Hello Lunch Break. Last week I took the plunge. I had seen so many stories about wispr I decided to give it a try. Fun fact. When you are a solopreneur, a lot of conversations happen in your head. With wispr, now your family will just think you are talking out loud to yourself. Anyways, it's lunchtime and what better way to keep right on working than to let your hands hold your bowl and wispr type your thoughts. Technology is a magical thing. And yes for quieter spots you can actually whisper.

Which got me thinking about all the words I pour into these tools. Where do they even go? Anyone else hold full conversations with themselves? Reply, make me feel normal.

Alright. Clock's ticking. Back to work.

THE GAME CHANGED

So I spent all week pouring my thoughts into AI out loud. So, where do all those thoughts go?

Turns out somebody just forced the issue. A publisher can finally tell Google no.

June 3. The UK's competition regulator forced Google's hand. Publishers there can toggle a switch to pull their work out of AI Overviews and AI Mode. Their normal search rankings do not move. The switch went live yesterday. Google says the rest of us get it later.

Why the fight in the first place? Pew Research did the math. Under an AI Overview, 8% of people click through to a source. Without one, 15%. Google was answering publishers' traffic away. And the only way to say no used to be blocking Google entirely and disappearing from search. No real choice. Now there is one.

Now I know you’re not a publisher but you make this exact call every single day, mostly without noticing. Open Claude, ChatGPT, or Perplexity on a personal plan and your settings are defaulted to yes. You’re opting in to having your words, chats, history train the model.

Did you know this?

On the consumer tiers (Claude Free, Pro, and Max. ChatGPT Free, Plus, and Pro), your chats train the model unless you turn it off. Anthropic flipped this to on-by-default in late 2025, and a Pro account counts as consumer. 

So you know, the strategy you paste in. The pricing you are working out. The numbers. All of it can become training material, and on Claude the retention window stretches to five years if you leave the setting on.

So before anything else this week, your action today is to toggle the data controls off.

Claude

ChatGPT

Perplexity

THE WINDOW IS NOW

What’s Brave? I said.

Brave is a search engine with its own index. Over 40 billion pages. Here is why you care: Claude does not crawl the web. When Claude looks something up, it reads Brave's results. 

At a conference this month, a team from the AI visibility platform Profound put up two numbers. Roughly 79% of Claude's citations trace back to Brave's top results. And only about 8% overlap between what ChatGPT cites and what Claude cites. I cannot verify those exact figures, so hold them as reported. Claude reads Brave. 

So being cited in one engine does not put you in the others. Different engines pull from different places. The businesses that show up everywhere got there by being findable in more than one index. Brave is the one your competitors do not know exists.

That is the window.

YOUR COMPETITORS ARE ASLEEP

Last week a friend was hunting for a web designer to build her a new page. I told her to use Claude. She said, "Really?" Yes. Really. If you are a marketer, or an owner who does your own marketing, you need Claude. It will handle the build you used to outsource.

Here is the part people miss. Canva did not replace designers. Squarespace did not replace developers. They dropped the price of execution. Suddenly anyone could make the thing. But making the thing was never the hard part. Knowing what to make, for whom, and why: that is the part that was always worth paying for.

So no, I have not stopped using developers. I have two right now, and they use AI too. I do not pay them to code. I pay them for judgment the tool cannot hand me.

Your competitors who are asleep still think the animation or cool transition on a website is the edge. Anyone can make that now, in an afternoon. What still wins is knowing why a customer chooses you over the place down the street. That is the part no tool hands you. Most of them have not figured out they need it.

WHAT’S THE PROMPT

What are the best places to buy [your product or service] in [your city], and what specifically makes each business stand out from the others?

Open this prompt in ChatGPT and swap in your category and city.

Do not just read who shows up. Read the reason the AI gives. That reason is the differentiator the top names already own. To break in, you need a reason of your own they cannot claim.

CITED

AI says: Five Oaks Nursery. Tinga Nursery.

This week I searched for my own backyard, which could use a couple new trees. Where to buy trees in Wilmington NC. Gemini, ChatGPT, and Perplexity agreed on two.

Look at why. Tinga, since 1913. Five Oaks, growing its own stock in Burgaw, already acclimated to the coast. The engines are repeating reasons that show up again and again, across reviews, directories, and other people's writing. That is citation strength, from sources that are not you.

Here is the useful part. Below those two. Perplexity surfaced Plant Place. ChatGPT pulled The Plant Outpost and Barr Evergreens. Number one and two are locked. Everything underneath is up for grabs, and it changes by engine.

So if you are the third nursery in town, you will not unseat a century of corroboration on the generic search. You do not need to. Own a question the top two are not known for. The native-plant question. The fruit-tree question. The fast-delivery question. Pick the intent they do not own. Build the proof for it. Get it into more than one index. That is how a third name gets cited.

And now, go flip those three switches. Just three.

- Anna

THE POLL