If you run one location and you are the whole marketing team, you can be forgiven for tuning out every headline about AI and search. Most of it is written for companies with a department.
Three people who build the software behind that headline sat down together on the Unscripted SEO Podcast recently, and a few things they said land differently when you are the owner, the operator, and the person who answers the phone. This is that shorter list — the parts that change something for a business with one address and no agency.
The tool that cost $110 a month now costs $10
Ben Senescu builds OpenSEO, a free and open source alternative to the big subscription SEO platforms. He expected professionals to use it. That is not who showed up.
His customers turned out to be entrepreneurs doing their own SEO for the first time, and the reason they could was price. He put the number at ten dollars a month using an AI assistant, instead of a hundred and ten for a platform built for full-time marketers.
That matters to you and not to a marketing department. The reason most small businesses never touched this work was not laziness. It was that the entry ticket cost more than the local advertising you were already paying for, and it came with a learning curve nobody had time for. That ticket price fell through the floor this year. If you looked at this in 2022 and decided it was not for you, that decision was made against numbers that no longer exist.
Two offers are going to land in your inbox. Both of them are the shortcut.
Senescu named them, and he was not being coy.
“There are always people selling shortcuts. ‘If you spend two thousand dollars a month with my agency, we’ll spam your website on every single Reddit forum.’ Or, ‘If you pay a hundred dollars a month, we’ll do this AI backlink exchange.’ And it’s like, okay, this may work in the short term, but it’s a bit of a distraction from just focusing on how to actually market your business well.”
Patrick Stox, who spent years at Ahrefs and IBM and is one of the more careful people in this industry, put a longer clock on it.
“Any tactic that is abused will be shut down… When Penguin came along it hurt for a few years, and then Google just said, all those bad links you built, we just forgive you. That may not be the case in all these new systems. They might hold a grudge for the next 10, 20, 30 years for all the spam that you did in the past.”
Read that as a business risk rather than a technical one. The old pattern was: somebody sold you a trick, it worked for a while, it stopped working, and eventually the slate got wiped. Stox is not confident the slate gets wiped this time.
So the person selling you a twelve-month tactic may be handing you a twenty-year mark against a business you intend to hand to your kids. That is a different kind of decision than “is this worth two grand a month,” and it is the kind of decision a steward makes differently than a renter does.
You do not have to be famous. You have to be on the list.
Here is the part I would tape to the wall.
Senescu asked the other two how he could get recommended by ChatGPT and Claude when almost nobody has heard of his tool yet. Patrick separated two things that usually get mashed together: being known by the AI, and being on the pages the AI goes and reads when somebody asks it a question.
“You’ve got a while before you’re really in the training data as a known entity. For now, it’s the retrieved pages where you’ll want to be found. Look at what’s there — people have all these lists… Make sure there’s a call-out section on those pages.”
He was talking about lists of SEO software. You have the local version of exactly the same thing, and it is much shorter and much easier to get onto:
- The chamber of commerce directory, filled out properly instead of half-filled in 2019.
- The “best [your trade] in [your town]” roundups that already exist and already rank.
- Your church and ministry networks, your association listings, your supplier’s “find a dealer” page.
- Google Business Profile with the hours, the service area, and the services actually written out.
A software founder is fighting to get named alongside Ahrefs and Semrush. You are fighting to be one of three plumbers or three counselors or three bakeries in a county. Nobody is bidding against you for that spot. It is simply unclaimed, and it takes an afternoon.
If the AI says the wrong thing about you, it is because nothing says the right thing
Ben Wills has been in this since 2001 and spent most of the last decade as an engineer, and he does not find AI mistakes mysterious at all. He explains them mechanically — the model breaks language into pieces and predicts the next one, so when it is asked to recommend businesses and it invents details, there is a reason, and the reason is usually that it did not have anything solid to work from.
The practical translation for a one-location business is not technical. It is this: if there is no clear, consistent, plainly written account of what you do, who you serve, and where you are, then something will get made up in the gap. Not out of malice. Out of arithmetic.
So write it down. What you do. Who it is for. Where you do it. What you do not do. On your own site, in your own words, in the same words everywhere else. That is unglamorous and it is the single highest-leverage hour available to you right now, because it is the raw material every one of these systems is working from.
The first year, you just make rice
Ben Wills trained analysts with a rule borrowed from a sushi kitchen. The first year, you do not touch the fish. You make rice. That is the year.
He put new people on one task — keyword research, over and over, across dozens of sites — because doing one thing properly for long enough is how it stops being a procedure and becomes judgment. He believes the same about learning to work with AI now.
For you that means picking one thing and doing it for a year instead of picking five things and doing them for a month. Ask your customers what they searched for before they found you, and write the page that answers it. Then do it again. Then again. That is a rice year, and it compounds in a way no monthly retainer does.
The work and the marketing are the same thing
Senescu said the line almost in passing, about software: the building and the marketing are the same thing, because the marketing informs what you build and what you build informs the marketing.
For a business with one location, that is not a strategy insight. It is closer to a conviction. The service you actually provide, the way you treat the person who calls, the thing you refuse to sell somebody who does not need it — that is the marketing. It always was. The tools changed. That did not.
The whole conversation is worth an hour if you want it: the full SEO SaaS panel with Patrick Stox, Ben Wills and Ben Senescu is on the Unscripted SEO Podcast.