Google may still dominate search, but if you’ve asked ChatGPT, Gemini, or Elon Musk’s Grok for a recommendation lately, you’re part of a growing trend reshaping marketing. Consumers are increasingly turning to AI assistants over traditional search engines—and that shift leaves small businesses scrambling to stay visible.

Enter NextPR Engine™, a new platform from Chicago-based More Leverage Solutions, Inc. The agency, founded by Gen X entrepreneur and former Fortune 50 strategist Patty Dominguez, claims its tool helps service-based businesses land the kind of media placements and digital credibility that AI systems actually trust and surface.

Why This Matters

For years, SEO has been the go-to playbook. But with generative AI now answering questions directly, small businesses can’t rely on backlinks and keywords alone. “The reality is, people aren’t just ‘Googling it’ anymore, they’re asking AI,” said Dominguez. “If you’re invisible there, you’re losing opportunities.”

That invisibility isn’t hypothetical. AI models increasingly favor content tied to authoritative sources, meaning a business without credible mentions may never show up in results—even if its website is optimized for Google. NextPR Engine™ aims to bridge that gap, helping businesses build trust signals recognizable to both AI systems and human buyers.

How It Works

At launch, NextPR Engine™ focuses on Stage 1 of Leverage OS™, a growth framework Dominguez’s agency has been developing. That stage is all about visibility: securing brand mentions, authoritative placements, and signals that AI tools treat as credible.

Future stages—already teased—cover conversion and optimization, with products like Know Your Leads™, Follow-Up Flywheel™, and the Cashflow Command Center™. Together, these form what Dominguez calls a Fortune-50-style “growth operating system” for small businesses.

A Timely Play in a Shifting Market

The timing feels spot-on. Rivals from HubSpot to Semrush are also pivoting their tools toward AI-driven search, but those are built for larger marketing teams. NextPR Engine™ is pitched as an accessible alternative for service-based solopreneurs and small shops that lack the budget—or patience—for heavyweight platforms.

The bigger question is whether AI-driven discoverability becomes the new SEO. Early evidence suggests it might: A 2024 Gartner report predicted that by 2026, 30% of search traffic will bypass traditional engines in favor of AI assistants. If that holds, tools like NextPR Engine™ could go from nice-to-have to mission-critical.

Bottom Line

For small businesses squeezed between big-brand ad budgets and ever-changing algorithms, NextPR Engine™ offers a new path to visibility in an AI-first world. Whether it can level the playing field—or just become another must-have subscription in the marketing toolkit—will depend on how fast consumer search habits continue to shift.

But if you’re running a service business and relying solely on Google rankings, consider this your wake-up call: AI assistants are already rewriting the rules.

Get in touch with our MarTech Experts.