AI marketing
People are starting to ask an AI instead of Google. Is it recommending you?
Search is changing faster than most agencies will admit. Here's how we see it, what it means for you, and what we're already doing about it.
Open ChatGPT and ask it for the best business in your suburb doing what you do. Someone gets named. If it isn't you, that's a decision being made about your business, in a room you're not in.
Why this matters
Getting left out of the answer is invisible. That's what makes it expensive.
When you slip off page one you can see it happen. Traffic drops, rankings move, somebody notices and says something. When an AI quietly stops naming you, nothing happens at all. No alert, no line on a report, and no customer ringing to tell you they went with the business the assistant suggested instead.
You just get fewer enquiries, and no explanation for them.
The businesses being named aren't necessarily better than you. They're easier for a machine to be confident about. Their details match everywhere they appear, their pages answer the questions people actually ask, and their site says plainly what they do and where they do it. Almost none of that is expensive. It's just done, or it isn't.
What's changing
Three shifts, already happening.
- AI answers are replacing result pages
Google's AI Overviews, ChatGPT and Perplexity answer "who does dental implants near me", "best physio in Cronulla" or "electrician open today" with a short list and a recommendation. Being on page one isn't enough anymore. You need to be in the answer. That takes structured data, consistent business info everywhere, real reviews, and content that answers questions the way people actually ask them.
There used to be ten results on a page and you could win work from any of them. Now there's often one answer with two or three businesses named in it. You're either one of those names or you may as well not be on the page.
- Follow-up is getting automated, and personal
The businesses winning right now aren't spending more on ads. They're answering faster and saying something relevant. AI-driven nurture, the kind SmileOX runs, makes a two-person business feel like it has a ten-person front desk.
Being quick to answer used to be a nice touch. Now it's often the whole difference between the enquiry being yours and it being someone else's.
- Making ads got easy. Knowing which ones to run didn't
Anyone can produce fifty versions of an ad in an afternoon now. That was never the hard part.
The hard part is picking which suburb to run them in, which offer to lead with and which service to push this month, then switching off the ones that aren't working before they eat your budget. The tools got cheap. The judgement didn't, and the judgement is what you're actually paying an agency for.
Ours comes from seven years in dental and about 30 other industries.
What we do about it
AI-ready marketing.
Practical, not theoretical. Everything below is running for our clients today.
Getting you into the answer
Consistent business data everywhere you're listed, code on your site that spells out what you do and where you do it, and content written the way customers actually ask the question. Then we watch how the assistants describe you, and fix it when they get it wrong.
AI lead response
SmileOX replies, qualifies and nurtures on the customer's channel in seconds. Hot leads get flagged for a human call, so nobody sits in an automated loop when they were ready to book.
Budget that moves
Spend shifts toward the service and suburb combinations producing enquiries this month, not last quarter's plan. Most accounts are still running a budget somebody set in January.
Ads tested, not guessed
We run several versions of an ad against each other rather than betting on one. Whichever is producing enquiries keeps the budget, and the rest get switched off within days, before they've wasted anything worth arguing about.
Winning back the customers you already have
We go through your database, work out who's likely due for something and what that something is, then contact them with a message that suits. No auction, nobody bidding against you, and they already know who you are. It's the cheapest sale you'll ever make and the one most businesses never go after.
Reports in plain English
A monthly summary that reads like a note from a person, not a spreadsheet export. Plus the fortnightly call, where we tell you what's not working before you have to ask.
Our view
Who wins the next five years.
Three things decide it. Whether your data is clean enough for a machine to recommend you. Whether your follow-up is fast enough to beat the competitor down the road. And whether your agency treats AI as a tool rather than a headline.
We plan to be that agency, and to keep telling you exactly what's working and what isn't.
Right now, an AI is recommending someone in your area.
It might be you. It might be the place up the road that isn't half the business you are, but whose website is easier for a machine to read.
Twenty minutes and we'll show you which, and what it takes to be the name that comes up.