Why AI Can Love Your Business and Still Never Recommend It

I accidentally gave myself a very useful lesson in AI discoverability this week. I opened a clean ChatGPT conversation with no knowledge of me or Inkie and started asking about marketing options for small businesses. I described the exact sort of thing I was looking for: affordable marketing support, social media, blogs, SEO, newsletters, and something designed specifically for a very small business that doesn't have an in-house marketing team or thousands of pounds to spend with a traditional agency.

It suggested lots of things. It did not suggest Inkie.

I tried asking in several different ways and still got no mention of Inkie. Eventually, I gave up and actually named it directly, at which point the answer changed completely. Once the AI looked at what Inkie actually does, it thought it was an excellent fit. In fact, it was considerably more enthusiastic about it than I would probably have been writing the sales copy myself.

Which raised a fairly obvious question: if AI thinks we are such a good answer, why didn't it find us in the first place?

And therein lies the core problem facing small businesses today.

Being Understood and Being Discovered Are Not the Same Thing

There are really two entirely different tests happening when someone uses search engines or AI assistants to find help:

1. The Understanding Test: If an AI system looks directly at my business, can it understand what I do and who I am useful for?

2. The Discovery Test: When somebody asks for something like me without mentioning my name, does AI have enough reason and confidence to bring me into the answer?

We were doing pretty well at the first test. We were not doing nearly as well at the second.

Once Inkie was named, there was plenty of structured information for the AI to evaluate. It could see what we offer, who it is for, what it costs, and how it works. But when Inkie was not named, we were competing for attention with businesses that have been talked about, reviewed, compared, linked to, and mentioned across the internet for years.

That is a completely different problem for a growing business to solve.

Your Website Cannot Do All the Talking

This is where some of the panic around AEO (Answer Engine Optimisation), GEO (Generative Engine Optimisation), and general AI visibility can become a little misleading.

Yes, your website needs to be technically accessible and easy to understand. OpenAI says public websites can appear in ChatGPT search results and specifically recommends allowing its OAI-SearchBot crawler if you want your content to be discovered, surfaced, and cited. Google's official guidance on generative AI search is reassuringly unexciting too: the core fundamentals of SEO still apply, and it warns against creating endless pages for every possible variation of a search query purely to manipulate search or AI results.

So no, you probably do not need to sacrifice a goat to the AEO gods or buy complicated new software.

But you do need more than just your own website saying, "We are brilliant at this."

Other parts of the internet need to help establish who you are and what you do.

AI Needs Evidence That You Belong in the Conversation

This is the key piece that small business owners should pay attention to. If your company is mentioned by customers, partners, industry organisations, business directories, journalists, event organisers, and other relevant websites, there is far more digital evidence connecting your business with the specific problem you solve.

That does not mean buying 10,000 artificial backlinks from dubious, suspicious websites. It means creating genuine, contextual evidence that your business actively exists in this space.

For us at Inkie, that might include customer case studies, verified reviews, partnership pages, business directory listings, podcast appearances, event participation, educational articles, awards, interviews, and real customers talking publicly about using Inkie. Crucially, those external mentions need to make it reasonably obvious what Inkie actually is.

A generic link saying "our friends at Inkie" is nice. A clear sentence saying "We use Inkie, a UK marketing platform for small businesses, to create and post our social content, blogs, and newsletters" gives a search engine or AI system considerably more useful context to connect the dots.

So Should We Start Creating Hundreds of SEO Pages?

No. Please don't.

There is a massive difference between writing genuinely useful pages for different target audiences and creating endless copies of the same page with one keyword changed. That is why, for example, we have created genuinely different Inkie pages for trades and makers.

A plumber and a ceramicist may both need marketing help, but they do not have the same business, the same customers, the same daily problems, or the same reasons for buying. Writing something genuinely tailored and useful for each audience makes complete sense.

On the other hand, creating 847 pages saying "AI marketing for plumbers in Eastbourne", "AI marketing for plumbers in Lewes", and "AI marketing for plumbers in Brighton" with essentially identical copy does not work, and AI engines will spot the fluff instantly.

What Am I Going to Do About It?

I am going to work on being known, not merely being indexed.

That means making sure the Inkie website very clearly explains what Inkie is, but also building more genuine evidence elsewhere across the web that connects us directly with small-business marketing. That means more customer stories, more reviews, more partnerships, more useful articles, and more places where other organisations describe what we do in plain English.

And probably more slightly obsessive experiments where I open a clean AI conversation and ask:

"What would you recommend for a small business that needs regular social media, blogs, and newsletters but doesn't want to pay agency prices?"

Then see whether we have managed to elbow our way into the answer yet.

Because that little experiment taught me something really useful: AI understanding your business once you tell it where to look is not the same as AI knowing your business well enough to recommend it.

And if people are increasingly asking AI what to buy, who to use, and where to go, that gap matters.

The good news is that closing it looks remarkably like good marketing has always looked. Do something useful, explain it clearly, get real people talking about it, and make sure the internet has enough genuine evidence to know what the hell you do.