What a customer finds when they search for you.

Have you searched for your own business recently? Not to see your own website. I mean: typed your business name into Google as a stranger would, and actually looked at what comes up.

Most business owners have not done this. And the gap between what they assume is there and what a new customer actually sees is, more often than not, significant.

When someone searches for your business by name, here is what Google displays, in rough order.

On the right side of a desktop screen, or at the top on a phone, your Google Business Profile appears. This is the panel showing your name, address, phone number, opening hours, star rating, number of reviews, photos, and your business description. On mobile, this is what fills the screen. The website often does not appear until the customer deliberately scrolls.

Below that, your own website appears as the first organic result. Then, depending on how established your business is online, some third-party listings: a Facebook page, a Yelp or TripAdvisor entry, a mention in a local directory.

That is the full picture. That is what a stranger is judging you on in the first thirty seconds, before they have visited, called, or clicked through to anything you have written.

Here is what I find when I look at a business's online presence for the first time.

The Google Business Profile shows outdated hours. Or a phone number that has not been correct for two years. Or photos from when the place looked different, or had a different menu, or had not yet done the refurbishment.

The website, if there is one, loads slowly on a phone. The contact information is buried three clicks deep. The About page describes the history of the business in 2018 and nothing else. There is no clear statement of what the business does for a customer who has never heard of it.

The third-party listings (Yelp, Yell, TripAdvisor, Apple Maps) often have a different address or phone number, because they were set up once and never maintained. The information diverges quietly over time.

None of this is unusual. Most businesses have not looked at any of it recently because they assume, quite reasonably, that what was set up still works. Often it does not.

A customer who cannot find accurate information about your business will not call to ask. They will go somewhere else.

When tools like ChatGPT or Google's AI Overview try to find information about a local business, they draw on exactly the same sources a human search would find: your Google Business Profile, your website, your third-party listings.

If those sources contain conflicting information, or if the information is thin, the AI either describes you inaccurately or does not mention you at all. Someone asking "where is the best [your type of business] near Wanstead?" gets an answer that does not include you.

The businesses that appear in those recommendations have not necessarily done anything special. They have simply made sure that the basic information is correct, consistent, and complete.

That is a low bar. Most businesses are not clearing it.