The Chatbot Is Your Customer’s Background Check Now. 57% Have Been Talked Out of Buying

Welcome to the AI Industry Report, daily AI news for small business, built by AI, about AI, from the Agentic Marketing Academy. It’s Wednesday, September 9th. Four stories and one rumor, and the first one is a new survey showing AI chatbots are talking more than half of their users out of purchases, and nearly nine in ten would ask one before hiring a local business. Let’s go.

Okay, this first one is about what your customers are doing before they ever call you. Semrush asked 2,338 Americans how they use AI when they shop, and the number I can’t get past isn’t about buying. It’s about not buying. 57 percent of people who use AI have walked away from a purchase because of something a chatbot told them. And what tips them? Reviews. Three out of four said they’d back off if a chatbot flagged mixed or negative reviews. Now, you might be thinking, that’s people buying headphones, not my shop. Here’s the local part. Almost half of all consumers sometimes ask an AI about a company before they buy from it. Of those people, 87 percent would check with AI before hiring a local business, and a third said they always do. That’s the plumber, the dentist, the caterer. You. And if your instinct is to buy an ad inside the chatbot to fix it, careful. Two-thirds of the people who dislike those ads say an ad makes them trust the whole answer less. So the chatbot is the background check now, it can kill the sale, and what it’s reading is your reviews, your website, and your listings. All stuff you can fix. Source: Semrush’s Exploding Topics survey, published September 7th, via Search Engine Roundtable.

Next up, and this one quietly rewrites some advice you’ve probably heard from me. For two years the line was, ChatGPT borrows its search results from Bing and Google, so rank there and you’ll show up in ChatGPT. Well. Tomek Rudzki at Peec AI read the data stream ChatGPT sends to your browser while it’s answering, and found ChatGPT has its own search index. Code name Labrador. Not one index, a set of them: web, news, local, shopping, images, and more. It’s testing that index against scraped search results in shopping right now, and it keeps its own copy of your pages instead of loading them fresh. Does it still use Google and Microsoft? Yes. But it also pulls Yelp and TripAdvisor in as licensed partners, and scrapes Google Maps data in without you having any say. OpenAI hasn’t confirmed any of this, so keep that in mind. What Peec tells owners to do: stop treating your Bing ranking as a stand-in for ChatGPT, watch ChatGPT shopping specifically if you sell products, and if you’re local, get your Yelp listing right, because it now feeds straight in. Source: Peec AI, published September 4th, reported in Search Engine Roundtable’s September 8th recap.

Now, go check the inbox attached to your Google Business Profile. Google is sending owners an email with the subject line “Does this look right to you?” It says a Maps user suggested an update to your listing, shows the change, and gives you four days to click “Yes, it’s correct” or “No, it’s incorrect.” Lluc Penycate spotted one where a stranger had suggested a new name for the business. Remember Tell Maps from last week? That’s the feature where anybody can propose an edit to your listing by talking to Maps or snapping a photo of your sign. This email is the other half of it, your chance to say no before the change sticks. And here’s why it matters: Google has applied user edits without the owner’s okay before. So a message you never open is a message that decides for you. Source: Lluc B. Penycate on X, reported by Search Engine Roundtable, September 8th.

One more, and it’s good news, which we could use this week. A free tool got better. OpenAI released ChatGPT Images 2.5 to every tier, including free. Two fixes matter if you make your own marketing. It keeps your actual product looking like your actual product when you drop it into a new scene, and it stops wrecking your fourth edit when you ask for a fifth. There are templates now for posters, flyers, product photos, and merch, a Sketch feature where you draw a rough layout and it finishes the picture, and you can point at one part of an image and change only that. And every image carries an invisible watermark, so it’s identifiable as AI-made where the disclosure rules apply. Source: OpenAI’s announcement, September 8th.

And today’s rumor watch. Remember back on August 14th, when we told you ChatGPT was testing hiding its Sources button under a three-dot menu? That’s the button a customer clicks to see where an answer came from, including whether it came from you. Glenn Gabe, who caught that test, now says his free ChatGPT account shows a plain “Sources” button again, right out in the open, while his paid account still hides it. One person, two accounts, nothing from OpenAI, so this is unconfirmed. But if it holds, the free tier, which is where most of your customers are, puts your name back in plain sight. Source: Glenn Gabe on X, via Search Engine Roundtable, September 8th.

So here’s your one thing for today. Ask ChatGPT, Gemini, or whichever assistant you use: “Should I hire [your business name] in [your town]? What do the reviews say?” Read the answer the way a customer would. Whatever’s wrong or missing is your to-do list this week.

That’s today’s report. Transcript and every source linked at A I industry report dot com.

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