Building Faro

tl;dr: I noticed small businesses that spent years building a strong Google presence had no idea whether they show up when a customer asks ChatGPT for a recommendation. That gap became Faro.

The Moment I Noticed the Gap

It started with a simple test.

I typed “best HVAC company in Miami” into ChatGPT. Then Perplexity. Then Gemini.

The results were nothing like Google. No ads. No map pack. No sponsored listings. Just a handful of names the model had decided — based on whatever it had read, indexed, and weighted — were worth recommending.

Then I searched for businesses I knew personally. Solid operations. Five-star reviews. Strong Google presence. Years of word-of-mouth.

Most of them weren’t there.

That gap — between businesses that exist and businesses AI knows about — is the problem I’m building Faro to solve.

Why This Matters More Than People Realize

We’re at a strange inflection point. AI-assisted search isn’t coming — it’s already here. Roughly 1 in 10 US searches now happen through an AI interface, and that number is climbing.

The shift is subtle but significant: when someone asks ChatGPT “who should I call for estate planning in Coral Gables?”, they’re not going to scroll through ten blue links. They’re going to follow the recommendation the model gives them. And the businesses it cites are not necessarily the best — they’re the ones the model has enough signal on to feel confident recommending.

Google optimization took years to become table stakes. AI visibility is about to do the same thing — but most small businesses won’t figure that out until they’re already behind.

Why Miami

I didn’t build Faro for “small businesses broadly.” I built it for Miami — and that specificity is intentional.

Miami is one of the most entrepreneurially dense cities in the country. It’s bilingual by default. It runs on service businesses: HVAC, legal, accounting, real estate, home services, healthcare. These are the people who fix things, advise families, and build real wealth in their communities. And they are also the businesses least likely to have a marketing team or a vendor who’s thinking about AI search on their behalf.

Most of the business owners I’ve talked to here aren’t afraid of AI. They’re just not thinking about it. They’re too busy running their business.

That’s the gap Faro sits in.

What Faro Actually Does

Faro is a done-for-you AI visibility service. Not a dashboard. Not a platform you log into. A service — like hiring an agency, except built around a very specific problem.

Here’s how it works:

Track — Every 48 hours, Faro runs hundreds of queries across ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and Gemini. The queries mirror what your actual customers would search: “best pediatric dentist in Hialeah”, “affordable CPA near Brickell”, “who does water damage restoration in Kendall.” We track whether your business shows up, and which competitors are mentioned instead.

Optimize — Based on what we find, we publish content and build citations on the directories, review platforms, and listicles that AI models actually pull from when forming recommendations. We do this in English and Spanish because this is Miami and that matters.

Report — Once a month, every client gets a two-page summary: your AI visibility score, what changed, which sources AI cited, which competitors you’re now outranking. No jargon. No dashboards. Just a clear picture of where you stand.

The Done-For-You Bet

The easiest version of this product would have been a SaaS dashboard. Show businesses their AI mention data, give them some tips, charge $50/month.

I didn’t build that.

I built a service because the business owners I want to help are already stretched thin. They don’t have time to log into another tool and figure out what to do with the data. They need someone to handle it. So Faro handles it.

This means the service is slower to scale than a SaaS product. It means each client relationship requires real work. I’m at peace with that — because the value is real, the clients see it, and this is a market where trust matters more than growth velocity.

The CPA Angle

One thing I didn’t expect to discover while building Faro: CPAs and financial advisors are a natural distribution channel.

These are professionals with deep client relationships and no interest in adding operational burden. When I started talking to them, the conversation kept landing in the same place: “I want to bring more value to my small business clients, but I don’t want to build a marketing agency.”

Faro lets them offer AI visibility as an advisory service — refer a client, we handle everything, they earn 20% lifetime revenue share. It extends their value without adding their workload.

Miami has tens of thousands of CPAs and advisors. That’s a lot of surface area.

Where I’m Hoping This Goes

Faro is in early pilot mode right now. The first 10 Miami businesses are being onboarded. The systems are built. The methodology is tested. And every conversation I have with a local business owner confirms that the problem is real and the timing is right.

My goal isn’t to build a VC-backed unicorn. My goal is to build something that materially helps small businesses in my city compete in a world that keeps shifting the rules on them.

AI search is one more shift they didn’t ask for. Faro is how they show up anyway.

If you’re a Miami business owner or know one who should be on the list: faro.