Happy Tuesday, friends.
Issue #003, and we're going somewhere I've been wanting to take you since Issue #001.
AI search. Not the scary, robots-are-taking-over kind. The very practical, very immediate kind that's already changing how your customers find businesses like yours.
Grab your coffee. This one's good. ☀️
☀️ THE FORECAST
Nearly half of your customers are now using AI to find local business recommendations.
Last year, that number was 6%.
Not a typo. According to BrightLocal's 2026 Local Consumer Review Survey, 45% of consumers now turn to tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google's AI when searching for local businesses. Up from 6% in 2025.
That's not a slow trend. That's a wave.
The businesses showing up in those AI answers? Not necessarily the ones with the biggest ad budgets or the most followers.
The ones with the clearest, most consistent, most credible information across the web.
More on that right now.
🍳 THE YOLK
The New Word of Mouth
Remember how word of mouth used to work?
You'd ask a friend. "Hey, do you know a good accountant in town?" And your friend would say, "Oh yeah, call Susan at ABC Accounting, she's the best." And you'd call Susan.
That's still happening. But there's a new version of it.
Now people are asking ChatGPT. Or Perplexity. Or Google's AI. And those tools are doing exactly what your friend used to do: giving a short list of names and saying "these are the ones worth your time."
The question is: is your business one of the names they give?
This is what AEO (Answer Engine Optimization) is. Not complicated jargon. Just making sure that when someone asks an AI tool "who's the best [your thing] in [your area]," you're the answer.
And here's the part that might surprise you.
You don't have to go viral to get there. You don't need a huge following or a big ad budget.
AI tools recommend businesses that are clear, consistent, and credible across the web. That's it.
Think about how word of mouth actually worked in your town. The businesses everyone recommended weren't always the flashiest. They were the ones you could describe easily. "Oh, they do great work, they're on Main Street, they specialize in X, and everyone leaves happy."
AI is looking for the same thing. It wants to be able to describe you confidently.
So what does "clear, consistent, and credible" actually look like?
Clear. Can an AI read your website and immediately know what you do, who you serve, and where you're located? If your About page is vague, your homepage is a slideshow with no real words, or you've never written your services out in plain language... AI has nothing to work with.
Consistent. Is your business name, address, phone number, and description the same everywhere it appears? Your website, Google Business Profile, Yelp, Facebook, industry directories. If it conflicts anywhere, AI loses confidence in you and may leave you out.
Credible. Do other sources mention you? Reviews that describe specifically what you do and where you are. Local press. Chamber listings. Guest articles. These are the digital version of "I've heard great things about them from multiple people."
The businesses getting recommended by AI right now are the ones that have quietly done this work already.
Most of your competitors haven't.
The window to get ahead of this is open right now.
✨ SUNNY SIDE SHORTCUTS
Three things you can do this week to start showing up in AI search:
1. Test yourself. Open ChatGPT or Perplexity and type: "[your industry] in [your city]." See who comes up. If your competitors are there and you're not, now you have a clear goal. If nobody local shows up, that's actually an opportunity.
2. Rewrite your About page like you're talking to a new customer. Drop the formal third-person bio. Write it the way you'd describe your business to someone who asked at a networking event. What do you do? Who do you help? Where are you? AI reads your website to figure out how to describe you. Make its job easy.
3. Check your Google Business Profile. Is it complete? Every field filled in? Hours accurate? Description specific? A fully optimized GBP is one of the strongest signals you can send to both Google and AI tools. If you haven't touched it in a year, this week is the week.
💭 WHAT I'M COOKING
I have a client I've worked with for a long time.
A really long time.
We built their website together about 10 years ago. And it did its job well. For 10 years, it lived on the internet, told people who they were, and held up just fine.
"Just fine" in 2016 looks a little different in 2026.
They came to me wanting some updates, and as we started digging in, we both realized: this isn't an updates situation. It's a rebuild. Different platform, different structure, AI visibility standards built in from the ground up.
Here's the part I want to be honest about: I am the person who talks about SEO and AI search for a living. And I had a client whose site hadn't been meaningfully touched in a decade.
Because 10 years ago, we weren't playing by these rules. Even a couple years ago, we weren't. The game has changed fast, and keeping up with it is a real thing, even when you're the one teaching it.
So we're rebuilding. And honestly, I'm excited. The new version is going to do so much more for them.
If you've been putting off looking at your own website, maybe this is your sign.
See you on the sunny side,
Heather ☀️
Sunny Side Up is a free weekly newsletter for small business owners who want to grow with modern marketing and AI, written by Heather Pouliot of Brightside Creative in Augusta, Maine.
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