Ask Gemini for the best option in your category and it names you. Ask ChatGPT the same question and you’re nowhere. This happens to most businesses, and it isn’t random. The AI tools read the web in different ways, and the difference usually points to a specific cause.
1. One tool can’t read your site
Each company uses its own crawlers, and robots.txt treats them separately. A site that blocks OAI-SearchBot but allows Googlebot will look fine to Gemini and Google’s AI and be invisible to ChatGPT search. Firewalls can do the same: some let Googlebot through and challenge everything else.
How to tell: check your robots.txt for each AI crawler, and test how your server answers each one. The AI crawler checker does both.
2. One tool searched, the other answered from memory
Perplexity searches the web for every answer. ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini often answer from what they learned in training instead. A newer or smaller business can be easy to find with a search and still unknown to a model’s memory, so the searching tool names you and the others don’t.
How to tell: if the tool that recommends you also cites your site as a source, search found you. The fix is time and mentions: the more other sites write about you, the sooner models learn you.
3. They trust different sources
When the tools do search, they use different indexes and weigh sources differently. One may lean on review sites, another on directories or forums. If you’re well covered in one place and absent from another, the answers split along the same line.
How to tell: look at which sites each tool cites when it answers. Those are the places to be mentioned.
4. A competitor is described more clearly
Sometimes nothing is wrong with your site. A competitor simply states what they do, where and for whom more plainly, and one tool picks up on it. When the tool that leaves you out names the same competitor every time, compare your homepage with theirs.
Find the cause for your site
A free account asks ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity and Google’s AI the questions your customers ask, then shows every question where they disagree, with the likeliest cause for each tool, checked against your site. When nothing on your site explains it, you can ask that tool why, and we check its reasons too.