Not Googling. Not scrolling a list of links. Asking, the way you’d ask a knowledgeable friend, and getting back one confident answer. If your business isn’t in that answer, you didn’t lose to a better competitor. You lost to one the machine happened to know better — and you’d have no idea it even happened.

What the book is about

Over fifteen years working in search, I’ve watched how people find businesses change more than once. AI search is the biggest shift yet, and it’s happening quietly, which is what makes it dangerous. Your rankings look fine. Your site hasn’t changed. But more of your best customers have stopped searching the old way and started asking AI instead. Most businesses have no plan for that. Most haven’t even noticed.

This book gives you one. It names the problem, explains what’s actually going on in plain English, and shows you the handful of things you can do about it yourself.

Try the 90-second test

Before you buy anything, prove to yourself this matters. Open ChatGPT, or Google’s AI, or whatever AI tool is nearest. Don’t type your business name. Type the question a customer would ask to find a business like yours — something like “recommend a good [what you do] for [who you serve] near [your area].”

Read what comes back. Are you there? Is a competitor there instead? Whatever you just saw, that’s your starting point. The book is how you change the answer.

What you’ll learn

You follow one business the whole way through — Sian, a Cardiff accountant who noticed her enquiries going quiet and did the test above. Every chapter names a real problem and gives you a small number of actions you can genuinely do yourself:

• Chapter 1 — How people find you now (and why it changed)
• Chapter 2 — What AI actually knows about your business
• Chapter 3 — Say who you are in plain terms
• Chapter 4 — Become the obvious answer
• Chapter 5 — Get talked about
• Chapter 6 — Your website’s new job
• Chapter 7 — Get into the sources AI trusts
• Chapter 8 — Check what AI says, then fix it
• Chapter 9 — The 30-minute-a-month routine

Who it’s for

Busy business owners, not marketers. You won’t need to hire anyone or understand anything technical — there’s no jargon and no code. Once you’re set up, keeping on top of it takes about thirty minutes a month. What you do need is the willingness to actually do the actions, not just read them.

Why I wrote it

I’m Marcus Taylor. I’ve spent fifteen years in search, most recently leading digital and UX for a specialist lender. I kept seeing the same thing: good businesses quietly losing customers to AI recommendations they didn’t know existed. The fixes aren’t complicated, but nobody was explaining them in a way a busy owner could actually use. So I wrote the book I wanted them to have.