Why does ChatGPT not mention us?
Usually because the sources the engine reads in your category name someone else. The engine is not weighing your product against theirs. It is assembling an answer out of pages it can reach and treats as reliable, and if those pages name three vendors and you are not one of them, you are not in the answer. The same holds for Claude, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews and Google AI Mode, which most buyers call Gemini.
Four causes account for almost every case we measure. They are not mutually exclusive, and the fix for one does nothing for the others.
1. The sources the engines read in your category do not name you
When an engine answers a buyer question, it leans on a small and surprisingly stable set of pages: comparison articles, category roundups, review sites, a handful of publications. Those pages are where the vendor names come from. If the three or four sources an engine reads for your category list your competitors and not you, the engine has nothing to name you with.
What changes it: being named on those specific sources. Not on every surface a company could be mentioned, but on the ones the engines are actually reading in your category, which is a measurement question before it is a placement question.
2. Your entity facts are thin or inconsistent across the web
An engine has to be confident it knows who you are before it will put you in front of a buyer. When your own site, your directory listings and your social profiles disagree about what you do, who you serve or even what you are called, that confidence is low, and a low-confidence vendor is left out of a short answer.
What changes it: one consistent account of the company across everything you own, with ordinary structured data of the kind the engines already read. Nothing AI-specific is required for this.
3. The engines cannot reach your site at all
Hosting rules, security settings and bot filters block AI crawlers silently. The site is up, visitors can read it, analytics look healthy, and most visibility tools will report nothing wrong, because they are not the crawler being blocked. This is the cheapest cause to rule out and the one most often missed.
What changes it: a pass or fail check of crawler access, then a change to the hosting or security rule that is refusing the request.
4. You are present on how-to questions and absent on shortlist questions
Not every question is the same question. A buyer asking how to solve a problem gets a different answer from a buyer asking who to buy from. Being cited on the first kind and absent from the second is the most common shape we find, and it is why a company can watch its mentions rise and see nothing change in its pipeline.
What changes it: knowing which questions you lose, by type, rather than a single visibility number that averages the two together.
How to find out which one applies to you
The four causes look identical from the outside. The only way to tell them apart is to put the same buyer questions to every engine, more than once, and record what comes back: who is named instead of you, how often, and which pages the engines read to name them. That is what the $490 Category Audit does, on one category and ten buyer questions across five engines with three measured runs each, and it checks crawler access first.
What nobody can promise you
No one can guarantee that an engine will name you, or place you first, or send you a given number of leads. Any supplier who offers that is selling something they cannot deliver. What can be done is honest and narrow: measure where you stand on a fixed question set, name the specific sources and pages responsible, change them, and measure the same set again.
A measured next step
AI answers vary. Repeated observations show who is named instead, the observed sources and the changes to test.
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