Singapore’s small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) are losing ground as artificial intelligence-powered answers increasingly skip over them, according to an opinion piece. A growing share of Singaporeans, especially younger ones, now rely on ChatGPT, Perplexity or Google’s AI Overviews to find goods and services such as florists, plumbers, tuition centres, renovation contractors or food caterers. When a question is posed, the app or browser shows a paragraph of text with information scraped and stitched from websites the AI engine decided were worth quoting. For Singapore’s SMEs, this shift matters more than most business owners realise because it changes the rules of the search engine optimisation (SEO) game they had only just learnt to play.