I returned two weeks ago from hiking the Walker's Haute Route through France and Switzerland, and it was amazing. Highly recommend! One of the hallmarks of a great vacation is how deeply you unplug — actually touching grass, off the group chats, off the deadlines. The downside is what's waiting when you get back. Business doesn't pause for you, and you come home to a tidal wave. That's why I missed sending this last week.
But this one's worth the wait — it packs a lot of punch for its size. You won't want to miss it.
Ask ChatGPT who's the best in your industry. If your name doesn't come up, you have a growth problem — and you need to do AI visibility website work.
For twenty years, if your website was losing ground, you could see it — rankings dropped, traffic charts dipped, you had a signal. That's not reliably true anymore.
AI search and traditional search now run as two genuinely separate systems, with different rules for who gets surfaced. Only about 14% of URLs and 22% of domains rank in both. You can hold your position in Google's results and still be quietly losing ground in the system a growing share of your buyers are actually using to decide.
Here's the simplest test: if your website was built before 2022, it wasn't built for this. Not because it's ugly or outdated — because the thing it needs to do didn't exist yet as a requirement when it was built. What happens next depends entirely on the size of your business.
Large enterprises are already on it.
A wave of SaaS companies has emerged specifically to help businesses assess, monitor, and grow their AI visibility. I use and recommend Brand Capsule — it's the tool I've built my own practice around for tracking this with clients. Enterprise is already treating this as a board-level metric, not a marketing afterthought.
Mid-sized companies are the most exposed, and least equipped.
This work isn't a design job or a marketing-manager job. It needs someone with the experience, confidence, and skill to run an actual strategic review — sharpen positioning, pricing, and ICP, not just refresh a template — and that's a full-time hire most mid-sized businesses can't justify. A large company has a CMO for this. A mid-sized one usually has neither the budget for that hire nor anyone senior enough in-house to do it themselves.
Small, expert-led businesses have the real opportunity — if they take it.
AI rewards clarity over scale. A specialist with genuine depth in a narrow category can out-rank a much bigger competitor, because the old rule — budget wins — doesn't hold here. But the site still has to actually say, clearly and specifically, what the expertise is and who it's for. Most don't. The opportunity is real. Almost nobody's taken it.
Whatever size you are, the underlying problem is the same: the thing that decides whether an AI system can confidently describe you is exactly the thing most businesses have never made precise. LLMs are less forgiving of fuzziness than a human ever was. A person browsing your site fills in the gaps, infers your positioning from vibes, gives you the benefit of the doubt. A model synthesizing an answer from thousands of sources doesn't extend that courtesy. It just moves on to whoever was clear.
For twenty years, your website was your handshake. Now it's your reference check — happening in a room you're not in, given by someone who's never met you.Let's talk →
Talk soon,
Susan
Founder, Claimed
Shipping the brands, websites, and growth systems that help you get chosen by the right leads