Last month, a founder I know found out her main competitor was being recommended by ChatGPT.
Not by Google. Not in a press release. By ChatGPT, when someone asked the model "who's the best in our category in our city?" The competitor came up. She didn't. Same revenue, same customer base, similar product. The model just picked one of them.
That's a different kind of marketing problem. And most brands have it.
What's changed
For about twenty years, "being found" online meant Google. You did SEO. You wrote blog posts. You optimised for keywords. You got into a featured snippet. People clicked. You got business.
That model still works, but it's eroding faster than most marketers want to admit.
What's replacing it isn't a search engine. It's an answer engine. ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity. Buyers go in with a question. The model gives them an answer. Most of the time, the answer names specific brands.
If you're not one of those names, you don't exist for that buyer. There's no scroll-to-the-second-page behaviour with AI. There's just "the answer" and silence.
Why your brand probably isn't getting cited
A few things determine whether AI platforms cite your brand. None of them are what people expect.
It's not about how much money you spend on Google Ads. AI doesn't care.
It's not about how active you are on social media. AI mostly doesn't see that either.
It's not even about how well your site ranks on Google, though there's some overlap.
What AI platforms care about is something more boring and more important. Do you have a clear, citable presence across the kinds of sources they trust?
Trust here means specific things. Wikipedia. Reddit. Quora. YouTube. Major editorial publications. Their own grounding signals (like Google's Knowledge Graph). If you appear in those places with consistent, useful information about who you are and what you do, the AI has something to draw on.
If you don't, you're a black box. The model can't find you. Or worse, it makes something up about you.
The four platforms behave differently
Worth knowing this if you're trying to be cited.
Gemini has the highest coverage. It cites the most brands per query. If you optimise for Google's grounding signals (structured data, clean Wikipedia entries, Knowledge Graph alignment), you have the broadest baseline visibility. It's the easiest one to start with.
ChatGPT concentrates citations among fewer brands per response. It draws heavily on Reddit and editorial sources. If you want ChatGPT to cite you, you need a real Reddit presence and ideally some press coverage in publications it trusts.
Claude behaves similarly to ChatGPT but cites Reddit even more. Authentic community engagement matters here. Posting once isn't enough. Showing up regularly across relevant subreddits is.
Perplexity weights editorial publishers more heavily than the others. Press coverage moves the needle here.
The trusted-20 domains across all four platforms account for about half of all citations. That's where the leverage is.
What to do about it
A few things. None of them are quick wins. All of them compound.
Make your site cite-able. That means structured data on every page. A clear "About" page that states what your business does in plain language. Service pages that name what you offer with no marketing fluff. FAQ pages that answer the questions buyers actually ask.
When AI looks at your site, it shouldn't have to guess. It should be able to extract a clean summary in two paragraphs.
Get into Wikipedia. Long game, but the highest-leverage move. Wikipedia is the single most-cited source across all four AI platforms. You don't get on Wikipedia by writing your own entry. You get on it by being notable enough that someone else writes one, which means earning press coverage and references first.
Show up on Reddit, properly. Not as a marketer. As a participant. Find the subreddits relevant to your customers. Answer questions there. Engage. Over time you become someone Reddit recognises, and AI platforms read Reddit for citation signals.
Get into trusted publications. Even one or two well-placed mentions in publishers AI platforms trust will carry more weight than a hundred LinkedIn posts.
Run a baseline. Before you do anything, measure where you currently sit. Run your brand against the queries you want to win and see what AI says about you today. Otherwise you have nothing to measure against.
What I'd do first if I were you
If I had to pick one thing to fix this week, it'd be the structured data on your site. Schema.org markup. Organisation schema, FAQ schema, Article schema where relevant. It takes a developer about a day. It's free. And it's the single biggest signal you can send to AI platforms about who you are.
Everything else is a longer game.
But if your brand is invisible right now, you have a window. The brands that figure this out in the next twelve months are going to be the named answers in their categories for the next decade. The ones who don't will spend the same period wondering why their competitors keep showing up everywhere they should be.
It's not too late. It will be eventually.