Singapore SMEs Are Winning at Google but Invisible to AI Search: Audit Finds 48/100 Readiness
Source: The Business Times
Singapore SMEs rank fine on Google but are invisible to AI answer engines, an audit of 46 business websites finds — averaging just 48 out of 100 on AI search readiness. Most sites lack machine-readable FAQ schema, llms.txt files and direct answers, leaving them bypassed as customers increasingly ask ChatGPT first.
Ask a young Singaporean where to find a plumber, a tuition centre or a catering service these days, and the answer increasingly comes from an AI — ChatGPT, Perplexity or Google's AI Overviews — rather than a scroll through search results. That shift is quietly rewriting the rules of being found online, and a new audit suggests most of Singapore's small businesses have not caught up: they rank fine on Google, but AI answer engines barely know they exist.
In July, AI consultant Nicholas Tung ran an AI search readiness audit of 46 Singapore SME websites across five sectors — all of them already ranking on standard Google results. They averaged just 48 out of 100. Around 60 per cent of homepages opened with a slogan or company history instead of the direct answers buyers are actually searching for. Three-quarters had FAQ sections written for humans but no machine-readable FAQ schema, and 85 per cent had no llms.txt file — the simple manifest that tells AI crawlers what a site is and how to read it. Close to 30 per cent of pages were too thin to quote at all, worst among F&B and retail. A handful of sites were built entirely in JavaScript, which renders in a browser but stays invisible to crawlers — effectively offline for AI search.
Ranking on Google and being quoted by an AI engine turn out to be two different achievements. The second runs on rules almost nobody was told about: answering questions upfront, verifiable author credentials, quotable depth, and technical accessibility. The gaps are structural, not cosmetic — nobody built AI-readable schema into the standard SME web development brief because until recently there was no reason to. Meanwhile, larger competitors with dedicated technical teams have quietly adapted.
The sector spread makes the point. Construction and trades businesses scored best at around 63, because their sites state prices and specifications plainly. Education SMEs scored worst at about 35 — an irony for an industry built on explaining things clearly. None of this is any business owner's fault, but it is becoming a competitiveness issue: the businesses least equipped to notice are the ones quietly losing visibility in the channel their customers increasingly ask first.
Why it matters for Singapore: The government has spent years pushing SMEs to digitalise — grants, playbooks, AI adoption schemes — and many answered the call. It would be a strange outcome if the next wave of search simply bypassed the businesses that did everything asked of them the first time round. The audit's conclusion is that generative engine optimisation should be treated as the next chapter of digitalisation: a solvable, teachable problem rather than a surprise nobody saw coming.
