“I don't need a website, that's what ChatGPT is for”

A client said that to me, and my first reaction was, wow, did you really just say that? But I have a logical and curious mind, I look at how things work, or at worst how they could work, so I stopped, and I realised that other people may well think the same thing.

So where does it get its information from?

Look, AI starts out knowing fuck all about you. It's a blank canvas, and it needs information to learn, which is good and terrifying all at once. So as a business, I know it's my job to teach it, and while of course I can't do that directly, I can make sure there is enough information out there on me and Wonder Works so it at least has something to go on. So yes, ChatGPT is good for information, but where the fuck does it get its information from? It's your job, and mine, to create that information and make sure it can read it.

And if you think people over here aren't asking AI yet, have a look at this. In September, people in Bulgaria searched Google for ChatGPT about 3.35 million times, and they couldn't even agree how to spell it. There are at least seven ways in the data, and about one in four used Cyrillic letters. My favourite is „чат джипити“, which is basically "chat jeepity" spelt out the way it sounds, and that one went from 33,100 searches a year ago to 110,000 this September. So yes, people are going to ChatGPT in their millions, typing it however it comes out, and when they get there and ask about you, the only question that matters is what it's reading.

Who honestly doesn't need a website?

Who honestly doesn't need a website? Well, unless you sell potatoes to the same three people and don't need any more, I'm not sure. It can't be many. I know that I need one, haha.

So I tested it on us

So I tested it on us, which seemed only fair. I asked ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity to tell me about Wonder Works, who runs it, what we do and what we charge, and they answered almost entirely from our own website. But not perfectly. ChatGPT told whoever was asking that our branding prices are different on two of our pages, and to check which one applies. Another one quoted an hourly rate from a directory listing we never wrote, and we don't even charge by the hour. It's not the AI that's wrong, it's the information it was given.

It's not the AI that's wrong, it's the information it was given.

And I'm cool with that, because it's expected at the moment. We don't get it all correct from the outset, we change and adapt our business to stay current, so some stuff we catch and some slips through, which is why we check regularly and keep improving. I'm not sure it will ever be perfect, we work in a fast-changing industry, but it's very close on all of them.

We are the live guinea pig

Our own site has been the same journey. The first one got nothing. It was built on one of the website builders, and I'm not naming it, because I don't name and shame, and it was right for us at the time. We rebuilt it when that improved, but AI still couldn't read all of it properly, so we moved again to fully custom coded. Now every word is right there in the page for AI to read, and when that improves, we'll adapt again, because we have to stay current. So many in our industry don't practise what they preach. We test the new stuff on ourselves before we apply it to a client. We are the live guinea pig.

I'm very proud of this one, although it still needs to improve. We cover a lot and the information is very good when you ask AI, but for me it still feels a bit robotic, and I'm not sure if that's me or the AI. I guess time will tell.