Why does ChatGPT recommend my competitor and not me?

Usually because they are easier to describe, not because they are better. That is a genuinely annoying answer when you have been trading for twenty years and they opened last spring, so it is worth explaining properly.

Why your reviews did not save you

An assistant is not counting your reviews and ranking you against theirs. It is assembling an answer it can defend. To do that it needs facts it can state without hedging: what you do, who for, where, and on what terms.

So the practice with four hundred reviews and a home page that says “excellence in client care since 2006” loses to the one whose page says “family law, divorce and children matters, Canterbury, first appointment £120”. The second one can be quoted. The first one cannot be quoted without the assistant making something up, and it would rather name somebody else than do that.

Reputation still matters enormously to the human reading the answer. It just is not the thing that gets you into the answer.

The three ways established firms disappear

The services are implied, never stated. Everyone locally knows what you do, so the site never says it. A machine has no local knowledge.

The detail lives where machines cannot go. Fee structures in a downloadable PDF. Services in a slider. Opening hours in an image of a sign. All invisible.

The writing is about you rather than the work. Pages of history and values, very little about what somebody can actually book. The newer competitor has not earned the right to talk about themselves yet, so they wrote about the service, and that is the page that gets quoted.

First, the thing nobody tells you

There is no submission form. There is no directory to pay. Nobody at OpenAI, Google or Anthropic can be persuaded to include you, and anyone offering to get you into ChatGPT for a monthly fee is selling something they do not have.

What assistants do is read the open web, and repeat what they can understand and trust. So the work is the same work as ever, done for a reader who cannot skim.

What actually gets you quoted

Answer the question in the first sentence. An assistant lifts short, self-contained passages. A page that opens with three paragraphs of throat clearing gives it nothing to lift. A page that opens with the answer gives it exactly what it needs.

Use the words people actually use. Not your internal name for the service. The question as your customer would type it.

Say the boring facts out loud, in text. Your address, your prices, your hours, what you do and do not do. A fact that only exists in an image, a PDF or a booking widget can sometimes be reached, but it is harder to find, harder to quote and easy to get wrong. Plain text on the page is the version that gets repeated.

Make your facts agree. The same business name, address and phone number everywhere, on your site and on every listing. Contradictions do not make a machine pick one, they make it trust all of them less.

Add structured data. Schema.org markup states in a fixed format what your page says in prose. It is not magic and it will not rescue a thin page, but it removes ambiguity, and ambiguity is what gets you left out.

Be citable somewhere else too. Assistants lean on sources they already consider reliable. A professional body, a local news piece, a real directory for your sector. One genuine mention is worth more than fifty of the other kind.

What does not work

Keyword stuffing. Publishing thin pages at volume. Blocks of text written for machines rather than people, which read badly to both. Anything that begins with the phrase AI SEO hack.

The limits

Nobody can promise you a mention, and we do not. Assistants change what they draw on, they disagree with each other, and two people asking the same question can get different names back. It is not a ranking you can hold.

What you can do is make yourself the easiest business in your area to describe accurately. Then, when an assistant is asked, you are the low risk answer.

How to check where you stand

Ask them. Open ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Google’s AI results, and ask the question a customer would ask: the best accountant in Canterbury, or a therapist near me who works with teenagers. Write down who gets named, and whether you do.

Do it monthly, in the same words each time. That is a free, honest measurement, and it is the same one we run.