Founder Message
As an owner of an architecture practice since 1992, I know what it means to run a small business — every client matters, every referral counts, and every dollar spent on marketing had better work. When ChatGPT arrived in late 2022, I was immediately drawn in. The technology felt natural to me in a way I didn't expect. Over the next three years I used it to build, develop, and deploy projects I never could have built alone.
Most people think architecture is just about buildings. It isn't. It's primarily about problem solving — the building is just the byproduct of hundreds of decisions made under constraints. Thirty years of that shapes how you think. You start seeing problems other people walk right past.
The problem
The problem small businesses face, and the reason Avikiva exists, is that the current search, marketing, and advertising models are broken. You all know this. You are paying more to these gatekeepers — who are technically keeping themselves between you and your customers — and receiving less business for that increased fee. Here's what you didn't know.
War was declared on this failing search, SEO, social, directory, paid ads, recommendations system back in 2022 when an AI platform called ChatGPT was launched. To most people, including business owners, they saw it only as an efficiency tool. That's not how Google and its supportive cast saw it. They knew exactly what it meant. It was the beginning of the end of their stranglehold on customer acquisition. It was the end of searching for a product, service, or answers to a problem and receiving 25 million results. They knew their delivery inefficiency would soon be exposed once you compare the same search query in an AI environment. It's night and day.
One result vs. 1.2 million
So that we are on the same page here — when you search for something on Google and receive 1.2 million results, Google expects you to then manually perform a secondary search through that collection of data. In complete opposition to that model, when you query the same search in ChatGPT, the entire internet is already in its memory, and it returns, or "surfaces," one answer out of that collection of 1.2 million results. It does the work, not you. This contrast is unmistakable, and it's why people are leaving Google in droves.
In 2023, I asked ChatGPT for a local business recommendation. That was the day Avikiva was born — I just didn't know it yet.
I did, however, fully understand that Google search was dead. I had already stopped searching on Google due to its immense inefficiency and knew this was the new direction of searching and connecting businesses to customers directly.
The free part nobody told me
About a year later I learned that these business recommendations were completely free of charge to the business owners that ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity were surfacing to their users. I had not advertised my business in this "Google pipeline" since the GFC in 2009 and had no idea these recommendations were free. We are conditioned to think that everything has a cost. There's no free lunch. The thought that these very specific and targeted recommendations were completely free simply never crossed my mind — but once it did, I clearly saw a solution to the problem of customer acquisition for small business owners such as myself.
What you should already know by now
Enough backstory. If you are reading this far down on this page you should already be excited about what this development can mean for your business. You should already know that your website is the key to unlocking free recommendations. You should already fully understand that you are 100% in control of this outcome. All you need to do is fill the gaps on the website you control. It doesn't matter what Google says, what SEO suggests, what Angi, Yelp, or HomeAdvisor charge, or what paid ads cost. Fix the gaps — the missing information — paint a fuller picture to AI platforms. Paint a complete picture to AI, gain their trust and credibility, and start receiving recommendations to their millions of users.
It's that simple.
War has been declared. It's time to take a side and take advantage of free recommendations and the knowledge of it you now have.