Red Isle WebI typed "best place for lunch in Charlottetown" into ChatGPT a few weeks back, mostly to see what it would say. It gave me four places, no map to scroll and nothing underneath them. I can think of a dozen good spots downtown off the top of my head, and most of them were not in that answer anywhere.
When someone Googles the same thing they get a page they can work through, and the little place with nine reviews and a chowder people drive in for can still catch an eye halfway down. An AI assistant hands over a shortlist and the conversation moves on to something else.
AI assistants name only a handful of businesses per answer, and they filter hard before they name anyone. They lean toward businesses whose details match everywhere online and whose reviews are strong. A business that does fine on Google can be left out of the AI answer completely, because the assistant is judging different things and judging them harder.
How picky are these answers?
A company called SOCi looked at how often AI assistants recommended businesses across roughly 350,000 locations, and Search Engine Land wrote it up in January. ChatGPT recommended 1.2 percent of those locations. Gemini managed 11 percent and Perplexity 7.4 percent. The same businesses turned up in Google's local map results about 36 percent of the time.
Those were chain locations, though, the kind of brand with hundreds of stores, not a one-shop business in Kensington, and nobody has run that study on Island businesses. The shape of it still holds. Google shows a page of options and an AI assistant picks a few.
Why does it skip good businesses?
Reviews are being used as a gate rather than a tiebreaker. In that same study, the businesses ChatGPT put forward averaged 4.3 stars. On Google a place with a 3.8 and a couple of grumpy reviews from 2022 still shows up, because Google cares a lot about how close you are and whether you do the thing that was searched. The AI assistant sees a middling rating and moves on to a name it feels safer giving.
These systems also have to be sure about you before they will say your name out loud. The same report found the business details ChatGPT and Perplexity handed out were only about 68 percent accurate. Gemini did better because it reads Google Maps directly. A system that is not confident about your hours or your phone number will leave you out rather than risk being wrong, and you never hear that it happened.
What does an AI assistant read about you?
Your Google Business Profile, your Facebook page, review sites, directories that scraped your information years ago, and your website. Only the last one is yours.
That makes your site the place to be blunt about the basics. A page saying you do wood-fired pizza in Victoria-by-the-Sea, open Thursday to Sunday, four until nine, May through October, is a page a machine can lift a sentence straight out of. A homepage that opens with "experience the taste of the Island" gives it nothing to work with. Where you are, what you do, when you are open, who you serve.
"Nobody on PEI is asking ChatGPT where to eat"
Mostly true today, and I would not build a business plan on the opposite. Your neighbours are still using Google, and if someone tells me the phone rings because of word of mouth and the map listing, I believe them.
Visitors are the ones who change it. They arrive every summer with a habit they picked up somewhere else, and they are exactly the customers who have never heard your name. Google is also folding AI answers into ordinary search, so the same filtering reaches you whether or not anyone on the Island ever opens ChatGPT.
The good news
None of this is a second job, because the work that gets you named in an AI answer is the work that was already on your list. Get your hours and phone number saying the same thing everywhere. Ask happy customers for reviews. Have a website that says what you do and where, in words a stranger could repeat back. Do those three and you are doing AI search too, without ever thinking about it.
That last one is what I do at Red Isle Web, for Island businesses, at a one-time price with no monthly fee. Sites built so a person can find what they need in one look and a machine can pull a clean answer out of the page. Have a look at some of my work, or send me a note and I will search your business the way a customer would, then tell you what came back and whether I think it is worth doing anything about.