Your Next Customer Is Already Searching for You on ChatGPT. Are You Showing Up?
Here is something that happened last week that almost nobody in the small business world noticed.
Durable, a platform that has helped over three million service-based businesses launch and run their operations, released a new tool on April 1st called Discoverability. It tracks how your business shows up across ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity, and Grok when someone asks those platforms for a recommendation in your category.
The reason they built it: more than 50% of consumers are now using AI models to search for local business recommendations. Not Google. ChatGPT. Gemini. Perplexity.
And as Durable’s founder James Clift put it: “Most businesses have no idea how they’re showing up.”
That is the thing I want to talk about today.
The Channel That Opened Without an Announcement
In December 2025, Shopify launched Agentic Storefronts as part of their Winter ‘26 Edition. One setup in your admin and your products are automatically discoverable inside ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Microsoft Copilot. Customers can find your products, get accurate information, and in some cases complete a purchase without ever leaving the AI conversation.
Over 150 product updates shipped in that edition. This one got a press release. Most small business owners missed it entirely.
Shopify’s president Harley Finkelstein said it plainly in March: AI shopping agents are preparing to change everything about how products get discovered and purchased.
He is right. And the window where you can get ahead of it is right now, before most of your competitors have thought about it once.
What Is Actually Changing
The concept has a name. GEO: Generative Engine Optimization.
It is the next layer on top of traditional SEO. Where SEO was about ranking in a list of blue links, GEO is about being included in the answer an AI gives when someone asks it a question.
Gartner is forecasting that 25% of all web search traffic will shift away from traditional search engines to AI-powered answer engines by the end of 2026. Google AI Overviews now appear on roughly 40% of all search queries.
The mechanics of how AI search works are different from how Google works. AI systems that pull live information, like Perplexity and Google AI Overviews, are evaluating the first 200 words of your content most heavily. They want direct answers, clear structure, and trust signals. They are not counting keywords.
The good news: the basics of GEO are the same things that make your website and your business listings useful to actual humans. Clear information. Consistent name, address, and phone number across directories. Real reviews. Specific, well-organized content about what you do and who you serve.
Three Things Worth Doing This Week
First, check your business listings. Durable’s tool is free to start and shows you exactly how your business is appearing in AI search platforms right now. If you have never checked this, the answer is probably “inconsistently,” which is the main reason businesses get left out of AI recommendations. The tool is at durable.co and takes about five minutes to set up.
Second, if you sell physical products and you are on Shopify, turn on Agentic Storefronts. It is one toggle in your admin. Your products start appearing in ChatGPT and Perplexity searches. There is no additional cost and no separate integration to build. This is one of the rare cases where the platform has already done the work and you just have to flip the switch.
Third, look at your website’s homepage and your Google Business Profile with fresh eyes. Ask: if someone asked ChatGPT “find me a [your business type] in [your city],” what would it pull to describe you? Is the information accurate, specific, and current? Most business owners have not updated their profile in over a year.
The Bigger Picture
This is not the end of Google. It is not a crisis requiring immediate action. But it is a genuine shift in how a growing portion of customers are finding businesses, and it is happening fast enough that getting set up now puts you months ahead of competitors who will catch on when it becomes obvious.
The tools to take advantage of it are either free or already included in platforms you are paying for. You do not need an agency for this. You need an afternoon and a clear description of what you do.
That is exactly the kind of thing I watch for so you do not have to watch everything.
If this was useful, forward it to one person running a local business or a service-based company. They need to know about this shift too.
See you tomorrow.
Andrew