This is how ChatGPT kills a small business.
It is a real story, and a warning for every online marketer and business owner.
Guide to Lofoten runs guided tours in the Lofoten Islands, northern Norway.
For years, they nailed SEO and digital marketing.
They brought traffic to their website and sold their tours.
Now, their business is collapsing before their eyes.
Their revenue came 50/50 from:
- Website content monetisation (display ads, paid articles etc)
- Guided tours
The first half is gone.
GPT took their website traffic.
Why visit a travel blog when a chatbot gives you the same answers instantly?
The second half is dying too.
Their tours barely show up online anymore.
💡 Because ChatGPT hardly mentions small websites for transactional conversations. There is growing academic evidence of this.
It prefers popular platforms, like GetYourGuide in this case.
Which take high commissions.
And that’s their small business' margin gone.
Two possible ways out:
1️⃣ Advertising
→ very expensive because competing against giants.
2️⃣ Becoming famous content creators (300k+ followers?)
→ possible, but brutal in the crowded travel niche.
No easy fix. Maybe no fix at all.
Their business model is simply becoming obsolete.
And that happens. It always has during technological shifts.
Bur for us marketers, two lessons stand out:
1️⃣ Info businesses are dead.
2️⃣ Aggregators thrive in the age of AI.
It's easy to see why.
Aggregators provide a large source of organised structured data, perfect to feed AI algorithms.
Of course, not all businesses are aggregators.
But they can look like one, or possibly work with one.
Think of SEO structured data, or retail media.
Adapt or die, as always.
