How a Buffalo Client Found Us on ChatGPT

In early September a woman I had never met emailed me about branding her new business, and when I asked how she had found Vagari Creative, I was expecting a name I knew, because in eight years almost every client has come through someone I know. She told me she had searched for branding in Buffalo on ChatGPT, and we came up.

We met in person the following week, and a little over two weeks after that first email she was a client.

I would like to say I had a plan for this, and I did not, so the first thing I did was read up on what had happened after spending years paying attention to Google and almost none to this, and that research is in a separate post, What Is AEO, and Why Should a Small Business Owner Care? The second thing was to look at our own site the way an assistant might.

What I cannot tell you

I cannot tell you which page ChatGPT read. It does not publish that, and I would rather say so than guess.

What we checked

I had Claude run a handful of checks on our own studio, asking a few assistants a few questions, which is not a study. The first thing to know is that the answers changed from one run to the next. The second is that the pages that got quoted were the specific ones.

Our salon page names a client, says where she is, lists what we built, and gives a starting price. For a question about website designers for salons in Buffalo, most of the assistants put us first, and one named only us. Our brand identity page named one client and had no price on it. For a question about brand identity studios in Buffalo, two of the assistants did not mention us at all.

What we changed

On October 13 we rewrote the brand identity page, adding a line with the starting price and two blocks of client proof: what we built, where, and for whom. We will see whether it makes a difference.

What I would take from it

If you run a business, the pattern in our own checks was that the assistants quoted the pages that said who, where, what, and how much. It costs nothing to open your own most important page and see whether it says all four. (The longer version of what AEO is and what the research says is in What Is AEO, and Why Should a Small Business Owner Care?)

If you would like help

If you are building or rebuilding a website and want it to say those four things plainly, the next step is a discovery call.

The client who started all this is a couple of weeks into her brand now, and she is a thoughtful one, building a service meant to bring people together at a time when loneliness is everywhere, which makes it mildly funny and a little lovely that it all began with someone asking a chatbot for help.