Two people type the same question into ChatGPT on the same afternoon. "Where should I get my car serviced?"
One lives in Cheltenham, drives an old Volvo and has spent the last month asking it about budgeting. The other lives in central London, has a company car and asked it yesterday about the best electric vehicles.
Same words. Very different answers.
That was the heart of a slide Alex Myers showed at aiblLIVE in London on 20 October. It said, quite simply, "You are the prompt."
Search engine, or someone you ask for advice?
Alex runs Manifest, and his talk closed the day. His argument was that before the model has even read your question, it already knows a lot about you. Your language. Your location. Its memory of you. Your past chats. Your preferences.
His words: "That is not a search engine. That is a person being asked for advice."
That changes things for anyone who grew up on SEO. For twenty-odd years the game was to work out which words people typed, then make sure your page matched them. Alex poked fun at briefs that ask for a brand to show up for one particular prompt. As if you could own a sentence.
When the question is different for every person, you can't. What you can do is make sure that, whoever is asking, the AI has good reasons to think of you.
So where does the AI get its reasons?
This is the bit every small business owner should see.
Muck Rack, a PR software company, looked at more than 25 million links cited by ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini, and published the results in May 2026. About 84% of the citations came from earned media. That means journalism, research, Wikipedia, third-party sites and social platforms. In other words, things other people wrote. Paid and advertorial content made up just 0.3%. Press releases, 1.1%.
Alex grouped the numbers a little differently on his slide, but the message was the same. "Earned media leads the way. But never in isolation."
Most small businesses pour their marketing budget into the 0.3%. Ads, promoted posts, sponsored listings. Those still have a job to do. The machine just reads other things when it decides who to recommend.
What this looks like for a local business
You don't need a national PR campaign. Earned media for a small business is often small and local.
A write-up in the local paper. A guest slot on someone else's podcast. A supplier who mentions you in their case study. An industry body that lists you. A customer who writes a long, specific review. A talk at a networking group that someone blogs about afterwards.
Each one is another person, in another place, saying your name in a context the AI can read. Put enough of them together and you get the thing Alex kept coming back to. A business that people talk about, and so the machine talks about too.
It's worth trying this as an exercise. Picture three very different customers, each asking an AI for help with the problem you solve. A first-time business owner. Someone who's been burned before. Someone in a hurry.
Ask yourself what each of them would hear about you, and from whom. If the honest answer is "only what I've said about myself", that's your gap.
Close it, and you can stop worrying about which words people type, because wherever they start, the trail leads back to you.
So where's one place someone other than you could tell your story?
