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A figure stands on Cleveleys sand at sunset with ribbons of glowing violet-to-amber ink flowing freely up from them, while a social feed sits sealed inside a glass display case on the promenade nearby, Mary's Shell sculpture and a distant lighthouse in silhouette over the Irish Sea

By John Stirzaker, INKON's founder

A Facebook page is not a website, and AI is the reason why

I hear it most weeks. “I don’t really need a website, I’ve got a Facebook page.” And for a good few years, fair enough. If your customers were on Facebook and your page had your number and a few photos of your work, it did a job.

That’s changed. Not because Facebook got worse, but because of where people now go to find you.

The new front door

Think about how you found the last tradesman, restaurant or clinic you used. You typed something into Google. Or, more and more, you asked an AI. “Who’s a good electrician near Cleveleys?” straight into ChatGPT, or you read the AI answer Google now puts at the top of the page before any of the links.

Here’s the bit that matters. When someone asks an AI for a recommendation, it doesn’t go rummaging through Facebook. It reads the open web. Websites. Pages it can crawl, understand and quote back. If your business only lives on a Facebook page, you’re not in the room when that question gets asked.

Read that again, because it’s the whole thing. The place people now ask “who should I use” can’t really see your Facebook page. It can see a website.

You’re building on rented land

There’s an older problem underneath this one, and AI has just made it bite harder.

A Facebook page isn’t yours. You rent it, and the landlord changes the rules whenever it likes.

  • The reach isn’t yours. Facebook decides who sees your posts. For most local businesses that’s a sliver of your own followers, unless you pay to reach the rest.
  • The rules aren’t yours. An account gets flagged by mistake, and you’re locked out with no-one to ring, your whole online presence frozen on a Tuesday morning.
  • The audience isn’t yours. Those followers are Facebook’s list, not yours. If the platform falls out of fashion, you can’t take them with you.

A website, you own. The domain’s in your name, the words are yours, and no algorithm gets to decide whether your own customers can find your phone number.

So why does AI make this urgent now

Because AI answers are built on things that can be read, trusted and cited. Clear pages. Real answers to real questions. Your services, your area, your prices, set out plainly. A website gives it all that. A Facebook feed, half of it images and comments behind a login, gives it almost none of it.

So when the AI is deciding who to name for “bathroom fitter in Poulton,” it reaches for the businesses that have laid it all out on a page it can actually read. If that’s not you, it’s the fella down the road who has.

None of this is clever. It’s just where the front door moved to.

This isn’t “ditch Facebook”

I’m not telling you to walk away from your page. Social still earns its keep, and I’d keep it.

It’s your proof of life. When someone gets your name, from a mate, from Google, from an AI, a lot of them will have a quick look at your Facebook before they ring. A recent post, a job from last week, a couple of replies to comments, and they think “yep, they’re active, they’re real.” A page that’s gone quiet since 2022 does the opposite (I wrote about that one here).

So the honest version is this. Facebook is where people check you out. A website is where people, and now the machines that recommend you, find you in the first place. You want both, doing their own job.

What to do about it

You don’t need me to start. If all you do this month is get a proper website up that says clearly what you do, where you do it and how to get hold of you, you’re most of the way there. Even a simple one beats a Facebook page for getting found, because it’s yours and it can be read.

If you’d rather it was built to actually pull the work in, and to be the thing the AI reaches for, that’s the bit I do. Either way, the move is the same: get off the rented land and onto something you own.

Want to know how you look to Google and AI right now? Get your free audit, or email hello@inkon.co.uk. I read every message myself, and I’ll tell you straight.

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