Why AI Leads Close Faster (And What That Means for Craftspeople)

When someone finds your workshop through AI — ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overview — they're more likely to hire you, and they'll decide faster. That's not a hunch. In a year-long study by an SEO agency called StudioHawk, leads that came through AI search closed in 18 days on average. Leads from traditional Google search took 29 days (Lawrence Hitches, Search Engine Land, February 2026).

Eleven days faster. For a furniture maker fitting in consultations around workshop time, that's the difference between a kitchen commission that drags through weeks of back-and-forth and one that moves from first call to deposit in under three weeks.

What's actually happening here?

When a homeowner asks Google "bespoke kitchen maker London," they get a list of ten blue links. They open three or four tabs, skim each website, compare, and start a slow process of figuring out who to trust. That's the 29-day journey.

When someone asks ChatGPT the same question, they get a direct answer. The AI doesn't give them ten options — it gives them two or three, with reasons. "This maker specialises in hardwood kitchens, has been operating for twelve years, and has strong reviews on Houzz and Google." By the time that person picks up the phone, they've already decided you're credible. The comparison-shopping phase happened inside the AI's answer.

Hitches describes this as "consideration compression" — the messy middle of the buying process, where people weigh options and reduce risk, gets squeezed into the AI response. The buyer arrives at your door pre-educated and pre-convinced. They ask fewer basic questions. They show less price resistance. They're further along before you've said a word (Search Engine Land, February 2026).

How big is the opportunity?

In the same study, StudioHawk tracked over 20 leads directly attributable to AI search in their first year. Those conversations contributed more than $100,000 in closed revenue. And that's likely an undercount — many AI-influenced leads show up in analytics as "direct traffic" or "Instagram referral" because the buyer used AI to research, then went to the business through another channel (Search Engine Land, February 2026).

One telling example: a customer found a luggage brand called Kadi through ChatGPT while searching "kids carry-on." She checked the shipping policy, browsed the range, added three extra products, and placed the brand's largest Black Friday order. In the analytics? It showed up as an Instagram conversion. The AI influence was invisible to standard tracking (Search Engine Land, February 2026).

For craftspeople, this matters because you're probably already being influenced by AI search without knowing it. When a customer calls and says "I found you online," they may well mean they asked ChatGPT.

Does just showing up in AI actually matter?

Here's where it gets interesting. Getting mentioned by AI is surprisingly easy. In another experiment, Hitches built a brand-new landscaping website — a test site with no real business behind it — and published a "best landscapers in Melbourne" list that included the fake company. Within two weeks, that site was appearing in AI responses (Search Engine Land, February 2026).

So visibility alone isn't the prize. A fake listing got visible in a fortnight. But visibility without substance is hollow — it doesn't generate the trust that makes leads close fast.

Wil Reynolds, founder of the marketing agency Seer Interactive, puts it bluntly: "Visibility alone does not get you believed or chosen." He warns that too many businesses are "mortgaging their trust to get back a little extra time" — using AI shortcuts that save effort today but erode the credibility that actually wins work (Wil Reynolds, "Trust vs Speed," 2026).

Reynolds uses a sharp diagnostic: look at the direct traffic to any page that's getting AI visibility. If no humans are sharing that page — no one's sending it to a friend in a WhatsApp group, no one's posting it on LinkedIn — then it's getting mentioned by AI but not trusted by people. Those two things need to go together (Wil Reynolds, "Trust vs Speed," 2026).

Why does this suit craftspeople specifically?

The 18-day closing speed depends on genuine trust. The AI has to be confident enough to recommend you with reasons, and the buyer has to arrive believing those reasons. That requires something real behind the recommendation — actual expertise, real customer reviews, a clear track record.

This is exactly what most craftspeople have. Twenty years making bespoke furniture. A portfolio of finished kitchens. Happy customers who'd vouch for the work. What they usually lack isn't substance — it's visibility. The quality is there; the AI just can't see it yet.

That's a fixable problem, and it's very different from the problem facing a generic business that has visibility but no substance. You can make substance visible. You can't manufacture substance you don't have.

What actually earns the recommendation?

The experiments and the practitioners converge on the same set of things:

• Clarity over cleverness. Hitches notes that "AI hates vagueness." Your website needs to clearly state what you do, where you work, and who it's for. "Bespoke hardwood kitchens and fitted furniture for homes in North London" beats "Crafting beautiful spaces" every time (Search Engine Land, February 2026).
• Consistency across platforms. AI cross-references your website against your Google Business Profile, your Houzz listing, your reviews. If the details match, confidence goes up. If your address is different on Yell than on Google, doubt creeps in.
• Reviews that tell a story. AI doesn't just count stars — it reads review text. Reviews that mention specific projects ("rebuilt our Victorian kitchen in solid oak") give AI concrete material to cite when recommending you.
• Content that answers real questions. Reynolds' strongest point is about authenticity: interview the person in your workshop who's been making furniture for fifteen years, and let their real knowledge drive your content. AI rewards genuine expertise — not reformatted advice from other websites (Wil Reynolds, "Trust vs Speed," 2026).

Isn't this just good business practice?

Yes — partly. Google's John Mueller said at Search Live in December 2025: "There is no such thing as GEO or AEO without doing SEO fundamentals." His point is that AI search relies on traditional search infrastructure. If your website is slow, broken, or invisible to Google, it's invisible to AI too (John Mueller, Google Search Live Zurich, December 2025, via Nicola Agius, Search Engine Land).

The SEO community broadly agrees. At recent industry meetups, experienced practitioners have been saying that the core work hasn't fundamentally changed: your website needs to load fast, your information needs to be accurate, your content needs to be useful. AI search builds on those foundations rather than replacing them.

For craftspeople, that's actually good news. It means the work you do to improve your AI visibility — claiming directory listings, gathering reviews, making your website clearer — also helps your traditional search presence. Nothing is wasted. The difference is that AI search adds a faster, higher-converting channel on top of what already works.

What you can do this week

You don't need to understand how AI works. You need to make the truth about your business visible to systems that are looking for it. Three things, in order:

1. Ask AI about yourself. Open ChatGPT or Perplexity and type "Tell me about [your business name]." What comes back? Is it accurate? Is it blank? That gap between what AI knows and what's true about your business — that's the work (Wil Reynolds, "Trust vs Speed," 2026).
2. Make your website say what you actually do. Not in clever marketing language. In the same plain words a customer would use when describing you to a friend. "He builds bespoke kitchens in solid hardwood, mostly in South London. Been doing it for twenty years."
3. Get your details consistent everywhere. Same name, same address, same phone number, same service description — on your website, Google Business Profile, Houzz, Checkatrade, and anywhere else you're listed. Consistency is one of the strongest trust signals AI uses.

Frequently asked questions

Further reading

These are independent sources — none of them are affiliated with Findcraft. They'll give you a broader perspective on the topics covered here:

• What 4 AI Search Experiments Reveal About Attribution and Buying Decisions — Lawrence Hitches, Search Engine Land. The primary source for the 18-day vs 29-day closing data and the fake business experiment.
• How to Optimize for AI Search: 12 Proven LLM Visibility Tactics — Nicola Agius, Search Engine Land. Includes John Mueller's quote on SEO fundamentals and a practitioner roundtable on what actually works.
• LearningSEO.io — Aleyda Solis's free SEO learning roadmap. If you want to understand the fundamentals that AI search builds on, this is the most accessible starting point.

A note on our perspective

Findcraft sells AI visibility services — the kind of work this article describes. That's a commercial interest worth naming. We've written this to be useful whether you hire anyone or not, and the three steps above cost nothing. But you should weigh our enthusiasm for AI search against the fact that we have a business built on it.

The data cited here comes from independent sources — Search Engine Land, StudioHawk, and Google's own John Mueller. We haven't cherry-picked results. The StudioHawk figures come from a single agency's experience, not a broad industry study, and we've said so. Draw your own conclusions.

Content produced through the M.A.R.C. methodology — our framework for evidence-based, ethically-governed content.