Do you care if ChatGPT recommends your competitors instead of you?
Hey IH,
Question for founders:
Do you care if someone asks ChatGPT or Perplexity for tools in your category, and it recommends your competitors instead of you?
For example:
- "best tools for AI SEO"
- "alternatives to [competitor]"
- "best chatbot for small business websites"
- "tools to improve visibility in AI answers"
I’ve started noticing that SEO tools still mostly answer:
"How do I rank on Google?"
But customers are increasingly asking AI tools directly.
So I’m wondering:
- Have you ever manually checked whether ChatGPT / Perplexity mentions your product?
- If the answer recommends competitors instead of you, would you actually care yet?
- If you tracked this, what would be most useful: knowing if your brand appears, seeing which competitors appear, or getting suggestions on how to improve?
I’m exploring this problem for small businesses and would love to hear how other founders are thinking about it.
yeah that presence vs "who replaced me" split is a good point. I've been messing around with a tool that checks the presence side, mainly bc I got tired of manually asking chatgpt the same question 5 times to see if the answer even stays consistent (it doesn't, btw)
haven't figured out the "why" part yet tbh - feels like it's a mix of positioning and just some models not citing sources at all. how are you currently telling those apart, or are you just guessing rn?
I check this manually pretty often right now deep in this exact space. On Q3, I don't think "does my brand appear" and "who replaced me and why" are separable the first without the second is close to a vanity metric.
The fix is completely different depending on the reason: sometimes it's positioning (vague messaging doesn't match the category language the model is matching against), sometimes it's a pure content gap (a competitor published an "alternatives to X" page and you didn't), and sometimes a given model just doesn't cite URLs at all and pulls from training data instead no content fix touches that one directly.
Tracking the reason, not just presence/absence, is what turns this into something you can actually act on.
One thing I’m realizing from the replies:
The question may not be just “does AI mention my product?”
It may be:
“When AI creates a shortlist for my category, am I even part of the comparison set?”
That feels more important than a one-off brand mention.
I think AI recommendations become important the moment they're influencing buying decisions, not when they're technically accurate.
If a founder's first touchpoint with potential customers shifts from Google to AI assistants, then being absent from those answers isn't just a visibility problem—it's a distribution problem.
That's right, you're absolutely right. This is a part that I've also considered. This is not a traditional SEO issue, but a new customer acquisition channel problem. So the more useful signals are: whether your brand will appear, who replaced it, why they appeared, etc.
Exactly. And once it becomes a distribution channel, founders need different questions than traditional SEO.
It's less about "How do I rank?" and more about "What evidence is the model using to recommend one company over another?" That feels like the more durable problem to solve.
So if there really are such evaluation criteria to help everyone improve their products, that would definitely be good. Thank you so much for your feedback.
Glad the discussion was useful.
Your point about tracking who replaced a brand and why is what makes this interesting. I have a couple of observations on where I think that idea could become even stronger, but they're probably better discussed privately than in the thread.
If you're open to it, what's the best email to reach you?
I am very happy to communicate with you and just saw your message. My personal email is: zhaodc1318292602@gmail.com
Thanks! I’ve just sent it over.
Looking forward to hearing your thoughts whenever you have a chance.