Why does AI recommend your competitors and not you?
Check the evidence behind the recommendation before paying for another website rewrite.
Steen Stones · Reviewed
Your competitor may be easier to find in the sources AI uses. Ahrefs found a strong link between web mentions and AI visibility, but that does not explain every missing company. OpenAI says its search rankings use several factors.
Read the answer and open its cited pages
The source needs checking
- Check whether the cited page supports the answer
- Check whether its information is current
Your pages need checking
- Confirm that search crawling is allowed
- Review the usefulness and currency of your market and feature pages
These checks help you investigate a result. They do not establish a single cause or promise that the next answer will change.
Sources: OpenAI search guidance; Ahrefs buying-prompt research
Where should you look first?
Open the sources behind the answer and read what they say about the competitor. OpenAI warns that citations can be wrong or out of date. Check the evidence before spending money to copy what you think worked.
Comparison pages are worth checking. Best-list blog posts made up 43.8% of source-page types in an Ahrefs study of 750 early buying questions. Those questions covered software, products and agencies, not every use of AI.
Check the quality of those pages too. The same researcher found that cited websites were not always legitimate. Getting copied by a weak source is not a standard to aim for.
Are you checking the same question?
Keep a record of the question and its context. ChatGPT can use your location and saved memories when it searches. Record those settings alongside the companies it names.
Check whether the answer used web search. ChatGPT may search automatically when current information would help, so do not assume every answer came from the same process.
Can ChatGPT read your website?
Ask your website manager to check whether OAI-SearchBot can read the site. This is the crawler used for ChatGPT search. Your hosting service must also allow requests from OpenAI’s published network addresses.
You can allow search access while keeping your content out of OpenAI’s training crawler. Blocking training is a separate choice, so opening everything is not the only option.
What should you improve once access works?
Look at the pages that explain your market and product features. Ahrefs recommends keeping them useful and current. Check whether a buyer can find what they need to compare your company.
If you publish comparisons, help readers check the alternatives for themselves. Glen Allsopp describes that approach in the Ahrefs study.
And we’ll keep linking directly to alternative solutions so visitors can research them on their own.
Should you publish more articles to catch up?
More pages alone are a poor target. Ahrefs found almost no relationship between page count and AI visibility. Its findings also do not prove that increasing mentions causes more visibility.
Find the gap you can see and fix that. A source may need correcting, or a product page may be out of date. The research gives you places to look, not a reason to copy everything your competitor publishes.