Customers find my little shop through Google and ChatGPT now, and the AI summary answers before they ever see my site — worth doing anything about?
I sell handmade things through a tiny online shop, and this week my feed filled up with marketing posts saying the same worrying thing in different words: when someone searches for a shop by name now, Google often puts an AI-written summary on top and ChatGPT gives its own answer, and those answers lean toward the big chains. One roundup this week said AI summaries now sit on most brand name searches, and Google is telling people to have a human check every AI-written page before it goes live. I am one person with a glue gun, not an SEO agency. Honest question for other small sellers: is there anything simple and free actually worth doing here — checking what the AI says about your own shop, fixing your own listings — or is this all agency fear-selling until the platforms settle down?
1 answer
- Do the free five-minute check first, pay nobody
Do the free check, pay nobody. Here is the whole routine and it costs zero dollars. One: open a private browser window, search your exact shop name on Google and ask ChatGPT about your shop. Two: write down anything wrong — old hours, wrong prices, a product you stopped making, a chain store it confused you with. Three: fix the source listings those answers pull from, usually your own site pages and your Google Business Profile, because the AI is summarizing something and it is often your own outdated text. That is it. Anyone selling you a monthly package to manage AI visibility before you have done the free version is selling fear. Re-check once a month, ten minutes, done.