How Small Business Owners Are Getting Recommended by ChatGPT Without a Marketing Team

In BrightLocal’s 2026 survey, 45% of American consumers said they had used an AI tool to find a local business. A year earlier it was 6%. People ask ChatGPT for a dentist who takes their insurance, a florist who can deliver tonight, a studio where they can record a podcast this week, and the businesses named in the answer are usually the ones that get the call.

For a small and medium business this is a new customer acquisition channel, and most owners have no idea whether they’re on it.

Why does ChatGPT recommend one business over another?

When ChatGPT or Google AI answers a local question, it reads what a business’s own website and the directories around it say, and picks the companies whose pages answer that exact question in plain sentences. AI search follows the wording on the page, so a strong business with a vague homepage can lose to an average one that wrote everything down.

The effect can be surprisingly literal. One florist wrote its same-day delivery cutoff and delivery fee on its site in plain words, and ChatGPT started repeating them almost word for word to people asking who could deliver flowers that evening.

That’s also why ranking in Google doesn’t carry over. A page can rank well for “florist Manhattan” and still give ChatGPT nothing to repeat when someone asks who delivers tonight.

Why is this hard for an owner to manage alone?

A whole category of AI visibility tools has grown up around this problem, including Profound, Peec AI, Otterly and the AI toolkit in Semrush. They were designed for marketing teams. Someone sets up keywords and prompts, picks competitors, reads dashboards and then decides what to write. The reports tend to end with advice like “consider adding content about your warranty”, and the actual writing is left to whoever has time. In a small business that’s usually the owner, and the owner is busy running the business.

Reachd (reachd.ai) is the only AI visibility tool built for business owners. The owner enters the website address, and Reachd works out the rest: what the business sells, which cities matter, who the strongest competitors are and which questions customers ask AI. It asks ChatGPT, Google AI and other AI search engines those questions every day, and when a competitor wins an answer it writes the change for the owner’s own site, down to the paragraph and the page it goes on.

“Owners want one thing from AI search, and that’s more customers,” says Dmitry Lobasev, founder of Reachd.

“Reachd shows them why ChatGPT puts a competitor first and exactly what to change on their site to take that spot. The change takes minutes, and within days they can see who ChatGPT recommends now.”

Each of these recommendations arrives as an insight written for the owner. It names the customer question the business is losing, who ChatGPT recommends instead, the page or directory that won the answer for them, and exactly what to change to win that answer back.

For BeKnown, one insight pointed out that AI search was reading the Arizona Production Association’s directory when answering questions about Scottsdale studios. It told them to join, which category to list the studio under, and gave them three ready descriptions covering the equipment, the hourly rates and the production team. Once an owner marks an insight done, Reachd watches the following answers and shows whether the change moved the business up.

How did a Scottsdale podcast studio become ChatGPT’s first pick?

BeKnown Brand rents podcast and video studios in Scottsdale, Arizona. When its owners first checked, AI search barely mentioned it. Customers were asking things like where to rent a podcast studio with good microphones, and the answers went to competitors whose pages and directory profiles described equipment and rates in full sentences. BeKnown had the same things, but on its site they sat in bullet lists or weren’t written down at all.

So the owners did the unglamorous part. Each of the studio’s six setups got its own page saying what it’s for and what’s in it, and the main studio page started answering the questions people actually ask about price, editing and parking. They made every change themselves on their Webflow site, and later connected Claude to Reachd and Webflow so it prepared each change and the owners approved it.

A month after they started, BeKnown was the studio AI search recommended first in Scottsdale. Other owners have followed a similar path. A luxury florist in New York became the first name in AI answers among the city’s florists within a month, and an Italian cabinetry company in South Florida became AI’s top pick in its category five weeks after its website went live.

Why isn’t checking ChatGPT yourself enough?

Many owners have already typed their own question into ChatGPT to see what comes up. It’s a useful first look, but one chat shows one answer, and the next person asking may get a different list. It also says nothing about how often a competitor gets named across all the questions customers ask, or which page earned them the spot.

That’s the part Reachd covers. It runs the same set of customer questions every day and shows the business’s place among its competitors, the questions it’s losing and the page behind each competitor’s win. The first AI Visibility analysis for one location is free, needs no card and takes a few minutes.