Read time: 14 minutes
› Library Navigation: Quick Navigation · Weekly Newsletter
The Executive Summary
When a prospect says ChatGPT recommended your rival, don’t buy a GEO (generative engine optimization) retainer yet. Ask ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini 20 buyer questions and count how often each names you and your rival. The sites they cite show where your rival appears and you don’t. Ravi, an SEO agency owner, fixed those sites and went from 6 mentions to 15 in 30 days.
Who this is for: agency owners at $30K-$150K a month losing deals because an AI named their rival first.
The problem: you sign a $3,000-a-month GEO retainer with no starting number. Six months and $18,000 later, nobody can tell if it worked.
The fix: 6 steps over 30 days:
Write 20 prompts in your buyers’ own words.
Run each in three AI tools, dated.
Log who gets named and what gets cited.
Sort the sources and find the gap.
Fix the gap, starting with your own profiles.
Re-run the same 20 prompts on day 30 and check the gain.
Time to first result: about 3 hours to count how many of your 60 answers name you.
Written by Nour Boustani for the agency owner who wants ChatGPT to name them, not their rival.
Try this now (under 2 minutes):
Open Perplexity and ask: “Who are the best [your service] agencies for [your niche]?”
Count the agencies it names, and note whether you’re one of them.
Screenshot it with the date showing. That’s answer 1 of your 60.
Why One Screenshot From a Prospect Proves Almost Nothing
A prospect tells you ChatGPT named your competitor first when they asked for the best agencies.
ChatGPT gives a different list nearly every time someone asks the same question, so one answer can’t rank anyone.
SparkToro, which sells audience research, ran the same questions 2,961 times. ChatGPT gave the same list twice less than 1 time in 100.
So one answer tells you nothing. You need to ask 20 questions and count how often the tools name you and your rival.
It matters because OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, reported more than 900M weekly users in February 2026. Some of them are your buyers.
Skip the Retainer Nobody Can Measure
A GEO firm will quote you within a week. Revv Growth, which sells GEO, starts basic retainers at $3,000 a month. WebFX, which sells GEO, lists agency plans up to $50,000+ a month.
If you buy first, nobody records where you started. In month three, the firm takes credit for any gain and blames the AI tools for any drop.
The AI tools also change on their own. seoClarity, which sells AI tracking, saw ChatGPT’s citation volume fall 86% to 94% from February to April 2026. ChatGPT’s citations rose again in May. Otterly, which sells AI tracking, saw ChatGPT’s Reddit citations drop at least 73% on 8 and 14 August 2026.
Counting 60 answers yourself takes about 3 hours. The count shows you which websites cite your rival and skip you. Then you decide whether to pay someone to fix that.
Run 60 Answers Before You Rewrite a Single Page
You’ll want to rewrite your website first, because you control it. Don’t, because you don’t know yet which websites the AI tools cite. Your homepage may not be one of them.
Count 60 answers first. That’s 20 prompts in three tools, in about 3 hours.
The count shows you which websites to work on over the next 30 days, and which to ignore.
Write 20 Prompts in Your Buyers’ Own Words
Don’t use “best SEO agency,” because buyers with a real problem don’t type that.
Use the words prospects used on your last ten sales calls. In SparkToro’s data, real buyers rarely phrased the same need alike. In SparkToro’s data, the average pair of prompts barely overlapped, scoring 0.081 out of 1.
Write four prompts of each of these five kinds:
Best-of: “Which SEO agencies are good for B2B SaaS companies under 50 staff?”
Compare: “Should a SaaS startup hire an SEO agency or a freelancer?”
Cost: “What does a B2B SEO agency cost per month?”
Problem: “Organic demo requests dropped by half this year. Who can fix it?”
Niche or place: “Which agency does SEO for fintech startups in Austin?”
Save the 20 in a sheet, because you’ll run these exact 20 again in 30 days.
I use 20 prompts and not 5, and here’s my thinking:
With 5 prompts I hear one kind of buyer, and one lucky answer changes my share by 7 points.
With 20 I cover five kinds of buyer and still finish in about 3 hours. No study sets 20, so it’s my rule.
How Ravi Found His Gap in 3 Hours
Ravi runs a B2B SEO agency at $35K a month with nine SaaS clients. On a Tuesday call, a prospect said ChatGPT had named Nadia’s agency, his closest rival, first. Ravi wasn’t on the list at all.
Ravi sells search visibility for a living, yet ChatGPT named him in 1 of his 20 test prompts.
A GEO firm quoted him $3,000 a month, with a six-month minimum. That’s $18,000 before he knew how often the AI tools named him, so he counted 60 answers first.
Here’s what his first 60 answers showed.
- 20 prompts x 3 tools = 60 answers
- Ravi named: 6 of 60 (10%)
- ChatGPT: 1 of 20
- Perplexity: 4 of 20
- Gemini: 1 of 20
- Nadia named: 27 of 60 (45%)
- "Best B2B SEO agency" lists cited in 3+ answers: 5
- Nadia on 4 of them
- Ravi on 1 of the 5
- Ravi's 1 is also one of Nadia's 4
- Clutch cited in 11 answers
- Nadia's Clutch reviews: 40
- Ravi's Clutch reviews: 3
- Ravi's LinkedIn: "digital marketing agency"
- Ravi's Clutch profile: "web design"
- Ravi's website: "SEO for SaaS"The 60 answers didn’t show that Nadia runs a better agency. They showed that more websites describe her agency, and they all describe it the same way.
The AI tools read your own site, but they rely more on what other websites say about you. Clutch is one: a site where clients review agencies. Ravi’s three profiles each described a different business.
Nadia was on 4 of the 5 lists the answers cited, with 40 Clutch reviews. Ravi was on 1, with 3.
