Do this: Paste your homepage text into a free chatbot and ask it to describe your business the way a stranger would. Whatever it gets wrong is what the assistants are telling your customers right now. Two minutes, no signup; then fix the one line that misleads it.
PASTE THIS
You are a customer who found this page in a search result and has 15 seconds. Here is the page text: [PASTE HOMEPAGE TEXT]. Answer in five short lines: what is sold, who it is for, what it costs, where you are, and how to reach a person. Then quote the exact sentences that made you guess instead of know.
You'll get: A robot's five-line description of your business, and the two sentences on your site that make it guess.
The five lines a robot needs to quote you correctly
Paste this block at the top of your homepage and into the description field of your Google Business profile. Same five facts, same words, both places.
WHO WE ARE: [one plain sentence about what we do] WHO IT IS FOR: [customer type] in [town or region] WHAT IT COSTS: [starting price, or free quote], no setup fee WHEN WE ARE OPEN: [hours], book at [link] WHO ANSWERS: [first name], a person, replies within [X] hours
Why the repetition: an assistant answering for you has to pick one version of the truth, and it tends to prefer the version it sees twice. Change a price in one place, change it in the other the same day, or the machine keeps quoting the old one.
The ad business is not dying. It is moving to whichever surface answers first. Google spent twenty years selling the click and has now shipped the thing that ends it. If your growth plan still says rank higher and wait, you are renting shelf space in a shop that is closing.
Meta's ad revenue rose 26% to $63.1 billion last quarter while Google's search business grew 12%, CNBC reports, a 14-point gap, widest since 2021. Alphabet lost $500 billion in market value in a day after blaming its own AI summaries for a hit to search ad revenue, the BBC reports.
So what: the free click is being replaced by a one-paragraph answer with no link. This week, count where your last 20 customers came from; if search is more than a quarter of them, start collecting the phone numbers and emails you own.
Microsoft is buying out 60,000 people to pay for AI
The offer went to vice presidents and below in the US, Canada, India and the UK, with Xbox, Windows, Copilot and Finance taking part and data-centre staff excluded, TechCrunch reports. So what: the savings go into machines, not into cheaper licences. Before your next renewal, ask your reseller for a written price hold for the full term.
Adoption is up. Productivity is not.
The University of Manchester's Productivity Institute says rising AI use has not yet produced the forecast gains, partly because firms spend heavily on retraining and reorganisation before anything shows, The Register reports. So what: measure the whole job, not the one task you automated. Pick a workflow with a clock on it this week, and re-measure in 30 days before you cut the budget or double it.
White text on white paper cost two lawyers a fine
A Brazilian labour court fined two lawyers who hid a white-on-white instruction in a filing, aimed at the AI tool the court uses to review petitions; the hidden line told the machine to read the petition superficially and not check the documents, JetStream AI reports. So what: any document you upload can carry invisible instructions. Before your next filing or bid, paste it into a plain-text editor and strip what you did not type.
This week's question: the booking page works fine in a browser. Does an AI assistant see the same thing? Often not. Assistants read the text, not the layout, so a price that lives only inside an image or a hover menu is invisible to them. Free check: open the page, select all, copy, paste into a plain document. If the price, hours and address are missing from that paste, they are missing for the machine too. Fix the words this week; the design can wait.
Where did your last ten new customers come from?
A. Search results
B. Referral or word of mouth
C. Paid ads
D. Nobody is counting
Reply with one letter — results next issue.
Which country's under-16 social media ban starts in March, with photo ID and bank records floated as age checks?
Answer tomorrow — and no, we are not printing it here.
YESTERDAY'S ANSWER
Google's first data-centre satellite sent its AI reply back to Earth this week. What did the chip actually produce?
A haiku. The prototype TPU wrote a short poem and Google transmitted it home, which is an expensive way to write three lines (The Register, The Verge).
About 5 minutes to read. One thing you can use today every issue.
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Sent by AI for Everyday Business.
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