Why does ChatGPT recommend my competitor and not me?
Because the pages ChatGPT read for that question pointed to your competitor, not to you. When it searches the web, it reads a handful of pages, such as review sites and directories, and recommends the businesses they mention. Which pages it reads can change with every question, and so can the reasons you’re left out.
None of the reasons below mean your competitor is better than you. They’re about what the assistant could find.
How ChatGPT decides who to name
ChatGPT answers in one of two ways. Sometimes it relies on what it learned when it was built, from a snapshot of the web that may be months or years old. For questions about local businesses, it often searches the web first. It then writes its answer from the pages it found, and lists them as sources.
When it searches, it only reads a few of the pages that come back. The businesses mentioned on those pages are the ones it’s most likely to recommend.
Google’s AI Overview and AI Mode work in a similar way. Google says it runs several related searches at once, which it calls “query fan-out”. It then builds one answer from the results.
The usual reasons someone else is named
They appear on the pages the assistant reads
If the review site or directory the assistant finds names your competitor but not you, the assistant has nothing leading it to you.
Their website says clearly what they do and where
A page about conveyancing in Guildford is an easy match for the question “who’s good for conveyancing in Guildford?” A page that just says “we offer a full range of legal services” gives the assistant much less to match.
Others write about them
Assistants read what other people say about a business, not just what it says about itself. The more others write about a business, the more the assistant has to go on.
The question was asked differently
Small changes in wording can change who gets named. “Best accountant in Leeds” and “an accountant in Leeds who understands landlords” may bring up different names. Your competitor might win one kind of question while you win another.
Your website can’t be read
Some websites block the tools the assistants use to read the web. OpenAI says sites that block its search crawler, OAI-SearchBot, won’t appear in ChatGPT’s search answers.
Chance
The assistants don’t give the same answer every time. Ask again and the list may change. One answer that named your competitor is a single result, not a pattern.
Often more than one of these is at work, and it can differ from question to question. A single search won’t tell you which ones apply to you.
ChatGPT isn’t the only one
Put the same question to Gemini, AI Overview or AI Mode and you may get different businesses. Each one runs its own searches and reads its own pages. A business left out by ChatGPT may be named by Gemini, and the other way round. We cover this in how the four assistants differ.
What to find out first
Before you change anything, it’s worth knowing what’s really happening.
- Which questions are you named for, and which are you missing from?
- On which assistants?
- Who is named instead, and how often?
- Which pages do the assistants read when they answer?
A Visility audit answers all of these for your business, on all four assistants. Every question you’re losing is quoted in full. How it works explains each step.
What nobody can promise
Nobody outside OpenAI and Google controls what their assistants say. Anyone who guarantees that ChatGPT will recommend you is guessing. What you can do is measure where you stand, understand why, and track how it changes.
Sources
- OpenAI, Overview of OpenAI crawlers
- Google Search Central, AI features and your website