Why ChatGPT recommends your competitors instead of you
AI builds its answers from other people's pages: directories, maps, roundups, reviews. What assistants cited in our October 2, 2026 measurement.
Published
4 min read
In short
- AI builds its answer from other people's pages: directories, maps, roundups, reviews, marketplaces. It rarely opens your website.
- In our October 2, 2026 measurement, not one assistant named us: 0 of 96 answers. The links show where their answers came from: roundups, directories, articles on other people's sites.
- See which pages AI cites in your category, check whether the facts about you there are right, and put the facts about your company on your own website.
You asked ChatGPT who to choose in your category, and it named two or three competitors. You weren't one of them.
It's not about brand awareness. It's about the sources AI builds its answer from.
AI builds its answer from other people's pages
Directories, maps, roundups, reviews, marketplaces. It rarely opens your website, yet it quotes, line by line, a competitor whose prices and terms are easy to find.
Facts about you are outdated or scattered
An old name, the wrong price, three versions of your address and hours. AI repeats what it finds, other people's mistakes included.
What our own measurement showed
On October 2, 2026, when we were still called shyash.ai, we asked AI assistants questions about our own service - in a buyer's words, without our name, each in a fresh chat: 12 in English to ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and Perplexity, and 12 in Russian to Alice AI, ChatGPT, DeepSeek and Gemini.
Not one assistant named us: 0 of 96 answers. In 73 of the 96 answers, AI suggested at least one agency, specialist or tool instead of us.
How many answers named us
0of 96
Questions in English
Questions in Russian
an answer without our name
The links show where the answers came from. Here are the sites cited most often across those 96 answers.
Answers linking to the site
- linkedin.com - posts, an article and company pages;
- vc.ru, sostav.ru and workspace.ru - articles and blogs on Russian business and marketing sites and an agency directory, including roundups and rankings of agencies and tools;
- rush-agency.ru - the agency's own service page and blog.
How the list was compiled
The list comes from the answers of Alice AI, DeepSeek, Claude and Perplexity. In this measurement, our recording tool didn't save source addresses from ChatGPT and Gemini answers, so this list says nothing about where ChatGPT gets its answers. Yandex service links like yabs.yandex.ru/count/… in Alice AI answers are left out: they are click-counter redirects, not pages with text.
The pattern in the list is the one described above: roundups, directories, articles on other people's sites.
What this means for a business owner
- Ask AI your buyers' questions and look at which pages it cites. That's the list of places already writing about your category.
- Check whether you're there and whether the facts are right: your name, what you sell, to whom, at what price, where. Everything should say the same thing.
- Put the facts about your company on your own website in a form a machine can quote.
- Answer your buyers' questions on your own site: a page that answers your customers' common questions is also a source AI can build an answer from.
What we don't do ourselves: we don't buy mentions or placements in roundups. We don't write reviews on clients' behalf or pose as “independent users”.
What we're doing about our own zero
What we suggest to others: working on the sources and measuring again, the same way.
This article is part of that work - an answer to a buyer's question on our own website. Whether it helps will show in the next measurement with the same questions, now under the name aigo.