ChatGPT, Perplexity, AI Overviews: what changes for a small business
Updated: 2 days ago
A customer looking for a plumber, a caterer or an osteopath no longer necessarily types three words into Google. They ask ChatGPT a full question, they try Perplexity, or they read the AI-generated summary at the top of Google's results.
For a shop owner or a freelancer, this changes how a website is read, not what needs to be on it: clear, accurate, verifiable information.
What has actually changed in the past year
Three things happened in a short time. Google rolled out AI Overviews in France: on some queries, a summary written by an AI appears above the classic links, with a few cited sources. ChatGPT can search the web and cites its sources when you ask it a local or timely question.
Perplexity, still a niche tool in France, was built from day one as an answer engine: a written answer, numbered sources.
The common thread: the visitor gets an answer before clicking, sometimes without clicking at all. In our clients' statistics, this shows up as fewer visits on very simple queries ("opening hours", "average price of a service") and more qualified visits on everything else: when someone clicks after reading a summary, they already know why they are coming.
Keep a sense of proportion. For the vast majority of small businesses we work with, Google remains by far the first source of traffic, ahead of social networks and digital word of mouth. Answer engines still weigh little in volume.
But they weigh on the decision: an AI that names three tradespeople in your town and not you is an appointment you will never know you missed.
How an AI decides who to cite
None of these tools publish their recipe, but their behaviour overlaps. They run a classic search, read the best-ranked pages, extract facts, then write an answer citing the pages those facts came from. In other words, they rely first on what Google and Bing already know about you.
If your site ranks poorly, an AI will not find it any better.
Next, they favour pages where the information is explicit.
An AI does not guess: if your service area is written nowhere, if your prices are "on quote" without the slightest order of magnitude, if your homepage says "welcome to our world" without saying what you do, it will move on to the next page, the competitor who wrote "joiner in Nantes, quote within 48 hours, 800 to 3,000 euros for a made-to-measure wardrobe".
A real example. A cleaning company we work with had a decent site, but everything was said in pictures and slogans. We added a "Frequently asked questions" page with twelve real questions received over the phone, answered factually (response time, geographic area, indicative prices per square metre, insurance).
Three months later, that page had become the second most visited page on the site, and the owner started receiving enquiries from customers who said they had "found the answer on ChatGPT". Nothing magical: a page that was clear for a human was clear for a machine too.
What really matters for a small business website
Good news: the list is short, and it also serves classic SEO. First, clear pages per service, with full sentences answering "what, where, for whom, at what price, how fast". One page per trade or service beats a homepage that tries to say everything.
Second, a real FAQ. Not three decorative questions, but the questions your customers actually ask, worded the way they ask them, with answers of three to five sentences. It is the format answer engines pick up most readily, because the question and the answer are already cut out for them.
Third, your Google Business Profile. AI Overviews and ChatGPT lean on it for local searches: opening hours, address, phone number, category, recent photos and, above all, reviews. An up-to-date profile with recent reviews and replies from the owner carries more weight than a polished "About" page. We covered this in detail in our article on Google Business Profile.
Finally, factual, signed content. An AI looks for attributable facts: "we cover a 30 km radius around Rennes", "our delivery times are 2 to 4 working days", "the shop has existed since 2011".
Dates, figures, place names, complete legal notices, a "Who we are" page with real people: all of this makes your site credible, for a reader as much as for a model.
What is useless, or nearly
We keep seeing "ChatGPT optimisation" offers at several hundred euros a month. Let's be frank: there is no secret button. Stuffing a page with "best hairdresser in Lyon" fools neither Google nor an AI.
Generating thirty blog posts with an AI tool to "occupy the ground" mostly produces hollow text that those same tools recognise very well, and that your customers do not read.
There is also no point hastily blocking or allowing AI crawlers in your robots.txt without knowing why. For a small business that wants to be found, the right setting is to let search engine crawlers through. And expect nothing from a one-page brochure site: an AI needs material to cite you, a "contact" page is not enough.
Checking whether your business is cited
This is the simplest test to run, and it takes ten minutes. Open ChatGPT with web search enabled, Perplexity, and Google in a private window. Ask five questions your customers really ask: "which photographer for a wedding near Bayonne", "how much does an orthoptic assessment cost in Tours", "where to buy houseplants in Lille".
Note who is cited, with which source, and whether you appear.
Repeat the same test every quarter and keep the results in a spreadsheet. You will learn whether your competitors are cited thanks to their Google profile, a directory, a local press article or their own website, and you will know what to work on.
Also look at the traffic sources in your Wix analytics: visits coming from chatgpt.com or perplexity.ai show up as referring sites.
Where to start
Run the five-question test on ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google, and note who is cited and why.
Write or rewrite a "Frequently asked questions" page with ten real customer questions and factual answers.
Update your Google Business Profile: category, opening hours, recent photos, and reply to every review.
Reread each service page and check that it answers what, where, for whom, at what price, how fast.
Put a reminder in your calendar to run the test again in three months.
What we take away
Answer engines do not replace Google, they use it. What they reward is exactly what a good small business website should already do: say clearly what you sell, where, for whom and at what price, and back it up with reviews and facts. No AI budget needed, but an afternoon of honest writing is.
As for the rest, no panic: volumes remain modest and you have time to do things properly. A truthful FAQ and a living Google profile beat ten mass-generated pages.
Would you rather we handle it? We set it up for you: a structured FAQ, rewritten service pages and a Google profile connected to your Wix site, within a week. Book a call with les défricheurs agency or browse our Wix Studio services.
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