A woman in Boulder wants Botox.

Five years ago she Googled "best med spa near me" and called whoever showed up on the map. Today, more and more, she opens ChatGPT or Perplexity first and asks which one is actually any good.

If your business is not in that answer, you were never in the running. And here's the uncomfortable part: she will never know you existed.

By the end of this you'll know exactly how much this is really happening, which of your customers' decisions it touches, and what to do about it without betting your whole budget on a trend.

📊 The honest numbers first

Let's kill the hype before we use the truth.

AI search is still small. It's roughly 1% of all website traffic today. Google still sends around 80% of all referrals. Anyone who tells you AI has replaced Google is selling you something.

But "small overall" hides the part that matters. Because search splits into two jobs, and AI is winning one of them fast.

The buying click is still Google Maps. When someone searches "best med spa Boulder" or "dentist near me," the local map pack shows up more than 90% of the time and AI answers show up about 15%. The map pack takes nearly half of all clicks. That's where booked appointments still come from.

The research is moving to AI. When someone asks "average cost of dental implants in Boulder" or "is LASIK worth it," AI answers appear on 92% to 97% of those searches. Those are the questions people ask for days before they ever pick up the phone.

🔍 Why your business is different from a pizza shop

A pizza shop does not need to read this. Nobody asks ChatGPT for three days before ordering a pepperoni.

But you are not a pizza shop.

The verticals where this matters are the ones where a single customer is worth thousands: med spas, cosmetic and implant dentistry, LASIK, cosmetic surgery, personal injury and family law, fertility, wealth management.

These are expensive, high-stakes, deeply researched decisions. People read, compare, and second-guess for weeks. That research is exactly the behavior moving into AI.

So the rule is simple: the higher the price tag and the longer the decision, the more AI search already matters for you.

🧪 What I found when I tested Boulder

I didn't want to hand you national averages. So I ran the test on your own backyard.

I looked at what AI engines actually pull from when they answer "best med spa" and "best cosmetic dentist" in Boulder. The results were striking.

The sources AI leans on here are mostly auto-generated aggregator lists, or nothing at all. There is no trusted local "best of" article owning these answers. For dental implant costs in Boulder, there is no Boulder-specific source at all. It's an empty room.

And the businesses that should be winning are invisible.

• A Boulder med spa with 5 stars and 112+ reviews, open since 2011: absent from the lists AI cites.
• A Boulder dental practice with 575+ five-star reviews: nowhere in any "best of" source an AI would quote.

That's the opportunity in one picture. The ground is empty, and strong local businesses haven't claimed it.

🧭 What to actually do about it

Here's the balanced play. Not "abandon Google for the shiny thing." Both, in the right order.

1. Keep winning Google Maps. That's still where this quarter's booked jobs come from. Do not touch the thing that pays the bills.

2. Claim the AI layer now, while it's cheap and empty. Four concrete moves:

• Make your site machine-readable: clean structure, schema markup, and an FAQ section that answers real questions in plain language.
• Answer the research questions your buyers actually type: cost, comparison, "is it worth it," "what to expect." These are the queries AI quotes.
• Get listed in the sources AI cites: your reviews, the relevant directories, and a genuine local "best of" article if one can be earned or built.
• Add an llms.txt file to your site. It's a simple text file that tells AI crawlers what matters. Almost nobody local has one.

3. Measure it. Ask the AI engines your own buyer questions every week and watch whether your name shows up. The before and after is the proof.

📈 Why now, and not next year

Two reasons the timing is the whole game.

AI search traffic is growing about 165 times faster than regular search traffic. The empty room fills up.

And being first in an empty space compounds. The business that becomes the cited answer while nobody else is trying gets to keep that seat as the volume grows.

The honest version: this is not where most of your revenue comes from today. It's where the cheapest, least crowded advantage is sitting right now, in exactly the decisions your customers agonize over.

The one-sentence takeaway

Send this to someone who owns a Boulder or Denver business worth more than a pizza order.