Why does my competitor show up in AI search and I don't?

Almost always for one of five reasons, and you can find out which in about thirty minutes with free tools. Either their page is in the index the assistant actually searches and yours isn't; or the cited page answers the exact question in its first lines and yours doesn't; or other websites name them and nobody names you; or your site is blocking the crawler; or the "competitor" is a directory, not an agency. Each leaves evidence. Here is where to look, fastest first.

One rule first: you are reverse-engineering a page, not a company. The assistant didn't cite "Smith Insurance." It cited one URL, and everything below is about that URL and your closest equivalent.

Step 0: make sure it's a pattern, not a coin flip

AI answers vary from run to run, so one result proves nothing. Ask the question the way a prospect in your county would, three or four times, on ChatGPT with search on, Perplexity, and Google AI Mode, and write down the exact URL cited each time. ChatGPT shows inline citations and a Sources list under a searched answer; Perplexity lists sources above the answer; AI Mode shows supporting links beside it. If the same competitor page keeps coming back, study that page; if the list changes every run, nobody has won that question yet. The prompt set is in the ten-minute test.

Step 1: read the page it cited, not the homepage

Open the cited URL and ask one thing: could I answer the prospect's question by quoting this page? Then check the same on your closest page.

• Does the first paragraph answer the question outright? Not "serving families since 2004." The options in that county, the deadline, what the person does next.
• Are the headings phrased as the questions people ask? H2s that read like search queries hand the model ready-made answer pairs. "Our Services" hands it nothing.
• Is a licensed human named, with a date? Google's guidance for its AI features warns against content that "could easily be produced by a generative AI model." A named agent with a license and a visible updated date is the plainest way to be something else.
• Are there local specifics with a source? County names, enrollment or population figures, a link to where they came from. Most agent sites skip this, and it's often the whole difference.
• Is there a visible FAQ in the searcher's wording?

Step 2: check you're in the index the assistant actually searches

Many audits end here, because the losing site was never eligible. Each assistant documents what it needs.

Google AI Overviews and AI Mode. Google says a page "must be indexed and eligible to be shown in Google Search with a snippet" to be linked as a source, with "no additional technical requirements" beyond that. A noindex, a nosnippet, or a page Google never found is out before content matters. Source: AI features and your website.

ChatGPT search. OpenAI documents OAI-SearchBot, which "is used to surface websites in search results in ChatGPT's search features," and says sites that opt out "will not be shown in ChatGPT search answers." It is separate from GPTBot, the training crawler. Source: Overview of OpenAI crawlers. Bing's webmaster blog also says Bing "powers a wide range of AI and search experiences," naming ChatGPT, in a June 2025 post.

Perplexity. Its docs say PerplexityBot "is designed to surface and link websites in search results on Perplexity" and that robots.txt changes take about 24 hours. Source: Perplexity crawlers.

So the checks are mechanical:

1. Search site:yourdomain.com on Bing, then Google. Do the pages you'd want cited appear? Do the competitor's?
2. Open yourdomain.com/robots.txt and the competitor's. Look for OAI-SearchBot, PerplexityBot, and any blanket Disallow: /. A designer who "blocked the AI bots" in 2024 may have done this to you.
3. Open a free Bing Webmaster Tools account. Its URL inspection tool reports indexing status and blocked resources, and IndexNow lets you submit new pages instead of waiting.

Step 3: compare the markup with Google's own tools

Paste the cited URL into Google's Rich Results Test, then yours. It lists the structured data on any public page; the Schema Markup Validator shows every schema.org type declared.

Be honest about what this shows. Google states that "there's no special schema.org structured data that you need to add" for AI Overviews or AI Mode, and its generative AI optimization guide says the same about new files like llms.txt. The competitor didn't win because of a schema type. What the comparison shows is how legibly their page describes itself: an agency entity with an area served, an author, a date, FAQ pairs matching the visible questions. If theirs declares all of that and yours nothing, that's a symptom of the shape gap, not the cause. Here's the sheet we use; fill in both columns and the gap usually explains itself.

Step 4: find where else they're named

Assistants don't only read the competitor's own site. If the answer drew on a chamber page, a news story or a carrier's agent locator that mentioned them, they got named without their own page doing the work. Read the full Sources list in the AI answer, and search their name minus their own site: "Smith Insurance Group" -site:smithinsurance.com. Every result is a place they're named that you may not be.

Resist the shortcut. Google's guide says "seeking inauthentic 'mentions' across the web isn't as helpful as it might seem." What works: a complete Google Business Profile (Google says Business Profiles "can help your products and services be visible in both AI responses and other Google Search results"), the associations you actually belong to, and reviews on platforms you don't control.

Step 5: check what Google says it's already showing you

Since August 31, 2026, Search Console's generative AI performance report is available to every site. It shows impressions your pages received in generative AI features on Google Search. Impressions only, no queries dimension, so it can't say which question you appeared for. But it splits the problem in two. Zero impressions everywhere points to Step 2, eligibility. Impressions on some pages but none on the one that should answer the question your competitor wins points to Step 1, and you now know which page.

What to do with what you found

1. Step 2 failed? Fix robots.txt, remove stray noindex tags, submit to Bing Webmaster Tools, re-check in a week. Nothing else matters until this passes.
2. Step 1 showed a shape gap? Build the page they have and you don't: one question, one county, answer first, question-shaped headings, a named licensed author with a date, sourced local figures, a visible FAQ. The recipe is in our pillar guide to AEO for insurance agents.
3. Step 3 showed empty markup? Add the agency entity, a Person for the author, and FAQPage mirroring the visible questions. Validate it. It won't do the work alone.
4. Step 4 showed you're named nowhere? Complete the Business Profile, claim the listings you already qualify for, and ask clients for reviews where they already are.
5. The "competitor" is a quote site? Better news: those county pages are usually thin templates, and a genuinely local page from a licensed agent is the one thing they can't copy.
6. Re-run Step 0 in 30 days. Assistants re-fetch and re-decide constantly. Nobody can promise you the citation, but the page that answers the question best and is readable everywhere it's looked for is the one with a reason to be picked.

One compliance note for Medicare county pages: keep the "we do not offer every plan available in your area" language and the non-affiliation disclaimer where your carriers and FMO require them, never call a $0-premium plan "free," and skip the superlatives. Confirm specifics with your FMO; this isn't legal advice.

Frequently asked questions

We run this audit for a living

Every site we build ships with what this audit checks for: answer-first county pages with a named licensed author, matching structured data, an llms.txt, a robots.txt that allows the search crawlers, and Bing and Google submission on launch day. On the Growth plan we re-run the audit every quarter. Details are on what you get, and you can inspect the homework on our demo sites before you pay for anything.