How your small business actually gets found by LLMs like ChatGPT (and why the window is now)

Short answer: ChatGPT has around 900 million weekly active users, and that figure doesn't include Google Gemini or Claude. "You might have six months or so where you can outstrip your competitors," says Nick Harding, CEO of Fifty One Degrees, but only if your website actually gives AI something to cite. Here's what that means in practice, with a real before/after and a checklist you can run today.

Why this isn't a "someday" problem

"ChatGPT already has basically 900 million active weekly users," Nick Harding says. "There's about 8.4 billion people on earth, and more than 10% of them are using ChatGPT every week. That doesn't include the Google Gemini users, it doesn't include the Claude users." Add those together and AI tools are already a mainstream way people find and choose businesses, running alongside Google search rather than replacing it. Most competitors haven't optimised for it yet, which is why Nick frames the current gap as temporary: "I do still see it at this point in time as a moment where you can make hay while the sun shines."

Why this isn't the same problem as SEO

Google ranks a list of links for a person to click through. An AI engine instead writes a direct answer and cites a handful of sources inside it, so the goal isn't to be one of ten blue links, it's to be the specific source the AI decided was worth quoting. A page can rank reasonably on Google and still never get cited by an LLM like ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini, if it doesn't give the AI a clear, complete claim to lift out, as opposed to a vague slogan, or the right information buried behind a slider, a PDF, or an interaction the AI can't read.

A real before/after

Here's the actual difference, using the kind of line that shows up on most small business "About" or service pages:

Not citable:

"We're passionate about delivering exceptional results for every client, tailored to your unique needs."

An AI engine can't extract anything factual from this. No service, no price, no location, no specifics, nothing to quote.

Citable:

"We're a Bristol-based accountancy firm offering fixed-fee bookkeeping from £150/month for businesses with under £250k turnover, with same-week onboarding."

Same slot on the page, same intent, but now there's a direct, complete claim: who, where, what, how much. That's the sentence an AI tool can lift straight into an answer to "who does affordable bookkeeping for small businesses in Bristol."

Checklist: run this on your own site today

Pick the two or three pages a potential customer would land on when deciding whether to use your business (usually: homepage, main service page, pricing/FAQ), and check each one against:

• Does the first paragraph answer a real question, in full sentences, without needing the rest of the page for context? If someone only read this paragraph, would they know what you do, who it's for, and roughly what it costs?
• Is the specific information (price, location, turnaround time, what's included) written as text, not locked inside an image, a PDF, a slider, or a form you have to submit to see the answer?
• Could you paste a sentence from the page directly into an answer to a customer's question, without editing it? If it needs rewriting to make sense out of context, it's not citable as-is.
• Does the page commit to a specific claim rather than a general one? "Fast turnaround" is not citable. "Same-week turnaround for orders under 50 units" is.
• Can AI crawlers actually reach and read your pages? A citable sentence is no use if the crawler never gets to it. Check your site has a sitemap.xml file listing your pages, and that robots.txt isn't accidentally blocking AI crawlers like GPTBot or ClaudeBot. Most website builders and CMS platforms generate these for you, but it's worth a quick check, especially if your site was built a few years ago.

If a page fails two or more of these, that's your starting point, not a full rewrite, just tightening the opening section to state the same facts directly.

If you want a shortcut, use AI to find the gaps

Nick's own suggested starting point doesn't require hiring anyone: "Go to Claude, go to ChatGPT, and ask it to write your plan on how you can implement this sort of functionality." A more targeted version of that: paste your homepage or service-page text into Claude or ChatGPT and ask it directly: "If you were answering a customer's question using only this page, what could you actually quote? What's missing?" The gaps it points out are usually the same ones the checklist above would catch, just specific to your own copy.

Being honest about the limits here

This isn't a guaranteed formula. Citation behaviour varies between AI models, changes over time, and isn't fully transparent even to people working in this space professionally. What's not in doubt is the scale of the audience already using these tools, and that most competitors haven't done this basic work yet. The tactics will keep evolving; making your key pages state clear, specific, citable facts is a safe bet regardless of how the algorithms shift.

What to try this month

Run the checklist above on two or three pages, fix whichever ones fail, and paste your homepage into Claude or ChatGPT for a second opinion on what's missing.

To learn more about how other UK small businesses are approaching AI-driven discoverability, and to access free tools and guidance without a sales pitch attached, join the AI for Growth community.