Your Reputation Is Being Written Somewhere You Are Not Reading

Why AI search is a governance question for Australian small business owners, not just a marketing one

I sat in on a session recently through my Uncommon Experiences, a networking event presented by Tony Sambell and Renae Casey from the Melbourne agency Spicy Web. The title was “Stop Optimising for AI. Start Owning the Source”, and I went in expecting another talk about keywords.

It was not that. It was a talk about evidence, and it landed somewhere I did not expect, which is squarely in the territory I spend most of my working life in: risk.

I want to give them full credit for the thinking that follows in the next section, because it is theirs and it is good. Then I want to share my reflection.

The idea, as Tony and Renae put it

Their core point is that an AI answer is the last step in a chain, not the starting point. The model gathers information from across the web, decides what is credible enough to use, and then produces a recommendation. Most businesses obsess over the final answer. Almost none pay attention to the ecosystem feeding it.

They framed it with a question I have not been able to put down since.

If every AI tool disappeared tomorrow, would the web still contain enough independent evidence to conclude that your business is one of the best in your industry?

They also made a distinction worth keeping in mind. Being cited is not the same as being recommended. Your website can be the source an AI quotes while a competitor wins the recommendation, because four other places on the internet spoke well of them. Visibility and influence aren’t the same.

They also lay out the five layers where information about your business lives: the content you own, community discussion on places like Reddit and Facebook groups, expert commentary published by named individuals, editorial coverage in trade and news media and transactional sources such as reviews and directories. Only the first of those five is yours.

I recommend reaching out to Tony and Renae at Spicy Web, and both are worth following on LinkedIn: Tony Sambell and Renae Casey.

The part I keep thinking about

Here is where I land differently, and it is a function of the chair I usually sit in.

Most of this conversation is happening in marketing language. Visibility, share of voice, optimisation. But strip that away and look at what is actually being described. A significant portion of what the market now believes about your business is being assembled from sources you did not write, do not monitor, cannot correct, and in most cases have never read.

In any other part of the business, we would call that an exposure.

If a staff member was speaking to customers about your business every day and you had no idea what they were saying, you would deal with it this week. If your compliance obligations had changed and nobody had checked, that would be on the next board agenda. This is the same category of problem I have written about in relation to technology risk and director duties. It has simply arrived wearing marketing clothes, so it gets handed to whoever runs the website instead of being treated as what it is.

I have never seen “what does the internet currently say about us, and is it accurate” on a small business board agenda. I think it belongs there, and it is exactly the kind of blind spot a well constructed advisory board exists to catch.

Image thanks to Unsplash 

Where I would push back

The honest problem with almost all advice in this space, including some of what was presented, is that it is built for organisations with a marketing team.

Auditing twenty queries across five platforms, tracking competitor sentiment, measuring recommendation share and running a brand gap analysis is entirely sensible work. It is also four or five days of effort. If you employ six people and you are still doing the quoting yourself, that is not going to happen, and pretending otherwise adds another thing to feel behind on.

So here is the version I would actually give an owner sitting across the table from me. Three things, in order.

One: find out what is already being said

Open a private browser window so your search history doesn’t influence the results. Ask ChatGPT and Google whom they would recommend for your service in your area. Then ask what they know about your business by name. As Renea shared, read the sources listed underneath the answer rather than the answer itself, because the sources are the actual findings. Half an hour, once a quarter.

Two: fix the layer you can fix this week

For most small businesses, that is reviews. It costs nothing; your happiest customers are usually willing, and nobody asks them. It is also the layer that carries weight with human buyers and machines at the same time, which makes it the best return available to you.

Three: make your own claims specific enough to be repeated

A model will happily repeat “we have supported 340 Victorian businesses since 2009”. It will not repeat “Australia’s leading provider” because there is nothing to verify. We apply the same discipline to board reporting: numbers beat adjectives. Most small business websites are written entirely in adjectives.

One thing to be careful of

Resist the temptation to manufacture what you have not earned. Fake reviews and staff posting in forums pretending to be customers get detected, and the damage when it surfaces is worse than the invisibility you were trying to solve. Earned or nothing.

The question for your next leadership meeting

Not “how is our marketing performing”. That question is already being asked and it is not the useful one.

Ask instead: do we know what the internet currently says about this business, do we know whether it is accurate, and who is responsible for checking? If nobody can answer, you have just found a gap in your risk register, and it took four minutes.

My thanks to Tony and Renae for the session. It is not often that a marketing talk changes how I think about governance.

Frequently asked questions

What does “online presence” mean for a small business now?

It is the full set of places where information about your business exists online, not only your website. That includes your owned content, community discussion on platforms like Reddit and Facebook groups, commentary published by named experts on LinkedIn, editorial coverage in trade and news media, and review platforms such as Google Reviews and Product Review. AI tools draw on all of these when answering a question about your business.

Do I still need a website if customers are using AI to find businesses?

Yes. Your website is where every other source ultimately points, and it is where claims made elsewhere get verified. What has changed is that a website on its own is no longer sufficient evidence that your business is credible, because you wrote all of it.

Why do community sites like Reddit carry so much weight in AI answers?

A Semrush study published in June 2025, analysing more than 150,000 AI citations across 5,000 keywords, found Reddit was the single most cited source at just over 40 per cent of references, ahead of Wikipedia and YouTube. Those shares have shifted since, and later analysis through 2026 shows them continuing to shift, which is a reason to check periodically rather than dismiss it.

How do I find out what AI says about my business?

Ask it directly in a private browser window so your history doesn’t shape the answer. Ask whom it would recommend for your service in your area, then ask what it knows about your business by name. Read the sources underneath the answer, because that is where the useful information is.

WITH THANKS The five source layers framework, the “if AI disappeared tomorrow” test and the citation versus recommendation distinction discussed in this article were presented by Tony Sambell and Renae Casey of Spicy Web in their session “Stop Optimising for AI. Start Owning the Source”, delivered to the Uncommon Experiences.

If reputation is not currently on your risk register, that is a conversation worth having. Get in touch with Affari SP. You can read more articles here.