Why can't AI find us?

AI is the future of search.

Apparently nobody uses Google any more. Whether they’re looking for the answer to a question like ‘where’s the best place to hike in the UK?’, ‘how long does the perfect boiled egg take?’ or even ‘what are the best waxed canvas backpacks made in the UK?’, everybody is turning to AI sites like ChatGPT for their answers.

There are pros and cons to using AI, as there are with any technology. In fact, as a small business, it could help our small team make a bigger impact. To preface this article, we’re not anti-AI.

That being said, AI has annoyed us.

We’re an independent, sustainable business that makes waxed canvas bags and, to sell our backpacks, totes and cross body bags online, it’s important that people can find us when they search for us online. When you search for ‘UK-made backpacks’ online, we’re one of the first results on Google and other search engines. We’ve worked hard to appear near the top, and we’re proud of it.

But people are abandoning Google search for things like ChatGPT, so we decided to search for ourselves there. We used the same search term, ‘UK-made backpacks’ and, to our surprise, we didn’t turn up. Out of the British bag brands that did appear:

• Some of them were UK-based designers

• Most of them were big, international bag brands

• None of them were manufactured exclusively in the UK

Weird, right?

So, we asked ChatGPT why Wildish didn’t turn up when we used it to search for bags made in the UK. It’s because we’re small, and ChatGPT likes ‘mainstream’. According to ChatGPT, ‘Wildish isn’t mainstream due to its deliberately small scale, deep sustainability commitment and recent, boutique emergence.’

And it’s right. We’re not mainstream, and that’s on purpose. We’re deliberately doing things differently, keeping production of our waxed canvas bags within the UK, and staying as small and sustainable as possible.

But if what AI wants is mainstream, and everybody’s using AI for search, what does that mean for independent businesses? Will they all eventually look and sound the same, just to appear in AI searches? Will we abandon sustainability commitments?

We hope not. And we’ll keep doing things in a better way, hoping that way becomes mainstream one day, and moving forwards as a home-grown British brand.