AIVisCity Weekly #2: How Small Businesses Can Compete with Big Brands in AI Search
- Mayor of AIVisCity
- Mar 17
- 4 min read
Updated: Mar 18
Welcome to the new issue of AIVisCity Weekly — a weekly briefing for those who want to understand how AI tools are changing the way customers discover businesses online.
In this week’s issue:
What’s Happening in AI Search — two studies showing how AI assistants decide which information to include in answers, and what they would skip.
Weekly Insight — do small businesses stand a chance against big brands in AI search? We think they do and we tell you how.
Try This Yourself — a simple test to see whether AI tools can know what your business do quickly.
Worth Reading — a few useful articles if you want to explore the topic further.
🔍 What’s Happening in AI Search
Only 15% of Retrieved Pages Appear in Final AI Answers
A recent analysis found that although AI systems retrieve many web pages while generating responses, only around 15% of those pages actually appear in the final answer.
In other words, most of the information AI reads never becomes visible to the user.
Why this matters? For businesses, being accessible to AI is not enough. The real challenge is becoming one of the few sources that the system decides to include in its final answer.
Google’s Latest Update Favours Clear Expertise
Google released another core search update in March 2026. The update continues Google’s push to reward websites that demonstrate real expertise and trustworthy information, while reducing visibility for generic or low-quality content (e.g. top 10 list, news aggregator, etc).
In simple terms, Google is trying to prioritise websites that clearly show:
who created the content
what experience or knowledge they have
whether the information is genuinely useful to readers
Websites that simply publish large amounts of generic content are becoming less effective. This trend matters not only for Google Search, but also for AI assistants — because many AI answers rely on the same underlying web ecosystem.
🔮 Weekly Insight: How Small Businesses Can Compete with Big Brands in AI Search?
Many small business owners assume that AI search will make it even harder to compete with large brands. After all, big companies are mentioned everywhere online — in news articles, reviews, directories, and comparison websites. It seems natural that AI assistants would recommend them more often.
And in some cases, that’s exactly what happens. For example, if some asks a broad question like
“What are good accounting software options?”
AI assistants usually return the same well-known names. Because these brands appear frequently and consistently across the internet, AI systems treat them as strong signals when deciding what to include in an answer.
However, AI search does not only deal with broad questions. In reality, many people use AI assistants to ask situational questions — questions that include context about what they are trying to do.
For example:
accounting software for freelancers
a quiet coffee shop for working in Manchester
late-night ramen restaurants in Tokyo
When questions include this kind of context, the AI system is no longer simply looking for the biggest brand. Instead, it tries to identify the business that best matches the situation being described.
Note that the user may not need to specify the context explicitly. For example, when a UK person uses AI assistant to plan for a trip in Tokyo and asks for "late-night ramen restaurants", AI assistant may include "foreigner friendly" in the context automatically.
This is where small businesses can compete. Large brands usually describe themselves in broad terms because they serve many different types of customers. Small businesses, on the other hand, often specialise in helping a very specific group of people.
A café might focus on remote workers. A repair shop might specialise in vintage cameras. A consultant might work mainly with freelancers.
When these businesses clearly describe who they help and what situation they are best for, they create signals that AI systems can recognise.
Imagine a café that clearly states on its website:
“A quiet coffee shop in Manchester designed for remote workers.”
When a freelancer asks an AI assistant
“Where can I work remotely in Manchester?”
That café may actually have a better chance of being recommended than a large coffee chain that never describes itself that way. Note that the query even does not have the keyword "café".
To sum up, large brands tend to dominate broad categories, but smaller businesses can stand out by becoming the clearest answer for a specific situation.
💻 Try This Yourself
Check Whether Your Business Has a Clear “One-Sentence Identity”
AI systems often struggle to understand businesses whose websites describe many different things. If your homepage talks about multiple services without a clear focus, AI assistants may have difficulty recognising what you should be recommended for.
Try this simple exercise.
Open your homepage and ask yourself: Can your business be clearly described in one sentence?
Good examples:
“A bookkeeping service for UK freelancers.”
“A specialist repair shop for vintage cameras.”
“A Manchester-based dog training school.”
Less clear examples:
“We provide a wide range of innovative business solutions.”
“Helping organisations grow through technology, consulting and digital services.”
If a stranger cannot quickly understand what your business does, AI tools will struggle as well. A simple improvement can be just adding a clear line near the top of your homepage that states:
What you do + who you help.
This small change helps both human visitors and AI systems understand your business much faster.
📕 Worth Reading
If you're curious to look deeper into how AI search is changing the internet, these articles are worth a look.
AI Overview Citations Don’t Always Come From Top Google Results
Ahrefs
New data shows that many sources cited by AI Overviews do not rank in Google’s top 10 results. In fact 31% of AI Overviews citations does not even rank in Top 100. This analysis highlights how AI search works differently from traditional SEO.
An interesting winner in AI Visibility: Trustpilot
BusinessCloud
One of the key factors of good AI Visibility is citations from well known platform. One of these platforms is Trustpliot, whose share prices rocketed nearly 30% after reported strong profitability because of substantial increase in citations from AI Assistants.
Read: https://businesscloud.co.uk/news/trustpilot-shares-rocket-amid-dramatic-rise-in-ai-visibility/
👋 Until Next Week
How are you seeing AI affect the way people search for businesses in your industry?
If you have noticed changes — or if you tried the quick check in this issue — we’d love to hear your observations. Feel free to share them in the comments.
See you in the next issue of AIVisCity Weekly
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