I Asked ChatGPT to Find a Fast Web Designer in Tulsa — Here's What Happened

I did the thing today.

I opened Perplexity, typed in a variation of "fast web designer in Tulsa" and handed it my own website URL to analyze.

And then I sat with what came back.

What happened

I'm not going to show you a screenshot. But I'll tell you what it said.

It recognized that Creative Pea leans toward speed and local work. It picked up that performance matters here. But when it tried to summarize what makes me different — the specific metrics, the technical approach, the actual proof — it came up mostly empty.

Not because the expertise isn't real. Because it wasn't written down in a way AI could find and repeat.

The five results that did show up for that search? I went and looked at them. And right there, on their homepages, in plain readable text — was exactly what I was missing. Their speed metrics. Their process named out loud. Their specific claims about what they build and how they build it.

They weren't smarter than me. They weren't better. They just wrote it down.

That hit different

Because here's the thing — I know this stuff. I know it cold.

Catch me at a networking event and I will give you forty-five minutes of free advice without blinking. I believe in performance-first web design the way some people believe in their morning routine. It's not a selling point for me. It's just how I think about every single build.

But believing something and publishing it are two very different things.

If I'm not putting what I know into content — on my homepage, in my blog, in plain language that both humans and AI can find and read — then I might as well be screaming into the void. The expertise is real. The evidence is invisible.

This isn't secret sauce

I want to be clear about something.

The things I'm talking about — static-first architecture, Core Web Vitals, LCP under 2.5 seconds, AEO, content that answers real questions — none of this is proprietary knowledge locked behind a paywall. It's not secret. It's not something I invented.

It's knowledge. Industry knowledge that exists in documentation, in case studies, in Google's own developer guides, in podcasts I listened to this morning.

The gap isn't access. The gap is knowing where to look, knowing how to read it, and knowing how to apply it to a real business with a real budget and a real deadline.

That's the work. That's what I do for clients. And that's exactly what I wasn't doing loudly enough for myself.

So here I am, walking the walk

This post exists because of that Perplexity search.

Not because I'm panicking. Because I'm learning — the way I always learn, which is by doing and then telling you what happened. I ran the experiment, I sat with the results, and now I'm writing about it because that's how the knowledge becomes useful to someone else.

I fixed the gaps on my site. I wrote the section that explains how we build. I added the metrics. I named the process out loud. And now I'm writing post after post about the things I genuinely believe in — not to manufacture content, but because if I believe performance matters this much, the least I can do is prove it by being visible about it.

You can't preach fast websites and have a slow content strategy.

What this means for your business

If you're a business owner reading this and wondering whether AI tools can find you — go check.

Open ChatGPT or Perplexity. Ask it about your business directly. Ask it who the best option is in your industry in your city. Ask it to summarize your homepage.

Then look at what shows up in your place.

Those businesses aren't necessarily better at what they do. They're just louder about it in the right places. And louder, in 2026, means written down in plain text on a well-built, fast-loading site.

The good news is this is fixable. It's not a rebrand. It's not a rebuild. It's a content clarity project — and it's one I now know from the inside out because I just did it on myself.

Let's talk about it

I'm on Instagram @creativepea and my DMs are open. No bots, no pitch.

If you ran your own search and didn't like what you found — or didn't find anything at all — come tell me. I genuinely love this conversation. Designers, business owners, fellow nerds who stayed too long on a Perplexity rabbit hole today. All welcome.

We're all figuring this out in real time. Might as well do it together.