Articles
Articles
How ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini choose a product, a service, or a place to recommend, and why that answer can be wrong or incomplete. If you have a website, how to check whether those tools can open your pages and whether you can be recommended. Read the first six groups in order, or start a lane from the top — product data for shops, shopping inside chat, then places and travel — only when that topic is new. Or open any article on its own. Terms we use →
01 How shortlists work
Why these answers matter, whether you can trust them, and how AI chooses what to recommend.
02 Whether that list is for you
These articles are for the person asking. A vague question often gets famous defaults; the details you give change the options; two tools can disagree; and a reply can say a booking finished when it did not.
03 Can AI read your site
These articles are for people who run a site. Your name and price can be right on the page and still never reach the answer, if the assistant never opened that page. Fetch check is a free look at whether bots are blocked and whether the page they receive is empty.
04 A citation is not a recommendation
Your URL can show up as a source while the thing you sell is never named. GEO papers and mention trackers mostly measure that smaller win.
05 Planted sources
Some of the trust those lists rely on was put there on purpose. Start with a fake brand ChatGPT named, then the Reddit posts companies seed and the paper that measured that pattern.
06 Why you were skipped
"We're not on the list" can mean the bot never opened you, opened you and named someone else, or named you with the wrong facts. Work that out before you rewrite a page.
07 Product data for shops
Wrong price and the wrong shop are the symptom. The rest cover identity, then the webpage, structured data, and feed, which have to agree before checkout or mention scores matter much.
08 Shopping inside chat
Live stock lookup and checkout in chat help after someone already picked you. They do not replace retrieval, fit, and trust on the public shortlist. The tool-calling article is the page to hand a developer. Product facts are in the previous group.
09 Places and travel
Travel answers concentrate on famous places. Place recommendations come from different directories, and a listing can still say open after the restaurant has closed.