MACHINE 404 / Two minutes
Two minutesAsk ChatGPT about your own business
You do not need to understand a word of the technical side to find out whether this is your problem. You need two minutes and your phone.
Open any assistant
ChatGPT, Copilot, Gemini, or the AI answer that now sits at the top of Google. Any of them. For this, they behave the same way.
Type this, with your own words in the brackets
Who are the best [what you sell] in [your town]?
Do not type your own name. That is the whole point. A customer who already knows your name does not need to ask anybody.
Count the names it gives you
It will not give ten. It gives two or three, and a sentence about each one. That is how these answers work, and it is why being fourth is the same as not being there.
If you are not in it
It is not personal and it is not a punishment. The assistant could not read enough about you to say anything, so it said nothing. It is not hiding you. It does not know you are there.
If you are in it, read what it said about you
The price. The phone number. The opening hours. Whatever it got wrong, it will keep telling people until something on your side changes. That is worth two minutes on its own.
Why it happens, in one paragraph
A person opens your website and understands it in two seconds, because a person can see. An assistant never opens it. It reads the text and a small set of facts that a website can state plainly: what you sell, what it costs, where you are, how to reach you. If those facts are only in a photograph, or only in the design, there is nothing for it to repeat, so it repeats somebody else.
Nothing about that is your fault. Websites were built for people for twenty five years, and this second reader arrived quietly, about a year ago.
See your own number first. It is free.
Type your address and the panel fills with your own data, the way an agent reads it. No email, no call, about ten seconds.
Scan my site See the prices