Why ChatGPT recommends your competitor: reviews, forums and the pages you do not control
When an assistant names a company, the evidence usually came from somewhere other than that company's website. Where it comes from instead, why a Reddit thread outweighs your homepage, and what to do about it without faking anything.
Mauro Miotti4 min read
Ask an assistant which fiduciary to use in Lucerne, which heat-pump installer in the Bernese Oberland, which agency for a Shopify store, and read the sources it cites. On most such questions, the company's own website is not among them. What gets cited is a comparison article, a directory, a trade-association list, a Google reviews page, and quite often a forum thread where someone asked the same question two years ago.
The AirOps analysis of AI citations from October 2025 put a number on this: brands were 6.5 times more likely to be mentioned through third-party pages than through their own. I think the number will move around as the tools change. The direction will not, and here is why.
An assistant is looking for a disinterested witness
When the question is "which X is good", a page that says "we are a good X" is not evidence. The system has been built, deliberately, to prefer sources that are not the subject. A comparison article names six companies and ranks them. A forum thread has three people saying who they used and whether they would again. A review page has two hundred strangers. Your homepage has you.
This is the same instinct a careful human has. It is just applied at scale and without the human's willingness to be charmed by a nice website.
Where the citations come from, in practice
These are the source types that come up again and again when we read the citations behind recommendation questions for small and mid-sized companies in German-speaking markets. The order is my impression from reading them, not a measurement:
- Comparison and "best of" pages, on trade publications, regional portals and blogs. These are the single most cited source type for recommendation questions.
- Directories and association lists: the trade association's member directory, local.ch, the chamber of commerce, specialist registers (for lawyers, doctors, fiduciaries).
- Review platforms: Google reviews above all, then the industry-specific ones.
- Forums and Q&A: Reddit most visibly, because its content is well indexed and in plain speech; also specialist forums, and increasingly LinkedIn posts.
- News: regional business press, when a company has been written about.
- The company's own site: for facts (address, services, prices), rarely for the recommendation itself.
What you can do without faking anything
The temptation is obvious and I will say it plainly: do not plant reviews, do not answer your own question on Reddit from a second account, do not pay for placement in a "best of" list and let it read as editorial. The platforms detect the first two and the assistants are learning to; the third is the kind of thing that ends up in a regional newspaper for the wrong reasons.
What works is slower and entirely legitimate:
Be in the lists that already exist. Every industry has three or four directories and comparison pages that get cited again and again. Find out which ones by asking the assistants and reading the sources. Make sure you are listed, correctly, with the same name and description as your site. This is the highest-return afternoon in this whole post.
Ask customers for reviews where the assistants look. Google, for almost everyone. The industry platform, if yours has one that gets cited. A review that mentions the specific service ("handled our VAT registration") is worth more than five stars with no text, because the assistant is matching the question to the text.
Answer real questions in public, under your name. When someone on a forum or LinkedIn asks the question you get asked every week, answer it properly, as yourself, with your company in your profile and no pitch in the reply. That thread will be read by assistants for years. The pitch would get it ignored.
Give the trade press a reason. A regional business journal writes about companies that do something specific: a new product, a hire, a view on a regulation. One article is one more disinterested witness.
Make your own site the best place to verify. Once an assistant has decided from third parties that you exist and are credible, it comes to your site for the facts. That is where the first paragraph, the named people, the structured data and the Impressum earn their keep.
Then check whether it worked
Ask the same recommendation questions again in two or three months and read the sources. If the directory you joined and the review you earned are now among them, you have moved the needle the only way it moves. The free analysis on this site runs your customers' questions across four tools and lists who was cited instead of you, which is the shortest route to knowing which lists you are missing from.
