Does AI search matter for small business yet?
Yes, though not the way the headlines say. Google is not being replaced: 95% of ChatGPT users also use Google 1. What changed is that your website now has two readers: Google, which shows your link, and ChatGPT or Google AI Mode, which reads your page and repeats what it found.
Mr Ramesh asked ChatGPT, then checked Google
Mr Ramesh's air-conditioner died at ten on a Sunday night, and the flat was already stifling. He picked up his phone and put it to ChatGPT:
My aircon stopped cooling, I'm in Bedok, can someone come tomorrow morning, roughly what will it cost, and can I book on WhatsApp.
ChatGPT gave him three firms. In that heat he did not quite trust a single answer, so he typed the same problem into Google and compared. Two machines, one customer, one sweaty evening.
Somewhere in Bedok, an air-conditioning firm had a technician free on Monday and does exactly this job. If its site never said so in text a machine can read, it was missing from both lists, and Mr Ramesh rang someone else. Is that your business? Is a rival down the road already getting the Monday call-outs?
Not long ago Mr Ramesh would have typed "aircon repair" into Google and phoned whoever came up. He still does that, but now he also asks a machine that reads pages and writes one answer. Does that matter for your business yet?
59% of Hong Kong sites never say which business they are
If a machine cannot tell which business a page belongs to, it struggles to name you when a customer asks for one. We measured how common that is. In September we scanned 147 business websites across five trades in Hong Kong and Singapore, then read each one again as plain text, the way a machine that does not run scripts receives it.
In Hong Kong, 59% of the sites never state, in their markup, which business the page is about. In Singapore it was 19%. Markup here means the structured data (JSON-LD, a block of labelled facts in the page's code) that a machine reads before anything else.
The detail shows the same pattern. We read 30 clinic websites as text: every one named a doctor, and only 2 stated a price. Where the site is silent, the answer comes from a page that is not yours.
We did not test whether fixing this changes what any AI says. We measured what the pages hand over.
Two readers, and only one of them sends the visit
Google used to be a signpost: it pointed a customer at your page, and your site did the selling. It now answers more of the question itself. In early 2026, 68% of Google searches in the US finished without anyone clicking through 2.
ChatGPT goes one step further. Someone asks it which dentist near Tiong Bahru takes walk-ins on Saturday, and it rewrites the question into searches, reads a handful of pages and writes one answer. OpenAI's help page says a site should allow its crawler, OAI-SearchBot (the program that fetches pages for ChatGPT search), to be eligible for inclusion 4. Microsoft documents that Copilot generates a search query and sends it to Bing 5. Either way, a machine reads your page and decides what to repeat.
What each reader needs from your website
The two readers overlap more than the noise suggests. Google says so itself: no need to write "in a specific way just for generative AI search" 3. The work is mostly the same work, done properly.
| Reader | What it does with your site | What it needs from you |
|---|---|---|
| Google Search | Indexes the page, ranks it, and more and more often answers on its own page 2 | A page it can crawl and index, with the business, the service and the place stated plainly |
| ChatGPT search | Rewrites the question into searches, reads the pages it finds, writes an answer 4 | OAI-SearchBot allowed in, and the facts in text it can read without running scripts |
| Microsoft Copilot | Sends its search query to Bing and grounds the answer in what comes back 5 | A site in Bing's index, which many businesses never set up |
Nothing in the right-hand column is a trick.
Your customers did not switch, they added a second place to ask
Among ChatGPT users, the share who also use Google was 95% in September 2025, and still 95% in May 2026 1. People did not move. Which machine to bet on is a badly set question: customers already ask both. Ask what each one does with your website.
Three checks to ask your web person for this week
Ask whoever looks after your site.
- Does the markup say what business we are, what we do and where? Ask them to show you the JSON-LD on the home page. A banner or a logo does not count.
- What does a machine that cannot run scripts see on our key pages? Ask for the page as plain text. If services, hours and prices are missing there, they are missing from the answer too.
- Are we in Bing's index, and does robots.txt let the AI crawlers in? Bing Webmaster Tools is free. The robots.txt file at the root of the site decides whether OAI-SearchBot can read you at all.
If they are vague, you have found your first job for the quarter.
Where I would spend, and where I would not
I would not pay anyone who promises that ChatGPT will recommend you, or that you will rank first. Nobody controls that for you, and we do not either. Google's own guidance is that the same fundamentals apply to its AI features 3, which should make you wary of anyone selling a secret.
I would spend on the plain work: a site that states who you are, what you do, where, for whom and at what price, in text a machine can read, with the crawlers let in. Then I would check again in a month.
Ranking on Google still works. It returns less each year
Think of Mr Ramesh's Sunday: Google was his second look, not his first. The old route is not closed, but fewer searches behind it end on a website: 68% of US Google searches ended without a click in early 2026 2. More of your customers read an answer, built from whichever business stated its facts plainly.
We take a site that ranks and make it readable to both machines without disturbing what already works. The free scan on your own site comes first: it shows what a machine finds on your pages now.
Questions people ask
Is ChatGPT replacing Google?
Not on the evidence. Similarweb found that 95% of ChatGPT users also use Google, in September 2025 and again in May 2026 1. A business needs to be readable by both.
Do I need a new website for AI search?
Usually not. Google says you do not need to write in a special way for its generative AI features 3. Most gaps we find are basic: no markup naming the business, key facts hidden behind scripts, crawlers blocked.
Can anyone make ChatGPT recommend my business?
No. No company outside OpenAI controls what ChatGPT says, and the same is true for Google and Microsoft. You control whether they can read your site, and whether what they read is complete.
Why does Bing matter if my customers use Google?
Because some AI assistants search through it. Microsoft documents that Copilot sends its search queries to the Bing search service 5. A site missing from Bing's index cannot come back from those searches.
What is the first thing to check?
Whether your home page says, in its structured data, which business it is, what it does and where. In our study of 147 sites across Hong Kong and Singapore, that was the most common gap.
How often should I check?
Once after the fixes, then monthly. Sites change without anyone deciding to change them: a theme update, a new plugin or a redesign can remove markup or block a crawler.
Next: Is ChatGPT replacing Google?
Sources
- Similarweb, Is AI replacing search?, 4 August 2026. Accessed 30 September 2026.
- SparkToro, In 2026, less than one third of Google searches still send a click, 9 June 2026. Accessed 30 September 2026.
- Google Search Central, Optimizing your website for generative AI features on Google Search, undated. Accessed 30 September 2026.
- OpenAI Help Center, Searching the web with ChatGPT, undated. Accessed 29 September 2026.
- Microsoft Learn, Data, privacy, and security for web search in Microsoft Copilot and Microsoft Copilot Chat, undated. Accessed 29 September 2026.
Our own counts come from our Hong Kong and Singapore sector studies of September 2026, 147 sites, one scan and one text read each, scored with the published rubric. Not a market survey.