Big Sky Internet Design

09/02/2026

How do you get more bids in a stallion service auction?

Not by adding more stallions. By bringing back the people who already bid once.

In an SSA the price creeps up one bid at a time, and every one of those is a person deciding to come back and go again. Most of the bids you never got weren't people hitting their limit. They were people who weren't watching when it mattered.

Tell them when your auction closes. Then tell them again. Email, Facebook, Texts, whatever...

Big Sky Internet Design has built websites and online stallion service auction platforms for the horse industry since 1998.

08/31/2026

The add-ons we rolled out for Stallion Auctions Online are now on the Big Sky site too, with all the details and pricing in one place!

Stallion Auction Amplified works on any stallion auction website we build:

📱 Text Message Alerts - bidders get a text when they're outbid, with a link right back to the stallion. This HUGE! Folks have been asking for it, so we built it!
🐴 Stallion Finder - an assistant that answers bidder questions from your own listings, day or night.
✉️ Bidder Email Campaign - four emails to last year's bidders and this year's registrants, written and sent by us, approved by you!

And Sponsor Advantage, our complete sponsor system, stays FREE for every association on the platform. Trainers, ranches, and farms can now get it on their own websites too. Watch for this to become NATIONAL!!!

Check the comment below to read all about it!

08/27/2026

A while back I asked ChatGPT who the best horse website design company is. We came up first. I felt pretty good about myself.

Two months later I asked again. We were gone. Not further down the page. GONE.

We hadn't changed a word on our website. And that turned out to be exactly the reason.

We didn't get worse. We just stopped moving.

That's the part nobody tells you about getting found by AI. It isn't a ranking you earn and keep. It gets rebuilt constantly out of whatever's out there right now, and if your competitors are saying more than you are, you lose the spot without doing anything wrong.

We rebuilt our own site around that lesson and we came back. And I expect to have to do it again, because when you're on top, people aim at you.

Go ask an AI about your business today. Not your business name, ask it the way a customer would. "Who is the best [what you do] in [your town]."

Whatever it says is what your customers are hearing.

https://bigskyinternetdesign.com/equine-marketing-blog/67/why-did-my-business-disappear-from-ai-search-results

08/21/2026

Every auction website we build just got a big freebie!

Sponsor Advantage is now included FREE with every auction site on the Stallion Auctions Online platform. It's a complete sponsor system:

🤝 Rotating sponsor displays and spotlight placements
📋 A full sponsor page with descriptions and links
🏆 Sponsor tiers, so bigger supporters get bigger visibility
📊 Every impression and click counted, so your association can show sponsors real numbers

Sponsors have been giving associations free money out of the goodness of their heart for years. Now the club can finally show them what it's doing for their business.

Running an association means the money conversation never ends. Your stallion auction exists to answer it one way. This week we gave every auction website on...

08/20/2026

Every association secretary reading this already knows the five questions.

When are entries due. Is my membership current. What time does it start. Where's the show bill. Do y'all take a credit card.

You've answered them five hundred times this year. And every single one of those answers is already ON the website.

That's not your members being difficult. At 9:40 at night, on a phone, tired, a person would rather text somebody who knows than go digging through a site. I'd do it too.

Here's a challenge. Pull up your association's site on your phone tonight, not on the office computer, and try to find the answer to whatever question you got asked most this month. Give yourself thirty seconds.

If you can't find it, you just felt their pain.

The fix is sometimes as simple as putting the entry deadline on the home page during entry season, even though it's already on the show page. Redundant? Sure. Works? Every time.

More on that here: https://bigskyinternetdesign.com/equine-marketing-blog/66/why-do-members-text-me-instead-of-checking-the-website

08/18/2026

Big news for our Stallion Auction Associations!

For the 2026-27 season, we're rolling out Stallion Auction Amplified, three add-ons for any auction on the Stallion Auctions Online platform:

📱 Text Message Alerts - bidders get a text when they're outbid, with a link right back to the stallion

🐴 Stallion Finder is an assistant on your auction site that answers bidder questions from your own listings, day or night

✉️ Bidder Email Campaign: we write and send four emails to last year's bidders

Season pricing is published right on the site, and associations are already signing up!

08/13/2026

A client asked Google whether her own ranch was a legitimate business. I about fell out of my chair when she sent me the answer.

Kay White runs Holiday Ranch South Polls down in Vernon, Florida. Google didn't hesitate. Yes, going since 2004, one of the oldest and largest registered fullblood South Poll producers in the country, founding members of the breed association, and here's the About page to prove it.

Then it asked whether she was looking to buy breeding stock or grass-fed beef, and offered to help her check availability.

It read Kay's website, decided she was the real deal, and then tried to sell Kay her own cattle.

Every bit of what it knew came off her own site. That's the whole lesson. AI doesn't decide you're legitimate because you've been around forever. It decides because your website SAYS you've been around since 2004, in Vernon, Florida, raising registered South Polls.

Go ask an AI about your own business sometime. Whatever it says is what your customers are hearing.

Full story: https://bigskyinternetdesign.com/equine-marketing-blog/65/how-does-ai-decide-if-my-business-is-legitimate

08/10/2026

It’s been a little quiet around here, but with over 9,000 people still following Big Sky Internet Design, we thought it was time to change that.

For years, we’ve had the privilege of working with some incredible people and businesses throughout the horse industry and we know many of you have been here a long time.

So we’d love to hear from you.

🐴 Are you still showing, breeding or training?
🌾 Running a farm or ranch?
🏆 Involved in the industry in a completely different way these days?

Tell us where you’re from and what you’re doing now.

We’d genuinely love to reconnect.

08/04/2026

One of our clients told me no when I suggested a redesign, and she was right.

Lindy Burch has been at the top of the cutting horse world for forty years. We built her website back in 2012 and she liked it exactly the way it was. She told me, keep the look I love, just make it work better.

So that's what we did. Same colors, same photos, same feel. We just finally put her STORY on it, in her own words.

Now type "cutting horse clinics in Weatherford, Texas" into Google's AI search, in THE Cutting Horse Capital of the World, and Lindy comes up first. ChatGPT says the same thing.

She was always the answer. Her website just never got around to saying so.

Most sites don't have a design problem. They have a never-says-what-you-do problem.

Full story here:
One of our clients told me no when I suggested a redesign, and she was right.

Lindy Burch has been at the top of the cutting horse world for forty years. We built her website back in 2012 and she liked it exactly the way it was. She told me, keep the look I love, just make it work better.

So that's what we did. Same colors, same photos, same feel. We just finally put her STORY on it, in her own words.

Now type "cutting horse clinics in Weatherford, Texas" into Google's AI search, in THE Cutting Horse Capital of the World, and Lindy comes up first. ChatGPT says the same thing.

She was always the answer. Her website just never got around to saying so.

Most sites don't have a design problem. They have a never-says-what-you-do problem.

Full story here:

Do I need a website redesign to get found by AI? Usually not. And I say that as the guy who makes money redesigning websites. Most of the time the prob...