Not long ago, someone looking for a commercial insurance broker, a custom home builder, or a marketing agency would type the question into Google and scan a page of results. They did the sorting themselves. Today, a growing share of those people ask ChatGPT, Claude, or Google’s own AI for answers instead, and they get something different: a short, confident response that names two or three businesses and moves on. The list of ten options has become an answer of three.

Our fast-paced, quick-reading culture has minimized the Top 10 List down to a Top 3 List. What would David Letterman think?

Anyway, that shift changes the question every business should be asking. It’s no longer only “where do we rank?” It’s “when the AI gives its answer, does our name come up at all?” And the way these systems decide who to name is not the same as the traditional search algorithms.

They are not crawling everyone’s website and rewarding whoever optimized best. And you simply cannot wedge yourself into AI answers by feeding your own chatbot information about your business.

Instead, when someone asks an AI a discovery question —who’s good at this, who should I call?—the model leans heavily on what independent, credible sources have already said. Muck Rack studied more than a million links cited by the major AI models and found that the overwhelming majority of those citations came from earned media rather than from the brands’ own pages. Your website still does good work for your organization, but more and more, it’s when a prospect already knows you and wants a specific fact. But at the moment of discovery, when someone is deciding who’s even in the running, the AI reaches past your site and toward who else has been talking about you.

This is a meaningful turn for anyone who has spent years trying to justify the value of public relations. For a long time, earned media lived in an awkward spot. Everyone agreed coverage mattered; a quote in a trade publication or a feature in the business section became public record and provided proof of your expertise, but it was hard to draw a straight line from that coverage to anything on the balance sheet. AI search is now drawing the line for us. The article that quotes your CEO, the trade-press mention, the analyst who references your work: these are no longer just reputation; they are the raw material the machine reads when it decides whether you belong in the answer.

The size of the gap this creates can be startling. In one analysis, a company ran its core buying questions through AI and discovered it appeared in only 12 percent of the answers, while its closest competitor appeared in 67 percent. That is a five-to-one disadvantage in visibility, and the company had no idea it existed until someone thought to measure it. Nothing about its website or its sales team had changed. It simply wasn’t part of the conversation the machine was reading.

There’s a lesson in that for Maine businesses in particular, where so much still runs on reputation and word of mouth. The instinct here has always been that being genuinely good at what you do, and being known for it, is what brings people to your door. AI search hasn’t overturned that instinct, but it is automating it. For it to work for you, two things have to be true. Your company/product/service has to be worth talking about, and credible people have to actually be talking about it. The names that show up in the answers AI spits out tend to be the ones where both are the case.

To compare modern technology with an old style way of thinking, back in the 80s, you might have discovered a local insurance agency because you drove past it. But it’s more likely that you discovered it because you saw a newspaper article that cited its good work, saw a TV news piece using the owner as a credible source, and saw a story in a trade magazine about an award it won. Essentially, that’s how AI is automating its ability to answer your questions about businesses today.

So the practical takeaway for the changing role of search isn’t to chase the algorithm. It’s to do work worth noticing, and make sure the right outlets, reporters, and industry voices know about it. That used to be how you built a reputation. Now it’s also how you make sure a machine remembers your name when a customer asks.