What is AI search?
The habit of asking instead of searching. It matters because the answer is a shortlist, and shortlists are short.
What changed
Typing keywords made the reader do the sorting. Asking a question hands that job to the machine, which returns a recommendation rather than a list. Most people accept it, the way most people accepted the first page of Google.
Why a shortlist is harder than a list
Ten blue links had room for the tenth business. Three named companies do not. The gap between being included and being left out is now wider than the gap between third place and fourth ever was.
That cuts both ways. A small studio that is genuinely the right answer to a narrow question can be named alongside companies many times its size, because the assistant is answering the question rather than ranking the budgets.
What to do about it
Be the clearest available answer to the questions your customers actually ask, and be described the same way everywhere a machine can read about you. Those two things are what our answer engine work does.
Questions worth asking
Do assistants send real customers, or just curiosity?
Both, and the split depends on the trade. For a decision somebody makes once every few years, like choosing a dentist or a builder, being named in the answer arrives very close to the moment they buy.
Which assistant matters most here?
The one your customers use, which in Albania and Italy is mostly ChatGPT today. That can change quickly, which is an argument for being readable by all of them rather than tuned to one.
Updated