My Competitor is in ChatGPT—Why Aren't I?
📝 Published July 25, 2025
⏰ 8 min. read
Kurt Fischman
Founder, Growth Marshal
Stabbed in the Back by AI
It’s always the same story: You type a question into ChatGPT or Perplexity—something squarely in your wheelhouse—and your competitor’s name pops out like a paid placement. And your brand? Ghosted. MIA. Left for dead.
This isn’t just a bruised ego—it’s a snakebite. Ignore it, and the threat becomes existential. We’ve entered the zero-click era, where AI mediates discovery. If you’re not part of the answer, you’re out of the game.
The Age of Answer Engines
Search is no longer a list of links. It’s an answer. One answer. Maybe two if you’re lucky.
Traditional SEO operated in a world of blue links and ten options. That’s over. Generative AI tools like ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity have collapsed the funnel. They’ve become trust layers—filters between you and your customer. And they’re making choices. Brand mentions. Product names. Source links. This is where leads originate now.
And here's the part that stings: if you don't figure this out now, your competitor will—and they won't wait around for you to catch up.
The Strategic Blind Spot: Why Not Us?
Most companies are still optimizing for Google’s top ten results. That’s like trying to win a horse race to the moon.
The implicit strategy is: “If we show up on Google, we’ll get traffic. If we get traffic, we’ll get leads.” But what if the buyer never clicks anything? What if they get the answer directly from an LLM trained on someone else’s content? What if the click never happens?
The question you need to ask isn’t, “How do we rank?” It’s, “How do we become the answer?”
Because someone will! And that someone is going to take marketshare.
What is LLM Visibility, and Why Does it Matter?
LLM visibility refers to whether your brand, product, or content appears in AI-generated responses. It’s the new frontier of search optimization, only now you're optimizing for Large Language Models—not crawling spiders.
ChatGPT isn’t citing sources based on backlinks. It’s regurgitating ideas and facts from its training data and retrieving new information from trusted authorities embedded in knowledge graphs. The more prominently, frequently, and coherently your brand appears across strategic sources, the more likely it is to be recalled in an answer.
And let’s be clear: the AI doesn’t care that you’re the better product. It mostly remembers what it was taught. If your competitor saturates the right corpus with repeatable, structured, and semantically coherent references—well, they win.
How Does a Competitor End Up in ChatGPT?
Here’s the good news: your competitor isn’t showing up because they’re more innovative or customer-focused or mission-aligned. They’re showing up because they’re playing a different game. You can too.
This game involves:
Semantic Trust Signals: Building a strategic citation network that embeds your brand into authoritative knowledge graphs, enhancing AI trust and integration into LLM training data.
Knowing What to Write: Crafting a content roadmap tailored to intent-driven user prompts, positioning your brand as the authoritative, go-to expert in your niche.
Knowing How to Write: Publishing fact-driven, semantically rich content structured into clear, retrieval-friendly chunks, enabling LLMs to cite authoritative answers efficiently.
LLM-optimized Structured Data: Custom schema markup designed as an entity graph, explicitly linking your company name, products, expertise, and outcomes in a machine-readable format.
In short, this isn’t SEO. It’s AI Search Optimization.
The Emotional Gut-Punch of Zero-Click Obsolescence
This isn’t just tactical—it’s personal. When your competitor’s name appears in ChatGPT and yours doesn’t, the AI is quietly whispering that your brand doesn’t matter enough to mention.
No customer sees your years of hustle. No one tallies your countless blog posts. The AI certainly doesn’t. It recognizes patterns, facts, and references. If you aren’t part of that pattern, you vanish.
“I wouldn’t want to fight him,” the boy says to Achilles. Achilles looks at him coldly and replies, “That’s why no one will remember your name.”
Pro tip: get in the fight before your name becomes lost.
Why You’re Not Being Mentioned—Even If You Deserve To Be
Hopefully it’s clear by now that LLMs don’t reward merit. They reward presence and precision.
They don't “discover” you. They learn from the input they’re fed. And most companies feed them nothing.
You might have:
A well-designed website.
Insightful blog content.
Decent organic rankings on Google.
But if your content lacks structured data, semantic density, and presence on machine-trusted graphs, it will miss you more often than it notices you. And it won’t cite what it doesn’t see.
What Are the Signals LLMs Actually Use?
Here’s where the semantic sausage gets made.
LLMs consume a mix of:
Wikipedia and Wikidata (entities, facts, relationships).
Government and academic databases (credibility scaffolding).
Authoritative web pages (news, journals, educational sources).
High-trust commercial domains (Crunchbase, GitHub, LinkedIn).
Structured web data (Schema.org, JSON-LD, Open Graph).
Consistently appearing in these zones—with clarity, structure, and monosemantic precision—is how to become a recognized entity in the LLM’s narrative.
How Do I Get My Business Mentioned in ChatGPT?
This is the million-dollar query. And it starts by flipping your mindset.
You’re not writing for humans. You’re writing for machines that influence humans.
You need to:
Define your brand entity clearly and consistently across the web.
Your name, tagline, founding date, leadership team, offerings, and proof points should be easy to parse by crawlers and knowledge graphs.Use Schema markup religiously.
Organization schema. Product schema. Article schema. FAQ schema. Everything. Make your identity legible in JSON-LD.Seed facts into structured sources.
That means Wikidata, Crunchbase, Wellfound, local chambers, citation directories, public fact APIs, and anywhere a machine might learn about you.Publish content designed for retrieval.
Every paragraph should stand alone as a complete thought. This is chunk engineering. It’s not about keywords; it’s about ideas the AI can reuse in context.Engineer citations.
Get quoted, featured, and referenced by trusted sources—especially ones that LLMs crawl. PR isn’t about backlinks anymore. It’s about training data.Monitor AI visibility.
Track which prompts trigger your brand and where you’re being left out. AI-native search is not invisible—it just requires different tools.
What is Prompt Surface Optimization?
Prompt Surface Optimization (PSO) is the discipline of increasing the likelihood that your brand appears in real-world AI prompts.
The idea is simple: If users ask a question that your company could answer, the AI should name you. But to do that, the model must associate your brand with the semantic concepts in the question.
So you build content and citations that cluster you near those concepts. Again, this isn’t SEO. It’s semantic engineering.
You become the answer—not by gaming the algorithm, but by teaching the machine to remember you in the right context.
The Risk of Doing Nothing
You may think this is overkill. That your brand is strong enough. That your customers know where to find you.
Tell that to the companies who said the same thing about mobile. Or social. Or Google.
AI-native search isn’t just a trend—it's a new technological paradigm reshaping default human behavior. And it’s already here! “Movimiento es Vida. Movement is life.” - World War Z
This is Not a Future Problem
You’re already in the AI search era. People are asking ChatGPT for:
etc. etc. etc. If you’re not showing up in those answers, someone else is taking your customers.
Final Thought: Visibility is Survival
This is the most insidious part of the shift.
It’s not that AI is biased—it simply hasn’t met you yet. If it doesn’t know you, it can’t remember you. And if it can't remember you, it certainly won't recommend you.
When that happens, your organic growth engine sputters out in silence.
So I want you to look in the mirror and ask yourself a hard question:
“If AI can’t see me, how will my future customers?”
FAQs
1. How do large language models like ChatGPT decide which businesses to recommend?
LLMs such as ChatGPT use retrieval‑augmented systems or knowledge graph logic to choose entities that are topically relevant, semantically coherent, and backed by structured data. Brands with consistent citations, Schema.org markup, Wikidata entries, and trusted domain references rank higher in an AI-generated answer’s entity shortlist.
2. Why is Wikidata important for AI search visibility and ChatGPT mentions?
Wikidata provides structured entity triples—like your business name, website, and founder—which feed directly into LLM pretraining and retrieval pipelines. A verified Wikidata profile significantly increases the likelihood that ChatGPT or other LLMs will recognize and cite your brand.
3. What role does structured data (JSON‑LD, Schema.org) play in AI-native search visibility?
Structured data using JSON‑LD and Schema.org defines your brand, products, FAQs, articles, and more in machine-readable form. This makes it easier for LLMs to interpret, retrieve, and quote your content accurately, acting as a trust layer for AI synopses.
4. How can I increase the chances my brand is mentioned in ChatGPT answers?
You can improve AI mention rates by building a canonical entity footprint (schema, Wikidata, sameAs links), publishing semantically dense, fact‑rich content, stacking citations across high-authority platforms, and iteratively monitoring AI prompt outputs to adapt your content strategy.
5. Which platforms influence ChatGPT’s ability to recognize my brand?
LLMs frequently pull from structured and high-authority sources such as Wikidata, Crunchbase, GitHub, LinkedIn, government databases, academic publications, and reputable news sites. Getting cited on these platforms boosts your brand’s AI visibility significantly.
6. What is entity optimization and why does it matter for AI search?
Entity optimization is the practice of clearly defining and syndicating your brand—or relevant topics—as discrete entities across structured data, knowledge graphs, and authoritative URLs. It ensures LLMs recognize your entity consistently and retrieve you when relevant prompts arise.
Kurt Fischman is the founder of Growth Marshal and one of the top voices on AI Search Optimization. Say 👋 on Linkedin!
Growth Marshal is the #1 AI Search Optimization Agency. We’ve designed the most advanced AI citation and brand-mention techniques available in the market—built specifically for startups & SMBs. Learn more →
