If your product's buyers ask an AI assistant "what's the best tool/agency for X", what decides who gets named?
I run a PR agency, so I tested it in my own category. The method is simple enough to copy for yours.
The setup
- Date: October 12, 2026
- Tool: ChatGPT with web search on, in a temporary chat with personalisation off (no memory, no past conversations)
- Method: ask a real buyer question, then ask: "List the full URL of every page you used as a source." Log everything.
What it relied on
| Buyer question | Sources ChatGPT used |
|---|---|
| What is the best PR agency for B2B tech companies? | 3: two "best of" list articles and a firm ranking, plus agency homepages |
| Best tech PR agency for enterprise software companies | 15: 11 list articles, 1 agency blog post, 3 agency case studies |
| Which PR agency can guarantee my tech company gets published on Business Insider? | 5: agency pages dedicated to that exact question, plus the publisher's own sponsored-content page |
| Best PR agency for SaaS companies that want top-tier coverage | 5: sector pages and case studies with measurable results |
| "What is [our agency] and is it any good?" | Our site, our Clutch profile and our Trustpilot page |
Three patterns
1. Broad questions are answered from lists, not from vendor sites. For the enterprise question, 11 of 15 sources were third-party "best X" articles. The vendors it recommended were the ones repeated across those lists. We weren't on them, so we weren't in the answer.
2. Specific questions reward specific pages. When the question named a publication and a guarantee, it stopped citing lists and cited vendors' own pages answering exactly that, especially pages explicit about terms ("what happens if it doesn't publish?").
3. Name-checks are judged on third-party proof. Asked about one vendor by name, it summarised the website accurately, but its verdict hinged on review counts and independently verifiable results. A small review count was enough for "do more due diligence".
How to run this for your own product
- Write down 5 questions your buyers really ask (one broad, one by industry, one hyper-specific, one comparison, one about you by name).
- Run each in a fresh temporary chat with search on.
- Ask for every source URL and log them in a sheet: list article, vendor page, review site, docs, forum.
- Repeat monthly. The source mix changes faster than Google rankings.
What to do with the results
- Get onto the third-party lists your buyers' questions draw from.
- Publish one specific page per real buyer question, with terms, numbers and proof.
- Build reviews and independent coverage on purpose, because that's what the name-check reads.
- Keep your company description consistent everywhere AI tools look.
Full method and results: https://www.jamcopr.com/ai-pr-agency-study
I'm Joseph Tannous, founder of Jamco PR. We rerun these questions monthly; follow for the trend data.
Top comments (1)
The jump from 3 sources to 15 just by adding "enterprise software" is the most interesting part to me. It suggests narrower buyer questions pull in more list articles, not fewer, which is the opposite of what I'd have guessed. Did you rerun the same questions a day or two later? I'm curious how stable the source set is between runs, because if it shifts a lot the practical advice changes from "get on these lists" to "get on many lists".