u/Conscious-Market8982

Sharing this because I have now watched three companies make the same mistake and it costs them a quarter every time.

A client came to me in the spring because ChatGPT was quoting pricing for them that was two years out of date. Not slightly off. It was describing a package they killed in 2024, at a price they had not charged since. Their sales team kept getting on calls with people who had already anchored to a number that did not exist.

What they had done about it before calling me was publish. Four new pages about pricing on their own blog, a pricing FAQ, a comparison page. Three months of work. Nothing moved. Not one assistant changed its answer.

The reason is boring but it matters. When you ask an assistant about a brand, most of what it tells you did not come from that brand's own site. It comes from what third parties have written about them, plus whatever is sitting in the model's weights from training. Their blog was not in the retrieval set for that question, so publishing on it was shouting into a room the model was not standing in.

The thing that finally told us what was going on took ten minutes. Ask the same question twice, once with web search on and once with it off. If the wrong answer only appears with search off, it is baked into the model and there is no quick fix. You are waiting on the next training run, and the only useful work is getting the correct version onto enough third party surfaces that the next one learns something better. If the wrong answer appears in both, then whatever it is pulling live is wrong, and that you can go and fix now.

Theirs was the second kind. It was reading two comparison articles on sites they had never heard of, both from 2024, both with the dead pricing. We got one corrected by emailing the author, who was perfectly reasonable about it, and got a newer piece published on a site the same models were already citing for that question. Answers started changing about five weeks later.

What I would take from it: before you write anything to fix an AI visibility problem, go find out what it is actually reading. It is almost never you.

Happy to go into how we worked out which sources it was pulling if that is useful to anyone.

I have answered a version of this three or four times in comments here over the last couple of weeks, so I am putting it in one place.

Everyone wants to know whether they show up in AI answers. There are tools for this now and some of them are fine, but you do not need one to start, and doing the first pass by hand tells you something a tool will not.

Start with questions, not keywords. Write down the fifteen or so things a buyer in your category actually types before they decide. Full sentences. Is X worth it for a small business. Best supplier for Y in whatever city. How do I fix Z. Not "supplier Y" as a keyword. The assistants answer questions, so your list has to be made of questions.

Ask each one in ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini, and write down every domain that gets cited. Perplexity gives you sources without being asked. In ChatGPT you have to prompt for them, and it is worth explicitly telling it to search rather than answer from memory, because those produce different results and you want to know which one you are looking at.

Then the part almost everyone skips. Do it again. The cited sources move between runs, so a domain appearing once tells you nothing. Ask the same question a few times over a couple of weeks and only keep what keeps coming back. That is the step that turns a messy list into something you can actually act on.

What you end up with is shorter than expected. A handful of domains that keep reappearing for your category, and it is usually not the list you would have guessed. A decent chunk of them tend to be forum threads and small comparison pages rather than the big publications everyone assumes are driving the answer.

Two honest caveats.

It is slow and boring and there is no way around that. Budget an afternoon for the first pass and about an hour a month after.

And it only tells you where you are absent. It does not tell you how to fix it, which is a separate and harder problem. For the forum threads in particular there is nothing to buy. You either take part properly or you wait for the question to get asked again and be early that time.

Disclosure, I run an SEO agency and this is the work we do, so weigh that. None of the above needs us or a tool, which is why it seemed worth writing down.