Your next customer might never see your Instagram

A customer you’ll never meet

It’s 2pm on a Tuesday. Someone has a laptop, two hours to kill and no plan. They pick up their phone and ask: “quiet cafe near me to work from, open now”.

A few years ago they would have scrolled Google Maps, tapped through some Instagram grids and decided. Now the AI tool reads the pages for them and comes back with three or four names. They pick one and go. They may never open your Instagram, however good it looks.

What’s an “AI agent”?

An AI agent is an AI tool that doesn’t just answer a question but does the job for you: it searches, compares options and, more and more, books.

This isn’t science fiction. Google’s AI Mode can already search booking platforms and restaurant websites for open tables that match what someone asked for, then show a short list with links to book (Google, Nov 2025). In April 2026 that restaurant booking feature expanded beyond the US to eight more markets, including Singapore (9to5Google). Malaysia wasn’t on that list yet. And since 22 Oct 2026, Gemini can, with the person’s permission, use their Google Maps searches and saved places to suggest where to go (9to5Google).

Where the AI gets its shortlist

The tool doesn’t visit your cafe. It reads what’s online: your Google listing, your reviews, and other sites that mention you, like Burpple, food blogs, directories and “best cafes in KL” lists. ChatGPT’s search, for example, sends questions to search partners including Microsoft (OpenAI), and Claude’s web search uses Brave’s index (Formative Digital).

That’s where it goes wrong. When we checked five Klang Valley cafes this month, every one had an old, unclaimed Burpple page that disagreed with Google about which day it’s closed (read what we found). If the AI reads one of those pages, “open now” can become “closed”, and you’re off the shortlist.

The hard part is that you never find out. There’s no missed call and no bad review. The customer simply goes to the cafe down the road.

What an AI Scan checks

• What the AI tools say. We ask ChatGPT, Gemini, Google AI, Claude, Perplexity and Grok the questions your customers ask, in English and Malay, like “best coffee in [your area]” or “is [your cafe] still open?”. Each question is asked twice, because answers change.
• Whether you’re named, and next to whom. Are you in the shortlist, where do you rank, and which nearby cafes come up instead?
• What’s wrong. Wrong hours, “temporarily closed”, old addresses, or a complaint the AI keeps repeating.
• Where it came from. The listings, blogs and review pages behind each answer, so you know which page to fix.

You get one page with the fixes in order. No one can promise an AI will recommend you, but you can make sure it reads the right facts.

3 things you can do today

1. Check your Google Business Profile. Hours, holiday hours, open status and the map pin. Ten minutes.
2. Search “[your cafe] opening hours” and look at every page on the first page of results. Claim or correct the ones that are wrong, starting with Burpple.
3. Use the same name, address, phone and hours everywhere, written the same way on Google, Instagram, Facebook and any listing you control.

There are 7 more in our free tips for KL cafes.