Ask an AI assistant for a WordPress agency in Singapore, an accountant in Brisbane or a clinic near you, and it names a few businesses and cites a handful of sites. Nobody scrolls to page two.
The sites we look at miss out for a few reasons. A security plugin, a firewall rule or an old line in robots.txt is blocking the crawlers AI search uses. The service pages are too vague to quote: no prices, no locations, nothing specific. And the brand doesn’t appear on the directories, reviews and articles the answers are built from.
Most owners can’t see any of this. Search Console doesn’t report ChatGPT or Perplexity. GA4 shows the visits that came from an answer, but not the answers that named a competitor.