Why ChatGPT names the shop down the street

A person looking for a plumber does not search your brand. They type “best plumber in Boise” into ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Gemini and take the first names that come back. If those names are not yours, the ad you bought this month is doing the work those answers used to leave on Google.

The answer is a citation, not a slogan

When web search is turned on, the assistant is summarizing pages it can point at. A homepage that says “trusted local experts” gives it nothing to quote. A page titled with the trade and the city, a Google Business Profile with recent reviews that mention both, and one listing a chamber or a neighborhood site actually wrote are the pieces that survive into the answer.

• The competitor’s name, address, and phone match on the site and on the big directories.
• A third party, not the business, has published the name next to the city.
• The service page answers the question in the first paragraph, in sentences a model can lift.

What Does AI Pick Me? checks

Does AI Pick Me? asks those buyer questions for you and records whether your business was absent, mentioned, or recommended. The free scan covers three prompts. The full report widens the set and lists the sources the answers leaned on, plus a short list of fixes: schema, reviews, directories, a real service page, and an llms.txt file that points at those pages.

None of that forces an assistant to change its mind. It shows you the gap between what a buyer asks and what the public web currently says about you.