Why Your Competitors Show Up In ChatGPT And You Do Not

Then re-run the same ten prompts a month later and compare. Attributing improvement to a specific fix is only possible because you recorded the starting point, which is the argument for doing the teardown before the work rather than after it.

That means the useful ask is not simply for a rating. Prompting customers to say what they used the product for and what situation it suited produces review text that can actually answer a question, which is what gets quoted.

Generative Engine Optimization The broadest of the three in common use. It refers to being visible in systems that generate an answer rather than returning a list, which covers assistants, AI summaries on results pages and any interface that synthesises rather than links.

Read the Source List Before the Prose Where citations are shown, list every domain and count how often each appears. This is the single most useful output of the whole exercise, and most people skip it because the prose is more interesting.

After that, the work is ordinary: accurate structured data, honest comparison content, a steady flow of detailed reviews, and marketplace listings maintained as carefully as your own pages. llm seo

The third question matters most. A good answer names a cause, attaches a number and admits an alternative explanation. A weak answer describes activity in the language of effort without connecting it to anything observable.

Set Up So You Do Not Fool Yourself Open a signed out session, or a fresh one with memory and personalisation disabled. This matters more than anything else in the method. An account that has spent the week researching your own company will show you a flattering picture that has nothing to do with what a stranger sees.

Second, prompts that presuppose a weakness: is this company expensive, are they slow, are they suitable for small clients. The answers reveal what the system believes about your reputation, and where the belief is wrong it points at a specific source you can correct.

The Data Has to Exist as Text The most common failure is mechanical. Specifications live in an image of a table, sizing sits in a downloadable PDF, and the price appears only after a script runs or after a variant is selected.

In practice it is used to mean roughly the same thing as generative engine optimization, occasionally with a stronger emphasis on training data and brand presence in the underlying corpus rather than on live retrieval.

Save the document and the date. In three months you will run the same ten prompts again, and the comparison is the only thing that will tell you whether anything you did in between mattered. llm seo

The Mistake Almost Everyone Makes Prompt sets written by marketing teams use marketing language. They contain the category name the company uses internally, the segment labels from the positioning document, and the phrasing from the website.

You can do this yourself in about half an hour, with no subscriptions and no technical knowledge. It will not be as thorough as a full engagement, and it is more than enough to establish whether you have a problem and roughly what kind.

In most categories the result is the same shape: a review platform, an industry directory, one or two forum threads, a comparison article, occasionally a trade publication, and only then anybody's own website. The competitor is winning on pages neither of you owns.

Resist the temptation to interpret a single run. Competitors move around between runs, and a rival appearing above you once is not a finding. Run the same prompt several times, count how often each company appears, and only then decide whether there is a gap worth spending a quarter on. Reacting to one answer is the most common way effort gets spent on a problem that does not exist.

Weight toward the commercial tiers. Roughly a third on buying intent, a quarter on evaluation, a quarter on problem framing and the remainder split between definitional and branded is a reasonable starting distribution.

How to Run the Ninety Day Review Ask three questions. Can you show me the prompt set is unchanged. Can you show me the raw answers. What specifically did you do, and which of the changes do you believe caused which movement.

If your category still gets meaningful traffic from those, a proposal scoped only to assistants will leave that work undone. Conversely, if somebody proposes an answer engine optimization programme and delivers only snippet optimisation, they are working on the older half of the definition.

Three acronyms, considerable overlap, and no governing body to settle the definitions. Different agencies use them differently, some interchangeably, and a few have invented a fourth to differentiate a proposal.

Reviews Do Disproportionate Work For products more than for services, review content is the evidence base. Volume matters, recency matters more, and detail matters most, because a review that describes a specific use gives a model something to match against a specific question.