You've been working on your Google ranking for years. Optimizing titles. Building backlinks. Maybe even paying someone to write blog posts that Google actually reads. And it's worked — you show up. People find you.

Now flip to ChatGPT and type "best plumber near me" or "where should I get my hair cut in Austin." What happens? The AI answers. It names businesses. Maybe your competitor. Maybe nobody you recognize. Maybe not you.

That's the new problem. And until this week, there wasn't a real tool to address it.

Durable, the AI-powered small business website builder, just launched a product called Discoverability. It's designed to help small businesses track and improve how they appear in AI-powered search tools — ChatGPT, Gemini, Grok, Perplexity, and whatever comes next.

What Discoverability Actually Does

The core feature is the AI Visibility Dashboard. It shows you whether and how your business shows up when someone asks an AI assistant for recommendations in your category.

There's also a Visibility Score — a number that summarizes your AI search presence. Think of it like a Domain Authority score, but for the AI search world instead of Google's.

Directory Management lets you manage your business listings across the data sources that AI systems pull from. This matters because AI tools don't just make things up — they pull from a web of directories, review sites, and databases. If your information is inconsistent or missing in those places, you're invisible.

Competitor Tracking shows you how your direct competitors are performing in AI search relative to you. That alone is worth logging in for.

The product is free to start. Paid tiers presumably unlock deeper tracking, but the core dashboard is accessible without a credit card.

SEO vs GEO: What's the Difference

SEO — search engine optimization — is the practice of making your website rank higher in Google results. It involves keywords, backlinks, site speed, and a hundred other signals Google uses to decide who shows up on page one.

GEO — generative engine optimization — is the emerging practice of making your business appear in AI-generated answers. The signals are different. AI systems care about whether your business appears in authoritative sources, whether your NAP (name, address, phone) data is consistent across the web, whether you answer specific questions that people actually ask, and whether credible websites reference you.

In SEO, the goal is a link on a results page. In GEO, the goal is being named in a paragraph. That's a fundamentally different game.

The shift is real. According to industry tracking cited by Durable, more than 50% of consumers now use AI tools for local recommendations. That number has climbed fast and will keep climbing. People under 35 increasingly skip Google entirely for certain searches.

Is This Worth Using for a Small Business?

Here's my honest take: the Durable Discoverability dashboard solves a real problem that most small business owners don't even know they have yet.

If you're a restaurant, a local service provider, a boutique retailer, or any business that depends on people finding you locally, your AI search visibility matters right now. It's not a 2027 problem. Customers are already asking AI tools where to go.

The free tier is an easy yes. You should know how you appear in AI search. If the answer is "poorly" or "not at all," that's actionable information.

The tool is still early. GEO as a discipline is only about two years old, and anyone claiming to have it fully figured out is overselling. But a dashboard that tracks your position over time and flags what to fix is more useful than nothing — which is currently what most small businesses have.

Durable's founder James Clift has been building the company around the premise that AI changes the infrastructure of small business discovery. Discoverability is the first product from any major platform to address that thesis directly.

What to Do Right Now

Log into Durable's Discoverability dashboard and run your business. Take note of your Visibility Score. Check what directories your data lives in and whether it's consistent. Look at where your competitors stand.

If your score is low, the fixes are mostly unglamorous but doable: update your Google Business Profile, make sure your address and phone number are identical everywhere it appears online, get more reviews on the platforms AI systems pull from, and create content that directly answers questions your customers ask.

GEO isn't separate from basic good business hygiene. It's an extension of it. Durable just gave you a way to measure it.

Start there.