Your Customers Are Asking ChatGPT About You. Here's What It Says.

Two of our clients told us the same story in the last few weeks.

They were on a call with a new prospect and asked how the person found them. The answer was ChatGPT. The prospect had asked it who to call, and our client's name came up.

That got our attention. People have always looked businesses up online before calling. Now some of them ask an AI tool instead, and the tool just gives them an answer. We wanted to know what it says about us.

We tested our own site

Squarespace hosts our website, and it has a tool that checks this. It asks ChatGPT and Gemini questions about your business. Some questions use your name. Others are the kind a stranger would ask, like who is the best marketing agency in Halifax for a small business, or who does social media management in Halifax.

Our score was 91%. All of our pages have descriptions filled in, and all of our images have alt text. When the questions used our name, the tools described us well, 9 times out of 10.

Where we fell down

The one it got wrong was a fair point. Someone asked how you start a project with Charcoal Marketing, and ChatGPT could not answer, because we have never written that down on the site. Our homepage says "How we make fire." That sounds good, but it does not tell anyone how we actually work.

The other questions were harder. When people did not use our name, we showed up sometimes and not others. One miss was on us. The words "social media management" were not on our website anywhere, even though it is work we do. If the words are not there, the tool cannot find them, so it named other companies instead.

That is really how this works. These tools read what is on the internet and build an answer from it. If your site does not say what you do, in plain words, you will not be in the answer.

What helps

None of this needs a new program or a new hire. It is mostly the basics, done properly.

Say what you do in plain words. If you offer social media management, your site should say social media management, and say where you work. A creative headline is fine, but it cannot do the whole job on its own.

Answer the basic questions. How does someone start working with you? What does it cost, roughly? Who is it for? People want to know this stuff, and the tools tend to repeat the businesses that answer it.

Keep the basics done. Fill in your page descriptions. Add alt text to your images. Keep your business details the same everywhere they show up. It is boring work, but it matters.

It is not only your website. Reviews, directories and articles about your business also shape what the tools say about you. That work has always mattered. Now it matters in one more place.

Do not worry too much about the score. Ours was 91%, and it moves a bit each time, because the tools do not answer the same way twice. Use it to find the gaps. That is the useful part.

The point

Our two clients did not do anything special to get found. Their sites were clear about what they do, and the work behind them was in decent shape. That is the same work we do with clients every week. It has always helped on Google. It helps with this too.

People used to look you up before they called. Now some of them ask a tool and go with the answer it gives. That answer is often the first impression your business makes, and you are not there when it happens.

It is worth checking what it says.