Why AI recommends your competitor, and not you

How an engine picks three names

When someone asks ChatGPT, Perplexity or Google's AI Overviews for a supplier, the engine usually doesn't answer from memory alone. It turns the question into a few searches, reads a handful of pages and writes a short answer with the names it found most often and most clearly.

That last part matters. The engine isn't judging who does the best work. It picks businesses that are described in words that match the question: the service, the place, sometimes a price. And it prefers names that several sources agree on.

"For freelancers in Utrecht, Van Dijk Advies and Bureau Noord are often recommended. Both list fixed monthly fees and specialise in self-employed clients."

A typical ChatGPT answer (example)

Notice what the answer is built from: a specialty, a place and a price. If your site says "We offer a wide range of financial services", none of those three words are there to match.

Where the names come from

The sources behind an answer fall into four groups. The mix differs per question and per engine, but the groups are always the same.

Your own website is the one source you fully control. The others you can influence: ask happy customers for reviews, make sure you're on the two or three lists that matter in your trade, and keep your details the same everywhere.

Why your competitor gets picked

When we look at why one business is named and another isn't, it's rarely mysterious. The named business usually does one or more of these things:

• It says what it does in plain words. "Bookkeeping for freelancers in Utrecht" on the page, not "financial solutions".
• It shows a price or a range. Engines love to answer "what does it cost", and they quote whoever gives a number.
• It appears on the lists the engine reads. A mention on a well-known comparison site counts as a second opinion.
• Its information is easy to lift. Short answers under clear headings, sometimes with FAQ markup, are easy to quote word for word.

What to fix first

1. 1Write one page per main service, with the town or region in the heading and the first paragraph.
2. 2Put a "from" price or a range on that page, in a sentence. Explain what changes the price.
3. 3Add three to five short answers to the questions customers ask before they call you.
4. 4Check your name, address and specialty on the listing sites in your trade, and make them match your site.

None of this is new or tricky. It's the work that usually doesn't get done, because nobody can see that it's missing.

Measure, don't guess

Asking ChatGPT once tells you very little. Answers change from day to day and from person to person. What you want to know is how often you're named across the same questions, on every engine, over weeks.

That's what Mentiofy does: we ask your prompts on ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity every day, show you who gets named instead of you, how AI talks about you, and which sources your competitors are cited on.

Questions we get

Written by

Danny van der Ham

Co-founder of Mentiofy. Runs several small businesses himself and built Mentiofy because he wanted to know what AI says about them.