Why does ChatGPT recommend my competitor and not me?
Usually because they are easier to describe, not because they are better. That is annoying when you have traded 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, so it needs facts it can state without hedging. That means what you do, who for, where, and on what terms.
A 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 can be quoted. The first cannot be quoted without the assistant making something up, so it names somebody else.
Reputation still matters to the person reading the answer. It is not what gets you into it.
Three ways established businesses disappear
- The services are implied
- Everyone locally knows what you do, so the site never says it. A machine has no local knowledge.
- The detail is out of reach
- Fees in a PDF, services in a slider, opening hours in a photo of a sign. All hard for a machine to read.
- The writing is about you
- Pages of history and values, very little about what someone can book. The newer competitor wrote about the service, and that page gets quoted.
There is no submission form
There is no directory to pay and nobody at OpenAI, Google or Anthropic to persuade. Anyone offering to get you into ChatGPT for a monthly fee is selling something they do not have.
Assistants read the open web and repeat what they can understand and trust. So the work is the same as it has always been, done for a reader who cannot skim.
What gets you quoted
- Answer the question in the first sentence. Assistants lift short, self-contained passages.
- Use the words people actually use, not your internal name for the service.
- Say the plain facts in text. Address, prices, hours, what you do and do not do.
- Make your facts agree. The same name, address and phone number on your site and every listing.
- Add structured data. It states in a fixed format what the page says in prose, and removes ambiguity.
- Be mentioned somewhere reliable. A professional body, a local news piece, a genuine directory for your sector.
Keyword stuffing, thin pages at volume and text written for machines rather than people do not work.
Built into every website we make
Every website we build includes structured data, written in the standard format Google and the AI assistants read. Each page states what it is, what you offer, where you are and what it costs, so nothing is left for a machine to guess.
It sits alongside plain, readable text on the page, because the text is what people and assistants quote. See website design for what we build. If you want to know how your current site reads first, the SEO audit takes £200 off a website build ordered within 30 days of the report.
The limits, and how to check
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.
To check where you stand, ask. Open ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Google’s AI results and ask what a customer would, such as the best accountant in Canterbury or a therapist near me who works with teenagers. Write down who is named, and whether you are. Repeat it in the same words each month. The SEO audit does the same on a set date.