in the memory of past customers, a machine has nothing to repeat back.
It closes with four things to do this week. The first is to ask AI to describe your own business, then read the answer honestly.
