Why ChatGPT Never Mentions Your Company
Which to Fix First Work in that order, because the sequence is roughly cheapest to most expensive and each step is wasted without the one before it. There is no value in earning press coverage if the crawler cannot reach the page it points at.
The Rendering Question This is the one real technical constraint. Content that only exists after JavaScript executes may be invisible to a retrieval fetch, which is not a browsing session and does not always run scripts.
Your Pages Contain Nothing Quotable Look at your homepage and count the sentences that could be lifted, attributed to you and remain true and useful out of context. On most brand sites the count is close to zero, because the copy is written to persuade rather than to inform.
Marketing copy does not get quoted. A paragraph of adjectives about your commitment to excellence contains nothing a model can attribute, so it is skipped in favour of a competitor who wrote a plain answer. Write the plain answer. llm seo
Those pages are your priority. Being listed accurately on the five pages assistants already quote is worth more than publishing twenty new articles nobody retrieves. Check each one for whether you appear, whether the details are correct, and whether the platform allows corrections.
Refusals matter. A report that only contains successes is either describing a suspiciously easy month or omitting the parts that did not work, and the omitted parts are usually where the useful information is.
Freshness Counts More Than You Expect Because retrieval happens at answer time, a page published or updated this week can be cited this week. This is a meaningful difference from ranking systems where authority accrues slowly.
A Claim About Causation, Stated as a Claim The most valuable paragraph in the report is the one that says what moved and why the agency believes their work caused it, phrased as a judgement rather than a fact.
Publish the Pages Assistants Reach For Certain formats get quoted far more than others because they answer a question directly and can be lifted without distortion. Comparison pages, alternatives pages, definitional explainers, specification tables and honest pricing pages all fall into this group.
The monthly report is where an engagement is either accountable or theatrical, and the difference is visible from the first page. A useful report can be argued with. A padded one cannot, because there is nothing in it specific enough to disagree about.
Set a Cadence and Stick to It Monthly is enough for most categories. Run the same prompts, the same number of times, and keep every answer. The value compounds because you can look back and see when a competitor entered the shortlist and which source appeared alongside them.
Check which agents you allow, confirm your important pages render meaningful content without scripts, and make sure nothing critical is trapped in a PDF or an image. This is the cheapest work in the whole discipline and it is routinely skipped.
So the work splits in two. Make your own pages quotable, which you control entirely, and get accurately represented on the pages that already get cited, which you control only partly. Neither half works alone.
Write between fifty and two hundred prompts covering five types: the category question, the problem question, the comparison question, the question that names a competitor, and the question that names you directly. The last one matters because it reveals what an assistant believes about you specifically, which is often more alarming than being absent.
There is a specific moment worth picturing. Somebody types a question into an assistant asking who they should use for the thing you sell. A short list comes back. If your name is not on it, you were never in the running, and unlike a search results page there is no second page for them to try.
The test that keeps this honest is simple. Show the rewritten page to somebody who buys from you and ask whether it is clearer. If the answer is no, no amount of extraction friendliness makes it a good page. llm seo
Also watch what happens to your citations over time rather than checking once. A page that earns a citation and then loses it usually has a fresher competitor rather than a technical problem, and the fix is updating your figures rather than rewriting the page. Because retrieval runs live, that maintenance is cheap and it is the difference between a page that keeps earning and one that quietly stops.
Start by Finding Out Where You Stand Before changing anything, establish what assistants currently say. Write out the questions a buyer would actually ask, in their words rather than yours. Include the category question, the problem question, the comparison question and the question that names your competitors directly.
It cuts both ways. Stale pages with outdated figures get passed over in favour of current ones, and a competitor can displace you by updating a page you have left alone for two years. Dating your content and keeping figures current is a lightweight habit with an outsized effect here.