Hi everyone,

A search engine can answer a lot of your customers’ questions now, before anybody gets in touch with you. It is not selling anything when it does that. What it is doing is deciding who gets pointed at, if anybody does. Sometimes it builds the answer out of one business’s material and names them. Sometimes it answers from general knowledge and names nobody at all.

What decides which one happens is not size or budget. It is whether the answer could have come from anywhere. Standard definitions, general background on your category, the how-to article every business in your industry has some version of: a search engine can produce all of that on its own now, and when it does, there is no reason to point back at you. What it cannot produce is what you have in stock, what it would cost for their situation, whether you can get it done by the fifteenth, or the answer you give a customer on the phone that they will not get anywhere else.

Most business websites have some of each type of answer on them, and most owners have never sorted out which is which.

So the useful work is not writing more. It is knowing the full run of questions your customers work through, not just the first one, and making sure your site answers the ones only you can answer.

Below is why this is not a big-company or a small-company problem, two things to check on your own site this week, and a free report for the one part you cannot check yourself.

Nearly half of all searches now end with the person reading their answer on the results page and never visiting anybody’s website. Not yours, not a competitor’s, nobody’s.

The largest study of search behavior I have come across tracked 13.1 billion searches. Part of it took the biggest websites in the world and counted how often Google answers the question itself instead of sending the person there.

Wikipedia loses about 30% of the searches headed its way. Amazon about 17%. Reddit about 14%.

Those are three of the most recognized names on the internet, and they still lose a share of the people who would otherwise have come to their websites. Nobody is exempt from this because of their size, and nobody earns their way out of it by getting better known.

It is also worth saying that getting answered around is not always a loss. When a search engine builds its answer out of your material and names you as the source, that is a good outcome. The person gets their answer with your name on it, already vouched for. The version that costs you is the one where nothing points back to you, because there was nothing in the answer that came from you in the first place.

Almost nobody asks one question and stops. They ask what the options are, then which one suits their situation, then what it costs for them specifically, then whether you can be trusted to do it right. You have walked people through that entire sequence on the phone a hundred times and probably never written it down in one place.

The opening question in any run is the one every business in your industry already has a page for. The ones that come after it are about that person’s situation, and those are the ones you can answer the way you would on a call, with the real numbers and the honest “it depends on.”

If the later answers are there in your words, you are in good shape whether or not anyone visits, because you are the reason those answers exist. If they are not, you have just found your next piece of work, and it is more specific than any content plan anyone could hand you.

There is one piece of this you cannot check on your own. When somebody asks ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Gemini a question in your category, you have no way of knowing whether your name comes up, or whose comes up instead.

So we built a free report that checks it for you and shows which businesses get named, how often, and where you are missing. You give it your website, plus up to five competitors if you would rather pick them yourself. It comes back by email, and there is no call attached to it.

Talk soon,

Iulia Vasciuc

CEO, ScaledOn