The Assistant Recommended My Competitor

It has happened to me more than once now, and it stings every time. You type a question you know your client should be the answer to, the kind you have ranked for and worked on for years, and the assistant confidently names someone else. Not a bad company. Just not yours. For a second the ground moves, and then the useful part of your brain switches on and asks the only question that matters: why them and not us?

That question has a forensic answer, most of the time. Here is the path I walk.

Step one: reproduce it properly

First I stop reacting and start logging. Same question, phrased three or four ways, across more than one assistant, in more than one session. Anecdotes lie; patterns do not. Often the “it recommended the competitor” turns out to be one phrasing, on one tool, on one day, which is a very different problem from a consistent miss.

Step two: find what it is actually reading

An assistant does not invent a recommendation. It repeats something. So I go looking for the source: the pages, the roundups, the directories, the threads it is likely leaning on. Usually the competitor is not winning because their product is better. They are winning because they are described more clearly, in more of the places the model trusts, in the exact words people ask the question in.

Step three: compare the two of us honestly

Then I put us side by side and ask, without flattering my own client: who states the answer more plainly? Who has the clearer named author, the more recent date, the more specific claim? Who is mentioned by third parties the model would treat as neutral? Nine times out of ten the competitor is simply the more obvious thing to quote, and that is fixable.

Step four: close the gap, then wait

Fixing it is slow and unglamorous. Say the thing clearly on our own pages. Earn a few honest third-party mentions in the right places. Make the claim specific and verifiable. Then wait, because these systems update on their own clock, not mine. I have learned not to promise a date.

The part I have made peace with

You cannot command an assistant to recommend you. You can only become the answer a reasonable reader, human or machine, would land on. The competitor did not beat me with a trick. They were just easier to repeat. So I go and make my client the easier thing to repeat, and I check again next month. It is patient work, and it is the actual job now.