Is AI search worth your attention?
Use evidence from your own customers before committing to another marketing expense.
Start with the question that affects your business
The useful question is not whether everyone has stopped using search engines. It is whether some of your potential customers are using AI assistants to shortlist businesses like yours, and whether a better discovery journey could matter to you.
Look for your own signals
Review identifiable referral sources where your analytics supports them. Ask new customers how they first heard about you. Note specific reports of an AI recommendation rather than grouping every online enquiry into the same bucket. None of these methods gives a complete picture on its own.
Check the experience, not only the traffic
A person may discover your name in one place and book through another. We would treat a customer’s explanation, referral data and a saved search example as different pieces of evidence, not add them together as three new customers.
Choose a bounded first step
Before a large retainer, agree what will be reviewed, which practical changes are in scope and how you will judge the work. Missing service information or wrong hours may be worth fixing regardless of the exact discovery channel.
Leave room for “not yet”
A business with an urgent booking problem, an unusable website or a different acquisition priority may need to address that first. We would rather have a useful conversation about fit than sell an elaborate programme on the strength of a broad adoption statistic.
See how this applies
to your business.