Seventy-seven point six percent of US consumers say they have used an AI tool such as ChatGPT or Gemini to help with a shopping or purchasing decision in the past six months, and 43 percent do it at least once a week, according to an Exploding Topics survey of 1,009 US consumers, published in April 2026. If that number holds anywhere close for your own customers, the real question is not whether you have a marketing plan. It is whether AI can find anything true and specific to say about your business when someone asks it.

Kevin has spent over 30 years moving brand stories out of agency boardrooms, from DDB, Ogilvy and Saatchi and Saatchi, into the hands of real customers, and has never seen a channel take over your customers' buying decisions this fast, or this quietly.

Here is the enemy worth naming: the SEO checklist. Meta descriptions, backlinks, a blog posted every week, all built for a search engine that returns ten blue links. That checklist still matters, but it was built for a world where a human reads the results. Increasingly, the first reader is an AI model, and it does not click through ten links, it picks one answer and hands it to your customer.

L.E.K. Consulting's research, covered by MarTech in July 2026, found that 46 percent of AI shoppers now start their purchase research on a standalone AI platform rather than a search engine, up from 25 percent in 2024, while traditional search use for that first step fell from 43 percent to 24 percent over the same period. The first move in your customer's buying journey is quietly changing platform, and most SME marketing plans have not noticed yet.

You cannot buy your way into an AI answer the way you can buy a search ad, but you can make yourself impossible for one to ignore:

This is the first pass of what I call AI visibility inside the Simple-Growth System, and it is quickly becoming as important as the Google ranking most owners still obsess over.

"Kevin D'Ambros-Smith was the first coach that helped us and he was so great. He understood the business straightaway, was able to identify some of the areas where we could grow it, and some of the things to park. I don't think the ROW branding would be nearly as strong without his input. He was just brilliant."

— Sarah McGuinness, Founder and CEO, Revolutionaries of Wellbeing (ROW)

The reason most SME owners have not touched this yet is not reluctance, it is timing. AI-driven shopping research went from a niche habit to a majority behaviour in roughly two years, and marketing plans typically get revisited once a year, if that. By the time next year's plan gets written, the gap between what AI already knows about your business and what it should know will have grown, not shrunk. Closing it now, while most competitors have not started, is the cheapest version of this fix you will ever get.

If you are not sure what AI currently says about your business, that is a five-minute conversation, not a six-month project.

Be the owner who knows what AI says about your business, and has shaped it on purpose.