Why ChatGPT Recommends Your Competitor: You Probably Skipped the SEO

Quick answer: In my opinion, ChatGPT often names your competitor because their basic SEO is better than yours, not because they found an AI trick. AI answers are built from pages that can be found, read and trusted, and that is what SEO has always been about. So before you buy an AEO or GEO package, check that you can be found in Google and Bing at all, that your pages say plainly what you do, and that other sites talk about you. This is my view, not a law. The data below supports part of it and pushes back on part of it, and I will show you both.

I sell AEO and GEO services, so this is an odd thing for me to write. But here it is: I think a lot of people are optimising for AEO and GEO while skipping the core SEO those things sit on.

Right now the conversation is all llms.txt files, prompt trackers and AI citation dashboards. Meanwhile, the same business has a service page that says "quality solutions for your needs", no internal links to it, and has never opened Bing Webmaster Tools. Then the owner asks why ChatGPT recommends the competitor down the road.

Google has basically said this out loud

I am not the first to say it. Danny Sullivan, a director in Google Search, put it this way in his keynote at WordCamp US in August 2025, as reported by Search Engine Land: "Good SEO is good GEO, or AEO, AIO, LLM SEO, or LMNOPO."

Google's documentation says the same thing in drier language. Its guide to AI features says there are "no additional requirements" to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode, and that you do not need new machine-readable files, AI text files or markup. The list it gives instead is plain old SEO: allow crawling, link to your pages internally, keep important content in text, and make sure your structured data matches what is on the page.

And the numbers line up for Google's own AI. Ahrefs studied 1.9 million AI Overview citations in 2025 and found 76% came from pages already ranking in Google's top 10.

But Google does not speak for ChatGPT

This is where I have to be honest, because the title of this post is about ChatGPT, not Google. Google has every reason to tell you that nothing has changed. So I looked at what ChatGPT does.

• For my argument: Seer Interactive matched over 500 ChatGPT citations against search results for about 100 questions. More than 87% matched Bing's top 20, and 56% matched Google's. That is a small study, but ChatGPT's sources look a lot like search results. I would bet most people doing "AI optimisation" have never checked how they rank on Bing.
• Against my argument: Ahrefs tested 15,000 long-tail prompts and found only 12% of links cited by ChatGPT, Gemini and Copilot were in Google's top 10 for the same prompt. So ranking on Google alone will not get you named.
• Also against it: Ahrefs compared 75,000 brands and found very weak correlations between link metrics and AI mentions. If your idea of SEO is buying backlinks, this is bad news.

Here is how I read all that. Ranking is not the same as being recommended. But the work that gets you ranked is most of the work that gets you recommended: being crawlable, being clear, and being talked about. That last one is the bit people forget was always part of SEO.

Check you are not panicking over one answer

One more thing before you change anything. SparkToro's study ran 12 prompts through AI tools 2,961 times and found a less than 1 in 100 chance of ChatGPT giving the same list of brands in any two answers. Your competitor being named once proves nothing.

So write ten questions your customers would really ask, ask each one five times in new chats, and count how many of the 50 answers name you and how many name them. SparkToro's view is that this kind of share is a reasonable measure, while any "ranking position in AI" is not. Our guide to measuring AI citations and share of voice turns it into a monthly sheet.

The order I would check things in

If your competitor really is ahead, this is the order I would go in. Notice that the SEO comes first and the AI-specific stuff comes last.

1. Make sure search engines and ChatGPT can reach you

Search for your own pages on Google and on Bing. Then check your robots.txt, your firewall and your hosting. OpenAI says sites that opt out of its search crawler, OAI-SearchBot, will not be shown in ChatGPT search answers, apart from navigational links. It takes a few minutes to check, and if it is blocked, nothing else on this list matters. Our free website audit includes this check.

2. See whether you even rank for the question

Search your customers' questions on Google and Bing. If your competitor is on page one of both and you are nowhere, you have an SEO problem, and I would not call it anything fancier. Our technical SEO checklist is where I would start.

3. Make your pages say what you do

Read your service page and your competitor's side by side. "We help businesses grow" gives nobody anything to work with, human or machine. "We do the books for online shops with under ten staff" does. This was good SEO before ChatGPT existed. Our post on AI-friendly service pages shows the pattern.

4. Find out who else talks about you

This is the one I think decides most of these cases. A newer Ahrefs study of 10,000 brands found that Reddit threads (0.75), web pages (0.70) and news articles (0.67) all track AI mentions closely, where 1 is a perfect match. Correlation is not causation, and big brands simply get more of everything. Still, open the links ChatGPT shows in your test. If a "best of" article and a directory name your competitor and not you, that is your to-do list. Our guide to Reddit and AI recommendations covers one of the most common sources.

5. Keep your business details the same everywhere

Your name, services and address should match across your website, your Google Business Profile, your social profiles and directories. Our guide to entity SEO explains why. Old-fashioned local SEO people have been saying this for years.

6. Now do the AI-specific work

Only now would I look at prompt tracking, question-led content and answers written to be quoted. They can help. I sell them, so I would say that, and our guide to ranking in ChatGPT covers them in full. But they are the finishing layer. An llms.txt file on a site nobody can find is a waste of an afternoon, and our post on what llms.txt does explains why.

Where I could be wrong

• Some things really are new. ChatGPT's model also learned from the public web during training, so a business with years of coverage can be named without any live search. No SEO checklist closes that gap quickly.
• "Good SEO" is doing a lot of work in this argument. If you define SEO as keywords and backlinks, I am wrong, and the Ahrefs data above says so. I mean all of it: being found, being clear and earning a reputation.
• This is an opinion, not a study. The studies I link to measure correlation, and some are small or from 2025. AI search changes quickly, so re-test on your own market.

One thing it is probably not: your competitor paying for it. OpenAI says ads do not influence the answers ChatGPT gives, and that they are clearly labelled.

How Loop2Tech helps

Our prices are fixed and published on our pricing page. The Full AI Visibility Audit, US$99, shows who gets named instead of you and gives you a prioritised fix list and a walkthrough call, and if your real problem is basic SEO, it will say that. Our AEO, GEO and SEO service, US$450 a month, does the work, with technical and on-page SEO included and not sold separately. Read how our AEO, GEO and SEO services work, or tell me which competitor keeps getting named. If you are comparing providers, our guide to AEO pricing explains what is worth paying for.

Frequently asked questions

Why does ChatGPT recommend my competitor and not me?

In my opinion, it is usually the basics: more independent pages mention them, their pages say more clearly who they serve, they show up in search for the question, or ChatGPT cannot read your site. It can also be chance, because ChatGPT rarely gives the same list twice, so test the same questions several times first.

Is good SEO really good AEO and GEO?

Google says so for its own AI features: its Danny Sullivan said "Good SEO is good GEO", and its documentation lists no extra requirements. For ChatGPT the evidence is more mixed. Its citations overlap heavily with Bing in one small study, but rarely with Google's top 10 in a larger one. I think SEO is most of the work, not all of it.

Do I need AEO or GEO if I already do SEO?

If your SEO is truly solid, you may need less than you are being sold. What is left is checking which pages ChatGPT reads for your market, getting mentioned on them, and tracking how often you are named. If your SEO is weak, I would fix that first.

Did my competitor pay to be recommended by ChatGPT?

OpenAI says ads do not influence ChatGPT's answers and that ads are clearly labelled. If your competitor is named in the answer itself and not in a sponsored label, the likelier explanation is what the web says about them.

Does ranking on Google get you recommended by ChatGPT?

Not on its own. Ahrefs found that only 12% of links cited by ChatGPT, Gemini and Copilot were in Google's top 10 for the same prompt. Ranking helps you get found, but ChatGPT also weighs what other sites say about you, and it appears to lean more on Bing than on Google.