Your Next Customer Might Not Google You

On September 16, OpenAI announced it is opening up advertising inside ChatGPT.

Three pieces of it matter if you run a small business.

1. Sponsored Agents

You click an ad inside ChatGPT and you land in a conversation with a bot that business paid for. This one is still a test, US only, select advertisers.

2. Ads Manager plugin

You create, update and check campaigns by typing what you want in normal English, right inside ChatGPT.

3. Apps inside Shopify & HubSpot
This is the actual news. Both went live the same day for US businesses. International Shopify merchants start getting it on September 23.

That third piece is the one I would hone in on. OpenAI put the on-ramp inside two tools a huge number of small businesses already pay for every month. You do not have to go learn a new platform. It is sitting in your App Store.

There is a new model or a new feature every single week and most of it does not change your every day life. This one is different, because it changes where buying decisions happen.

• The old way: somebody types three words into Google, gets ten links, clicks around, maybe finds you.
• The new way: somebody describes their entire problem to a chatbot, in full sentences, with their budget and their zip code in there, and gets back one recommendation. Maybe two.

You do not get ranked in that world. You get mentioned, or you do not.

The part nobody wants to say out loud.

You are probably not ready to be found.

Go try this right now, it takes two minutes.

Open ChatGPT and ask it what your company does, who you serve, what you charge, and what area you cover. It is reading whatever is publicly out there about you. Your website copy, your directory listings, an old article, a five-year-old Facebook page nobody has touched. Garbage in, garbage out, same as it ever was.

What to actually do this month

Three things, in this order. None of them cost money.

One. Write like a human on your own website.

A page that says you are a "full service solutions partner committed to excellence" tells an AI absolutely nothing. A page that says "we do commercial HVAC repair in Broward County, same day service, service calls start at $189" tells it everything it needs.

Put the plain facts somewhere a machine can read them. What you do. Who you do it for. Where. Roughly what it costs. If you are scared to put a price on your site, put a range.

Two. Fix your listings.

Google Business Profile, Yelp, your chamber page, whatever industry directories exist for your trade. AI systems pull from these constantly. If three of them still have the phone number you dropped two years ago, block off one Tuesday afternoon and fix every one of them. This is boring. It is also the highest return hour you will spend this quarter.

Three. Then, and only then, think about ads.

If you are already on Shopify or HubSpot, the ChatGPT Ads app is right there and it is easy to install. Easy is not the same as smart.

Paying to show up is the simple part. Being worth showing up for is the actual work, and that is steps one and two.

If you do try it, start with a number you would not miss if it vanished. Give it thirty days.

Write down what you expect to happen before you start, because otherwise you will talk yourself into whatever result you get.

What I would skip

Sponsored Agents. It is a limited test with a short list of advertisers. Interesting to watch, not something to plan for. And please skip whoever shows up in your inbox this month selling "AI search optimization" at five grand a month. Nobody on earth has a year of real data on this yet. Anyone selling you a proven playbook is guessing with a lot of confidence, and confidence is a hell of a thing to charge for.

The takeaway

The shift here is not that you need to buy ads inside a chatbot. It is that a machine is now describing your business to people before they ever reach your website, and right now it is doing that from whatever scraps it can find.
You cannot control what it says. You can absolutely control what it has to work with.

Go ask it about yourself. Whatever it gets wrong is your to-do list this week.

If you want to sit down and actually do this instead of adding it to a list, that is exactly what my workshops are for. One evening, one thing you needed done, and you leave with it finished.

Dates are here: https://luma.com/user/usr-yNP17hArZ18OZlc