I Tested 50 AI Queries. My Competitor Appeared 47 Times. I Appeared Zero.

I asked ChatGPT for the best CRM for small agencies. Your competitor was first on the list. Your product wasn’t mentioned at all.

This isn’t random. Your competitor didn’t pay for placement. They’ve built something you probably haven’t even thought about: the underlying presence that feeds AI recommendations.

Understanding why they appear and you don’t is the first step to fixing it. If you haven’t already, start by understanding how LLMs decide what to recommend – the mechanism explains most of the gap.

Running the Comparison

Before assuming you have an AI visibility problem, let’s verify it and measure the gap.

The Six Factors Behind the Gap

When competitors consistently outrank you in AI recommendations, it’s almost always one of these factors:

1. Reddit Presence Volume

Search Reddit for your competitor and for yourself. Count mentions. Count upvotes on those mentions. Count unique threads.

Competitors with strong AI visibility typically have years of authentic Reddit participation and thousands of mentions across hundreds of threads. If this is your weakest area, our Reddit marketing playbook for B2B SaaS covers how to build that presence from scratch.

2. Review Site Depth

G2, Capterra, and TrustRadius feed LLM training. Check: - Number of reviews (competitors often have 5-10x more) - Recency of reviews (active review flow signals relevance) - Average rating (quality matters, not just volume) - Depth of reviews (detailed reviews provide more training signal)

3. Clarity of Positioning

Open your competitor’s website and your own. Which one more clearly answers: “What exactly do you do?” and “Who exactly is this for?”

LLMs match products to queries. Clear positioning enables confident matching. Vague positioning leads to no mention.

4. Documentation Quality

Technical products with comprehensive documentation get cited in technical queries. If someone asks “how to set up [category] for [use case],” products with detailed docs that address this get mentioned.

Compare your documentation depth and specificity to competitors.

5. Content Quotability

LLMs cite sources they can quote confidently. Content with clear statements, statistics, and definitions gets cited more than meandering prose.

Look at competitor blog posts and guides. Are they more quotable than yours? If the answer is yes, our guide on creating AI-friendly content shows how to write content that LLMs can extract and cite.

6. Mention Recency

If your competitor had a major launch, funding announcement, or product update recently, they have fresh mentions that boost their signals. Old mentions from years ago carry less weight.

Closing the Gap

Once you’ve identified which factors create the gap, here’s how to address each:

For Reddit Gap

This is usually the biggest factor and the hardest to fix quickly.

Short-term: Can’t be rushed. Start building now, expect 6-12 months before meaningful impact.

Medium-term: Consider agencies with established Reddit accounts who can accelerate authentic participation.

Long-term: Embed Reddit presence into your company culture. Team members who naturally use Reddit should be encouraged to participate professionally.

For Review Gap

Short-term: Ask current customers to leave reviews. Make it frictionless. Time requests after positive interactions.

Medium-term: Build review requests into your customer success workflows. Every happy customer is a potential review.

Long-term: Create programs that recognize and reward customers who review (within platform terms of service).

For Positioning Gap

Immediate: Rewrite your homepage and key landing pages with specific, quotable positioning statements. Who exactly you’re for. What exactly you do. How you’re different. Our guide on optimizing landing pages for LLM recommendations has the exact framework for this.

Short-term: Update all profiles (LinkedIn, Crunchbase, directories) with consistent positioning. LLMs aggregate across sources.

For Documentation Gap

Short-term: Prioritize documentation for common use cases and queries. What questions do customers ask? Document answers clearly.

Medium-term: Build comprehensive guides that answer implementation questions in detail.

For Quotability Gap

Immediate: Add clear, quotable statements to existing content. Statistics. Definitions. Specific claims.

Short-term: Create new content specifically designed to be cited. Comparison guides. Feature explanations. Use case breakdowns.

For Recency Gap

Short-term: Create newsworthy moments. Launches. Announcements. Partnerships. Funding. These generate fresh mentions.

Ongoing: Maintain consistent activity through regular updates, blog posts, and community engagement.

The Uncomfortable Truth

The gap between you and competitors in AI recommendations likely took years to build. Your competitors weren’t optimizing for LLMs. They were building authentic presence across channels that happened to become training data.

Closing this gap isn’t a quarter-long project. It’s a multi-year commitment to presence building that eventually pays compounding returns.

The good news: your competitors probably aren’t consciously working on this either. Starting now gives you an advantage over the companies that won’t notice this shift for another year or two. For a structured approach to the broader strategy, read the complete guide to Generative Engine Optimization.