How to Get Your Business AI-Search Ready

Kathleen Banks, CFRE, CFOP, of Advancement Digital presented "Your Next Client Is Asking AI for a Referral: How to Get Your Business AI-Search Ready" to the Greater New York Chamber of Commerce. Everyone is using AI for research. Customers now ask Google's AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and Perplexity who to call, and those tools answer the way a well-connected friend would, by naming the businesses they know about and have reason to trust. Nobody can guarantee a spot in those answers. What a business can control is what AI finds when it goes looking. The session covered seven fixes in the order they pay off, starting with the Google Business Profile and Search Console and moving on to answer pages, service-area pages, reviews, structured data and crawl files. It also showed how to measure results with Google's new AI report in Search Console and with Google Analytics, and why tracking and cookie consent now need the same attention as visibility. Attendees left with a checklist and a free Google AI-Ready Check.