Is AI recommending your competitors instead of you?

Right now, someone in your market is asking an AI assistant which product to buy, and it's answering. With names. The only question is whose.

Most founders have never checked. They track their Google rankings weekly and have no idea what ChatGPT says when a buyer asks the exact question their business depends on. So check - it takes about fifteen minutes. We run the same exercise on Zene every week; it's half of how we decide what to build next.

The exercise

Write down the five questions that, if answered with your name, would print money. Not "what is [your brand]" - real buying questions: "best [category] for [audience]", "[big competitor] alternatives", "is [category] worth paying for?"

Ask each one in ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity. Fresh chats, signed out, no memory. For every answer, write down just two things: the brands named, in order - and whether yours is one of them.

Reading the result

A few patterns show up again and again:

• One rival keeps winning everything. Run their name through Perplexity and read the citations - their playbook is sitting there in public: citable pages and third-party coverage you haven't built yet.
• The engines disagree. You win Perplexity, vanish in ChatGPT, get garbled in Gemini. Normal - the engines build answers differently - and useful, because each gap has a different fix.

And the pattern that should actually worry you: a brand you've never heard of shows up. AI answers are where new entrants surface first, long before they touch your Google rankings - take it seriously.

If the answer is "yes, they are"

Don't panic-publish ten blog posts. Pick the single question with the most revenue behind it, study who's winning it and which sources the engines cite, and ship the one asset that beats it - usually a comparison page or a direct, quotable answer page. Then re-run the question in two weeks and see if the answer moved. Do that on repeat and you're already ahead of almost everyone in your category.