Why does ChatGPT name your competitor and not you?

You ask ChatGPT which company in your region does what you do. The answer names two or three businesses. Your competitor is on the list and you are missing. An AI assistant recommends what it can find, understand and confirm in other sources. You can usually trace where it gets stuck for you in the sources listed under the answer.

How an AI assistant arrives at a recommendation

In its guide to searching the web with ChatGPT, OpenAI explains that ChatGPT rewrites your question into one or more targeted queries and sends them to search partners. It uses your approximate location as it does so: someone asking for good restaurants nearby gets a query with the name of their city in it. According to its documentation on AI features, Google works in a similar way. AI Overviews and AI Mode run several related searches across subtopics and data sources.

The answer you see is therefore a summary of what those searches return. If your business turns up in none of those results and no source says clearly what you do, your name stays out of the answer.

Other sites talk about your competitor

Much of what an AI assistant says about a business comes from outside that business's own website. Ahrefs studied 75,000 brands in Google AI Overviews and found the strongest link with the number of times a brand is mentioned elsewhere on the web, with a correlation of 0.664. The number of backlinks scored clearly lower, at 0.218. The study measures a correlation and looked at larger brands.

A competitor who appears in an article in the regional paper, on the member list of their sector federation or in a comparison of providers gives the AI assistant sources where their name already sits next to the right question. If your name is missing from those places, the assistant has to get everything from your own site. Where to look for such mentions is covered in our article on appearing in ChatGPT's answers.

Reviews and prominence count

When a question includes a region, local search results play a large part. Google writes in its explanation of local ranking that local results depend mainly on relevance, distance and prominence. For prominence, Google looks at how many websites link to your business and how many reviews you have, among other things. More reviews and positive ratings can improve your local ranking, according to Google.

Google says this about its own local results. Neither ChatGPT nor Perplexity discloses how much weight it gives to reviews. Because they do consult search results for a local question, a business with a complete business profile and recent reviews has a better chance of turning up in those results.

A clear entity and pages that can be quoted

An AI assistant has to understand that your business is one recognisable whole: a name, an activity, a region. If your company appears on one site under its trading name, on another under the name of the legal entity and on your own site only as a logo, a machine cannot tell whether those are the same business. A competitor who uses the same name, address and description everywhere is easier to confirm. You can also record those details in code with structured data.

Your copy also decides whether you can be quoted. A service page whose first sentences say what you deliver, for whom and in which municipalities contains a passage an assistant can take over as it stands.

Crawler access and freshness

An assistant can only cite what it is allowed to read. OpenAI writes in its overview of crawlers that sites which block OAI-SearchBot are not shown in ChatGPT's search answers. For Google, the same documentation on AI features says a page must be indexed and eligible to appear in search results with a snippet. An outdated rule in robots.txt can keep such a crawler out without anyone noticing; our article on robots.txt and AI crawlers explains how to check.

The age of your pages also plays a part. Ahrefs analysed 17 million citations in AI assistants and found that cited pages were on average 25.7% fresher than pages in ordinary search results. A competitor who updates their service pages and publishes new articles gives the assistant more recent sources to choose from.

How to check it in ten minutes

For a first diagnosis, one question a customer would really ask is enough, with your service and your region in it:

• Ask the question in ChatGPT with search switched on, in Perplexity and in Google. Note who is named.
• Open the sources under each answer. If your competitor appears in a directory, a news article or a review site where you are missing, the cause lies in mentions outside your site.
• Then ask directly: "what do you know about [name of your business] in [town]?". A vague or wrong answer points to your entity or to copy that is not clear enough.
• Finally ask: "why do you recommend [competitor]?". The assistant sometimes names the reviews, the specialisation or the source that tipped the balance.

One question is a snapshot. To follow whether your changes pay off, work with a fixed list of questions as described in our article on measuring GEO.

What you can do now

• Run the ten-minute test above today and save the answers along with their sources.
• Look up your business on the three sites that appear most often as a source and check that your name, address and description are correct.
• Rewrite the first paragraph of your most important service page so it says what you do, for whom and where.

From Ghent we run the same check in depth for SMEs across Belgium: request the free AI analysis or take a look at our monthly follow-up. If visitors reach your site through AI but drop off there, our sister agency hetdesignbureau.be can help.