Why ChatGPT names your competitor, not you
When a competitor is named and you are not, the cause is almost always upstream of your website. The engine assembled its answer from sources it retrieved, and you were not in them. Four causes account for most cases, and they are worth checking in order because the fixes differ enormously in cost.
The four causes, in order
Recommendation answers lean on independent comparisons. If the roundups covering your category do not list you, you were never a candidate. Fixing this is outreach, not publishing, and it is the highest-yield work for most brands.
Vendor pages get cited for factual sub-questions such as pricing and integrations, rarely for recommendations. If your only content is positioning copy, there is nothing for an engine to quote.
Publishing the dominant format is not sufficient. In one category we measured, the brand already published comparison pages, the dominant format, and still held only 6% of citations, because the winning pages were written for named audience segments and theirs addressed everybody.
Worth ruling out in a minute. If your robots file disallows GPTBot or similar, you have removed yourself from retrieval entirely. Check before assuming anything more complicated.
Should I just publish more content?
Usually not first. More pages on your own domain do not enter a competition being decided among third-party sources, which is where recommendation answers are typically drawn from.
The sequence that works is: confirm you are crawlable, find which sources are cited in answers where the competitor wins, then decide whether the fix is being included in those sources or replacing them with something better of your own.
Common questions
Capture the answers and read the citations. Any approach that reports a score without showing the cited URLs cannot tell you why, only that.
It can put you in the retrieved set, which is the mechanism. Whether it is worth the money depends on whether that source is actually cited in your category, which is measurable before you spend.
Covers the work that changes whether an engine names you.