Is AI Recommending Your Business or Your Competitor?

Welcome to Found, Trusted and Chosen by Arising Co, where we talk about how businesses get discovered, earn trust, create better digital experiences, and ultimately get chosen.

There’s a question I’ve been asking business owners a lot lately, and it’s this:

Is AI recommending your business or your competitor?

Now, I don’t mean this as some futuristic marketing question. I mean right now, in the present.

People are already opening ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, and other AI tools and asking questions that they used to type into Google.

However, now they’re providing far more context.

Things like:

“Who builds luxury homes in Orlando?”

Or:

“Who’s a good digital marketing company for my business?”

They’re providing that context directly through their conversations with the AI tool, and AI gives them an answer.

Now, are you the answer they’re receiving, or is it a competitor?

Sometimes it even gives them reasons why those companies might be a good fit, and hopefully you fit in there.

But the business owner doesn’t even realize that this entire buying decision is starting to happen without them ever seeing a search results page.

That’s what I want to talk about today, because I think a lot of businesses are underestimating how quickly this is changing.

I’m Michael Santiago. I own and founded Arising Co here in Orlando, and we help businesses with websites, SEO, AI visibility, and digital marketing.

One of the things that we’ve been paying a lot of attention to over the last year is how people are actually finding businesses now.

For a long time, the conversation was really simple.

You wanted to show up on Google.

Someone searched for a service, they clicked your website, they saw your reviews, and they called you.

And Google is still extremely important. I don’t think that’s going away.

AI tools still rely on the SERPs, the ratings, and the rankings that Google gives you on page one, page two, et cetera.

But there’s another layer now being added on top of that.

Now, someone might not search for ten companies and open ten tabs.

They might just simply ask Claude:

“I’m looking for a company that does this. I live here. I care about these things. Who would you recommend?”

And instead of giving them ten blue links, AI may give them three companies, maybe five, or sometimes one.

Think about how different that is.

Because if you’re not one of those businesses being mentioned, you may never even enter the consideration set.

That’s why I’ve become super interested in AI visibility.

Where before websites could take anywhere from six to nine months to rank from SEO changes done on the website, now, with AI search, websites that we work on are being found within one to two months of our initial work.

And not only that, they’re also then ranking in Google search.

Now, one of the biggest misconceptions I see is businesses thinking that they need some kind of secret AI sauce or optimization tricks.

But they don’t.

A lot of the problem is much simpler.

There just isn’t enough information online for AI to really understand your business.

I’ll give you an example.

Let’s say that you’re an outdoor living company.

You build custom pools.

You build outdoor kitchens.

You build pergolas.

You do complete backyard transformations.

Now, you serve Orlando, Winter Park, Lake Mary, Windermere, Winter Garden, and a bunch of surrounding areas.

You’ve been doing this for 15 years.

You’ve completed hundreds of projects.

But when I go to your website, you only have five pages.

You have a home page, an about page, a services page, a gallery, and a contact page.

And your services page basically says:

“We build beautiful outdoor spaces. Contact us today.”

You might have a nice, fancy photo of something that you’ve done, and it might look clean.

It might even be a nice-looking website.

But there’s almost nothing there for a search engine or an AI platform to understand.

What kind of pools do you specialize in?

What areas do you serve?

What makes your process different?

What type of customer is a good fit?

What does a project typically involve?

What materials do you use?

Do you do complete design-build work?

Do you handle permitting?

Do you build outdoor kitchens?

Do you work in Windermere?

Do you work in Winter Park?

There could be 50 things that you know about your company because you live and breathe the business every day, but none of that knowledge exists online.

And that creates what I think is going to become one of the biggest marketing problems for established businesses over the next few years.

Your company may have a much stronger reputation in real life than it does digitally.

And that matters because AI doesn’t know what everyone in your community knows about you.

It has to find evidence.

It has to understand your website.

It has to understand what other websites say about you.

And it has to understand your services, your location, your expertise, your reviews, your projects, pretty much all the authority that you have in the space.

Now, this is one of the reasons that I keep talking about thin-content websites.

A lot of companies have actually outgrown their websites.

The business might be doing millions of dollars a year, but their online presence still represents the company that they were five years ago.

And if most of your business comes from referrals, it’s really easy to ignore that.

Referrals are still coming in.

The phone is still ringing.

So why change anything?

But here’s what I would think about:

What happens with everybody who wasn’t referred to you?

What happens when somebody moves into your market and doesn’t know anybody?

What happens when a homeowner receives three recommendations and decides to research all three companies?

What happens when somebody asks AI instead of asking their neighbor?

You see, that’s where your website starts doing a lot of the selling before you ever get involved.

And I think businesses need to stop treating their websites like simple pages that just have basic information.

It’s almost like a graphic ad that you might print out and put in a magazine. It’s just there online for people to see, but it’s not treated as the main thing.

We need to stop treating it like it’s not a main thing.

Especially now that AI is crawling your website and sending little agents to find and dig up all that information.

I mean, what happens when you’re an outdoor living company and, for every sale that you make, you give to young kids globally and donate part of your profits to them?

What happens when someone looking for your service asks AI to choose a company that serves its community or gives globally to a like-minded mission, just like I was describing?

But because your website doesn’t have that information, you end up not getting recommended while someone else does.

That’s what I’m talking about here.

Your website needs to be an asset that you actually care about.

It should be explaining your company.

It should be answering questions.

It should be demonstrating expertise.

It should be showing your work.

It should be helping people understand why they should trust you.

And it should be giving search engines and AI platforms enough information to actually know when your company deserves to show up.

Again, we’ve seen this inside even our own company, not just our clients.

Earlier this year, we started intentionally expanding our own website.

Instead of having a handful of broad service pages, we started answering more specific questions.

We built pages around the things prospects actually search for.

We created more depth around the problems that we actually solve.

And we started paying much more attention to how AI systems understand Arising Co.

Then something happened that really confirmed this for me.

We had somebody contact us who had found Arising Co through an AI recommendation on Claude.

It was not Google.

It was not an ad.

It was not a referral.

Claude, in this case, recommended our company, and that person became a client.

And guess what?

They lived an hour and a half away from us, in an area where a proliferation of digital marketing companies exists.

Now, that’s a pretty significant moment for me because this wasn’t theoretical anymore, at least for our company.

We’ve already been seeing the success that we’ve had across our clients, but now this was becoming personal.

It wasn’t:

“Maybe this is where marketing is going someday.”

It genuinely generated actual business for us.

Which is why companies should start paying attention to this now, while a lot of their competitors still are not considering it.

That doesn’t mean that you abandon Google.

It doesn’t mean stuffing your website with AI keywords.

And it definitely doesn’t mean generating hundreds of garbage pages just because AI can write them.

The foundation of good SEO still matters.

A good website.

Good content.

Clear positioning.

Strong proof.

Useful information.

Real expertise.

Local relevance where it matters.

And enough depth that these systems can actually understand what your company does.

That’s what we’re working on for our clients.

And that’s why we recently created a free AI Visibility Audit at Arising Co.

We wanted to answer a pretty simple question for businesses:

When somebody asks AI for a company like yours, what happens?

Are you appearing?

Are competitors showing up instead?

What does AI seem to understand about your business?

What is missing?

And what will we need to change to improve that?

We look across platforms like ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Perplexity and start identifying where the gaps are.

Because before you can improve your visibility, you need to know where your website currently stands.

So if you’re listening to this and you own a business, especially one that has been around for a while, I’d encourage you to ask yourself one question today:

If somebody described exactly what my company does to ChatGPT right now, would it know enough about my business to recommend me?

And if you don’t know the answer, that’s exactly why we built this audit.

You can go to thearising.co/free-ai-visibility-audit and request one today, or click the link in the description.

We’ll take a look at how your business is showing up, where competitors may be getting the advantage, and where we see opportunities to strengthen your website and your overall visibility.

People are already asking AI who they should hire.

The question is whether your business is part of the answer.

I’m Michael Santiago with Arising Co.

Thank you for listening to Episode 1, and I’ll see you in the next one.