Is AI Hurting the Bottom Line For Too Many Businesses?

Susanna Kelland, Author

Digital Solutions Strategist & Account Manager | SMB Growth Partner | Google Certified | Digital Marketing Solutions for Local SMB Success (Residential & Commercial) | Digital Marketing for the Developing AI Era

LinkedIn Article, June 11, 2026

Your potential customers using AI are being handed convincing and confidently informative recommendations, and those recommendations have consequences. 

💲 Monetary consequences. 💲

The legal ramifications of this are beginning to surface as businesses, and individuals, question whether those AI answers and recommendations are accurate, fair and as helpful as Google and AI search engines claim them to be.

Does Google have legal AI responsibility? Germany just said "yes". The decision was officially issued on May 28, 2026, though it only became public knowledge and hit global news cycles yesterday, June 10, 2026. **

So, Big News: Google was found to be legally responsible for certain statements generated in its AI Overview, reasoning that Google created and published the content rather than merely linking to third-party sources.

How does this legal decision affect us?  It opens the door for more questions:

• Is AI helping customers find my business, or steering them elsewhere?

• How much trust should customers place in AI-generated recommendations?

• What happens when an AI answer is wrong and someone loses money?

Read on for more discussion around why we should be curious about AI, especially if you are a business owner. Online AI visibility is affecting every business, from the one-person SMB to National Enterprise brands.

• AI is affecting business profits and losses. It is changing how they win customers online.

The influence on customer decisions has moved from Google providing a list of choices (lists of company websites to browse), to Google and other AI search engines  giving advice, summarizing and providing decision-making recommendations to potential customers! 

Helpful? Sure. But this SIGNIFICANTLY influences buying decisions. AI can negatively affect the bottom line of businesses who DON'T understand how AI works.

• To be fair, businesses have always needed to understand digital marketing strategies to succeed online. What has changed is that AI is no longer simply directing customers to information, it is increasingly interpreting that information and influencing decisions on their behalf. 

Companies now have to understand how AI works to get cited. It's not enough anymore to just put your website out there and hope customers learn enough about you to choose you. It never was that simple, of course, but now it's even more impossibly challenging for everyone.

AI has moved Google from merely providing sources on the Search Engine Results Page (SERP) to actually providing summaries, answers, recommendations and more. Helpful? Sure. But this SIGNIFICANTLY influences buying decisions.

• AI may reach the wrong business conclusion because it failed to surface relevant information.

Businesses can be harmed not only by false information, but also by omissions, when AI fails to surface important facts, qualifications, experience, or context that would materially influence a customer's decision.

What if AI gets it "wrong"? The company who is not cited and recommended, or worse, who is slandered with false, misleading, incomplete, or omitted information, suffers.

For example:

• Builder A has 50 healthcare projects.

• Builder B has 5 healthcare projects.

• AI mentions neither fact.

• AI recommends Builder B.

The answer may contain no factual error whatsoever.

But the economic outcome could still be substantial.

• Businesses need to feed the AI machine.

Training AI is achieved by providing it with information for the answers: company information everywhere on the web, production and service information on websites, Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs), reviews and review responses, anywhere a company is referenced.

Should businesses be solely responsible for providing the information AI requires to give a correct answer about their business, about their qualifications, their reputation and reviews, about their legitimacy and ranking?

It's a big ask.

Currently it's HEAVILY incumbent upon the businesses to provide PROOF of their validity and value for AI to source! Information in AI is provided by the very companies they generate overviews for: In Summaries. Assessments. Rankings. Comparisons. Criticisms. Recommendations. Citations.

And what about the opinions of others, competitors, unhappy customers, chat room threads, or just incorrect assumptions by bloggers? All this is considered in AI answers. And not all of it is factual. 

Businesses are increasingly expected to provide enough evidence and authority signals for AI systems to understand who they are and what they do. AI systems learn from:

• company websites

• reviews

• news articles

• government databases

• forums

• social media

• third-party publications

Businesses have responsibilities for their online information, of course, but certainly AI platforms should have responsibilities too.

• Is AI really the final answer?

Should it be?

If an AI-generated answer becomes the first information a customer sees, and that answer influences purchasing decisions, who should be responsible when the answer is false, incomplete, omitted, or misleading?

Is Google, or any AI-powered search or LLM platform, innocent of the results, the answers it comes up with? Is it responsible for the harm it may cause to companies by getting those answers "wrong" or "misleading" or "only part of the story"?

This is an interesting development in Germany: "Google is legally responsible for their created answer". I personally believe that companies should start to stand up to Google and other engines for misinforming their customers, disrupting their marketing messages by providing misinformation or partial information in the AI overviews.

• Misinformation or partial information in AI citations and recommendations causes serious harm to business income.

Perhaps AI has way too much power to sway decisions and influence buyers. Why is it HEAVILY on companies to "prove themselves" to Google and the AI chat engines? Could there be a more balanced answer for visibility on the web?

Why are AI chat engines the ones deciding who is the "best choice" for a customer looking for answers? AI even doubles down on their answer over and over again, making firm, super-confident one-size-fits-all recommendations.

Even if it's wrong! Even if it's misleading! Even if facts and nuances are missing in the answers!

Is this fair? Stating opinions it finds online as fact? Really?

• When AI becomes the advisor, who is responsible for the advice?

For now, it is what it is. The legal questioning has just begun. Watch the space closely!

• What should I do to make my business more AI-visible?

Do your best to have accurate, informative and helpful information out there:

• Maintain accurate, up-to-date and relevant, localized website content.

• Publish FAQs (Frequently Asked Questions) that answer real customer questions.

• Monitor how AI engines describe your business. Ask questions yourself!

• Respond to reviews in a descriptive way, not just "Thanks!"

• Build third-party credibility signals - reviews, media mentions, and industry awards.

• Correct misinformation quickly when you find it.

That should set you on the right path to get better visibility, more accurate citations, and the powerful recommendations for your prospects to choose you.

• AI is becoming part of the buying process. If it misunderstands your business, misrepresents your expertise, or recommends a competitor instead of you, what is the financial impact? 

This is going to be the question of the near future. Should businesses be totally responsible for the information out there about them? Should AI be making the recommendations on behalf of businesses for customers based on the information it finds? Should AI also be held to be more discerning, thorough and be more accountable when it interprets this information and provides the recommendation, the commentary about reputation, or the advice?

It can affect a company's bottom line, after all. 

This is just the beginning of this legal push-back. We're about to see how this will go.

**Information about the ruling: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/06/nobody-needs-ai-to-search-the-internet-court-says-in-ruling-against-google/