Did AI just skip your venue?

Your next customer asked their phone where to go...

...it answered with someone else’s name! It’s Thursday night and a couple three suburbs over are working out where to spend Saturday.

They don’t open Google and scroll. They ask their phone, out loud, like it’s a mate who knows the area. And the phone answers in a heartbeat, with a shortlist of three.

You want to be one of those three. Right now, you might not even be in the room!

Here’s the scary bit. The phone isn’t recommending the best venue. It’s recommending the one it understands.

AI now works the door and it can only recommend what it can read

AI assistants like ChatGPT, Gemini and Google’s AI, shortlist businesses before a customer ever lands on a website. They recommend the venues they can understand clearly, not the ones with the nicest fit-out. If your online presence doesn’t spell out who you are and who you’re for, AI quietly skips you and hands the booking to a competitor instead.

Think of AI as a concierge with a clipboard. It’s standing between your future customer and their Saturday night or their next weekend getaway. It will only put your name forward if it can work out, fast, what you do and who you’re for.

Your customer stopped Googling and nobody sent you the memo

The old game was be found on Google and hope they call. The new game is be understood by AI and get recommended before they’ve opened a single tab.

That’s a big shift. Most operators are still optimising for a habit their customers have half moved on from. The search bar didn’t die, it just got a gatekeeper.

Being great is not the same as being found

You can run a cracking venue, make the best coffee in the district and still be invisible if the concierge can’t read your clipboard entry. Great doesn’t travel through an AI that can’t tell what you are. Clear does.

That’s the cost of staying fuzzy. Not a bad review, not an empty Tuesday you can explain away. It’s the booking you never knew existed, made three suburbs over, before you’d even flipped the sign to open.

Try this before your next quiet week

Open ChatGPT or Google’s AI and ask it, as a customer would, where to go in your town for exactly what you do. A long lunch, a romantic weekend, a family feed. Then check:

• Did your name come up at all?
• If it did, did it describe you the way you’d describe yourself?
• If it didn’t, whose name came up instead, what are they saying online that you’re not?

If the concierge didn’t have you on the clipboard, that’s not bad luck. That’s the gap and it’s fixable.

Want to see exactly where AI and your customers are getting stuck on your business? The free Digital Audit walks you through it in a couple of minutes.

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