What if youāre spending more to bring customers to your website when the problem starts before they get there?
You can explain what you offer when someone makes an enquiry. But that assumes they get that far. Your marketing reports wonāt show how often an AI assistant leaves you out.
Zohre Shirazi founded AI Wide Open, where she explores the practical impact of AI on businesses. In this guest post, she examines what an AI assistant needs to know about your business before it can recommend you.
You might still be deciding whether AI has a place in your business. Your next customer could already be using it to decide whether youāre worth considering. šš»
The sale you never knew you lost
A customer could be ready to buy exactly what you sell and never find your business. They ask an AI assistant to recommend a supplier, choose from its shortlist and buy from a competitor without ever seeing what you offer.
Youāve spent years investing in search rankings and making it easier for customers to buy once they arrive. AI assistants are introducing another decision point before that visit. They can compare products or services, recommend what looks like the best fit and, in some cases, complete the purchase.
If your business doesnāt make that initial selection, you lose the chance to explain why youāre worth considering. Thereās no abandoned basket to analyse or enquiry to follow up.
Your business simply disappeared earlier in the journey.
Thereās no single AI shortlist
In traditional search, customers see a list of links and decide which ones to investigate. AI assistants make an initial selection for them, and that selection can vary considerably.
In September, John Lewis said searches originating from AI agents rose from 0.3% to 2.5% in a year, with the trend accelerating.
Euromonitor tested 1,000 shopping prompts across ChatGPT and Gemini in the UK and US. In the scalp-care category, the brand Nizoral appeared in 58% of Gemini responses but only 24% on ChatGPT. A brand that features prominently in one assistantās recommendations can be far less visible in another.
Amazonās Alexa for Shopping, which combines the former Rufus assistant with Alexa+, shows how much further this can go. Amazon reported that more than 350 million customers used the assistant in the preceding 12 months. It can answer product questions, compare prices and even buy something automatically at a price the customer sets.
Thatās how AI is becoming a consideration layer, influencing which products customers evaluate before opening an individual listing.
When AI can't make sense of you
I think weāre getting too caught up in optimising for AI when businesses havenāt always got their basic product information right.