Why a lesser-known competitor can outrank you in AI answers
Ask an AI assistant who can help with your problem and a smaller competitor may be named while you are not. It is rarely random. What the research says about where AI answers come from, and what to do about it.
Ask an AI assistant which companies can solve a problem you specialise in, and you may find a smaller, lesser-known competitor named while your own company is missing. It feels unfair, especially when your website is better and your results are stronger.
It is rarely random, though. When assistants answer questions about companies, they lean heavily on what other people say about those companies, not only on what the companies say about themselves.
Your website is only part of the story
One study of more than 23,000 citations, collected from 240 brand-related questions across four industries and several AI tools, looked at where the sources came from. Roughly half came from earned media: editorial coverage, forums and social platforms, review sites and directories. About a quarter came from the brand’s own content. For questions about customer reviews, the share of earned media was far higher, while for questions about what a product does, the brand’s own pages were cited most. The authors note that citation analysis is only a proxy for how the models weigh sources.
In other words, a competitor that is discussed, reviewed and listed in more places can look more credible to an AI system than a company that mainly publishes on its own site.
What correlates with AI visibility
A large Ahrefs study of 75,000 brands compared signals with how often brands appeared in ChatGPT, Google AI Mode and Google AI Overviews. The strongest correlations were with mentions of the brand on YouTube and across the web, followed by branded anchor text and branded search volume. Classic SEO metrics such as the number of backlinks showed a much weaker relationship.
The authors stress that this is correlation, not causation, and the pattern differs by platform. It still points in a consistent direction: being talked about matters.
Where those mentions come from
- Reviews. Google reviews, and the review platforms that matter in your market. Some are cited often for software, others for agencies and services. Their openness to AI crawlers also differs, so it is worth checking which platforms your category actually uses.
- Directories and partner listings. Platform partner directories and industry listings that describe what you do.
- Editorial lists. Articles such as “the best X for Y”, which AI tools often draw on when asked for recommendations.
- Communities and forums. Places where practitioners discuss tools and providers.
- Video and podcasts. Mentions in videos, interviews and podcasts, including ones you appear in.
- Your own content. Still essential, especially for explaining what you do and how.
Why it can feel random
It partly is. SparkToro tested this with 600 volunteers running 12 prompts nearly 3,000 times across ChatGPT, Claude and Google’s AI features. The lists of brands almost never repeated: the same list appeared less than once in a hundred runs, and the order was even less stable. Their conclusion is that a ranking position in an AI answer means little. What does mean something is how often you appear across many runs of the same question.
What to do about it
- Find out how you appear today. Take ten questions your buyers would ask, run each several times in different assistants and note who is named and which sources are cited.
- Collect reviews on purpose. Ask right after a project, and ask clients to describe the situation and the result, not just to leave a score.
- Be present where your category is discussed. Create and complete your profiles on the directories, partner listings and review platforms your market actually uses.
- Earn mentions. Podcasts, guest articles, original data and contributions that others reference.
- Make your own content easy to quote. Clear answers, and credible facts, statistics and sources. The original generative engine optimization research found that adding quotations, statistics and sources to content can raise its visibility, with effects that vary by domain.
- Measure the same questions over time. Look at the share of runs in which you appear, not at a single answer.
What to keep in mind
Most of this research reports correlations, the AI tools change frequently and results differ by platform. There is no trick that guarantees a mention. The reliable approach is the slow one: be genuinely useful, get talked about in the right places and keep your facts consistent everywhere.
Where to start
Run the ten-question test this week. The sources that keep showing up in the answers tell you where your category builds its reputation, and where your competitor is already present and you are not.
Sources