More people are asking AI who to hire. Is your business in the answer?

People used to Google a lawyer, a contractor or a doctor and sort the results themselves. Now they increasingly just ask ChatGPT, Claude or Perplexity and get a short, confident shortlist. It's not fringe: ChatGPT grew from roughly 300 million weekly users in late 2024 to about 900 million a year later, and in 2025 surveys nearly 6 in 10 Americans said they use AI to shop — 1 in 4 said it beats Google for product research. Almost 60% of U.S. searches now end with no click at all. Soon the AI's shortlist won't be one input into the decision; it'll be the decision.

So why are good businesses missing from it? Two reasons.

1. Their sites aren't built for AI to read

AI doesn't browse a site the way a person does — it reads the underlying code for plain text and for the signals that say who you are, what you do and why you're trustworthy: services, location, hours, reviews, the structured facts behind your pages. When a site is built for human eyes (images, scripts, marketing polish) but not for machines, AI can't easily access or verify your value — so it leaves you out and recommends a competitor it understood more easily.

2. They blocked the wrong AI bots

Many businesses blocked "AI bots" to keep their content out of training — a fair instinct. But per OpenAI's own documentation, there are two kinds. Training bots (GPTBot, CCBot, Google-Extended) learn from your content; blocking them costs you nothing. Reference bots (ChatGPT-User, OAI-SearchBot, PerplexityBot) fetch your page live when a customer asks a question — block those and you can't appear in the answer, no matter how good you are. Most businesses blocked both.

Both are fixable: make your site readable and trustworthy to machines, and keep the training bots out while letting the reference bots in. This week, ask an AI to recommend a business like yours and see if you come up.

That's GEO Digest — getting found by AI, one practical idea at a time.