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RileyCraig14
RileyCraig14

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What to do when ChatGPT names your competitor instead of you

Most teams still treat Google rankings as the scoreboard.

Buyers don't. They ask ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Gemini "what's the best X for Y" and take the shortlist the model speaks out loud. If your brand is not in that answer, you lose the deal before a click exists.

I built a checker for this because I kept seeing the same failure: a site that ranks fine on Google and is invisible inside the assistant.

The 10-minute test (do this before you buy anything)

Pick the exact question a buyer would type. Not your slogan. The buying question.

Ask all three engines, verbatim:

Who are the best [category] for [niche or city] in 2026? Name five brands and say why.

Write down four things:

  1. Are you named at all?
  2. What position are you in (1-5, or missing)?
  3. Who got named instead?
  4. What reason did the model give for the winner?

Do this three times with slightly different wording. Models jitter. One lucky mention is not visibility.

If you want the same check without copy-pasting into three tabs, I run it here for free (no signup): https://try.agentexchange.work

Why a good SEO site still vanishes

The model is not ranking your homepage. It is assembling a shortlist from sources it already trusts.

Brands vanish for boring reasons:

  • No citable sentence. The first 80 words of your key pages are brand poetry. Models lift a declarative answer.
  • Thin third-party footprint. If review sites, Reddit, directories, and comparison posts never mention you, the model has nothing independent to confirm.
  • Entity mush. Two products share a name, or your About page never says what you are in one sentence.
  • Blocked or unreadable pages. JS-only content, missing Organization/FAQ schema, or AI crawlers denied in robots.txt.
  • You never measured it. Rank trackers do not tell you whether ChatGPT said your name this morning.

GEO / AEO is a messy label. The useful part is not the acronym. It is: are you in the answer, and if not, who is?

What actually moves the needle

Do these in order. Skip the retainers until you have a baseline.

  1. Write the answer-first page. One page per buying question. First sentence is the answer. Then proof.
  2. Make the entity obvious. Same brand name everywhere. Organization schema with sameAs to the profiles that already exist.
  3. Earn mentions off your domain. One honest review, one comparison mention, one useful public comment in a thread people already use to decide.
  4. Allow the crawlers you want citations from. GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, PerplexityBot, ClaudeBot, Google-Extended.
  5. Re-run the same five prompts in 30 days. If the shortlist did not move, the last change was theater.

None of that is a guarantee. Anyone selling "we will get you into ChatGPT" as a paid placement is overselling an earned channel.

If you want the scored version

I built a one-time AI Visibility Report in the Profound / Otterly category, without the monthly seat.

The report scores how ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini talk about a brand, names the competitors they recommend instead, and gives a prioritized fix list. 30-day money-back.

I am Riley Craig. This is my tool. If you only want the free score, start there.

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