ChatGPT Recommends My Competitor Instead of Me. What Can I Do?
Updated
AI engines name the brands they find on pages they can read and on sites they trust. Start in AI Visibility > Prompts with the Invisible filter, read who each engine names, then check Citations for the sites cited instead of you. Your agents fix your own pages. Getting mentioned on review sites, directories and forums is work you do, and SEOmatic tells you where.
1. Find the Questions You Lose#
- Open AI Visibility > Prompts and click Invisible. These are the questions where no engine names you. Weak shows questions where only some engines do.
- Look at Top Competitor and Difficulty. A question with many rival brands (High) is harder to win than one with a few.
- Click a question to open Prompt details and read what each engine answered. Note why the engine picks the competitor: a feature, a price, a review, a list it quotes.
- If the question is not one your buyers really ask, remove it and add a better one with Add prompt.
2. See Which Sources the Engines Trust#
- AI Visibility > Citations > Sources cited instead of you ranks the sites engines link to that are not yours. Review sites, lists of best tools and forums often top it.
- In the table, hover the Prompts number of a source to see which questions it was cited for.
- On the Overview, Trust sources engines consult lists the sites engines search while answering your questions. Those marked never cited are listed again under Corroboration playbook, with one action for each.
- Your pages AI search engines cite shows what already works on your site. Those pages show the format engines like to quote.
3. Remove What Blocks You#
| Check | Where | What to do |
|---|---|---|
| AI search bots blocked | Your agents check robots.txt when they plan. A Prepare crawler-access changes task means something is blocked | Have an admin apply it. See let AI crawlers read your site |
| Not in Bing | A box on the Overview: Your site isn't showing up in Bing | Verify your site in Bing Webmaster Tools and submit your sitemap. ChatGPT finds pages through Bing. Any member can also connect IndexNow. See IndexNow and IndexMeNow |
| Cited but not named | By engine shows unnamed | The engine linked to your page without saying your brand. Pages that state your brand name next to the answer help |
| Negative tone | The Sentiment tile, and How the answers talk about each brand once the scan has enough measured answers | Read the negative answers in Prompt details to find the complaint they repeat, then answer it on your site and on review sites |
4. Let Your Agents Fix Your Pages#
Each week your agents take up to 8 of your invisible or weak questions and work on them. They add answer passages to the page that matches each question, or write a new article when no page does (at most 4 new articles a week). They also prepare your brand ID card and, when Reddit supplies at least a quarter of the citations for a question, a brief on those threads. See how agents improve your AI visibility.
- This needs your website connected. If you see no AI search tasks on the board, check Connections first.
- About 1 question in 4 is left untouched on purpose, to measure the result, as long as at least 3 questions are workable. Do not worry if one of your questions never gets a task.
- To push one question now, ask SEO Copilot, for example: add a citable passage to my pricing page for "best invoicing app for freelancers".
5. Work on the Sites Engines Trust#
Engines often name a competitor because review sites, lists and forums name it. SEOmatic does not post, review or contact anyone for you. Use the Corroboration playbook and the community brief as your to-do list: get listed on the review sites engines check, ask happy customers for reviews there, and take part in the threads engines cite.
6. Compare and Wait#
- Click Scan a competitor on the Overview to see how often engines name that competitor. Results appear in Competitor scans.
- Changes to AI answers take weeks. Answer passages are judged after 30 days, citable passages after 21. The line above the AI Visibility chart says when worked questions move more than untouched ones.
- The competitor is named on one engine but I am named on another. Why?
- Each engine runs its own searches and reads different sources. Check By engine on the Overview, and read each engine's answer in Prompt details.
- I was named last week and not this week.
- Answers change from scan to scan. Look at the trend for that question in the Trend column before acting. If an engine stopped citing one of your pages, your agents propose work on that page to win it back.
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