When someone asks ChatGPT or Gemini for the best option in your category, the assistant does not consult a ranking. It reads a handful of pages, finds the names that appear across more than one of them, and repeats those. That single mechanic explains almost everything about getting recommended.
You are not optimizing for a ranking algorithm. You are trying to be the name that appears on the pages the model reads. A study published on October 10, 2026 by Kitstarter asked ChatGPT and Gemini 96 buyer questions across 12 categories, and the findings tell you exactly where to focus.
The study found that ChatGPT and Gemini agreed on only 34% of their recommendations for the same question. ChatGPT read the brands’ own websites. Gemini leaned on other companies’ blogs, Reddit, and YouTube. And for local businesses, the overlap fell to 7%. Nobody owns these answers yet, which means a clear website and complete directory profiles can get you in.
What the Assistants Actually Do
They read a small number of sources, typically three to eight pages retrieved live for the query. They favor corroboration: a business named on one page is a mention, but a business named on five independent pages is a fact, as far as the model is concerned.
They prefer pages that are easy to extract from. Clear lists, named entities, explicit comparisons, and plain sentences beat narrative prose, because the answer has to be assembled in one pass. They also cite recent pages disproportionately. A 2026 roundup outranks a better 2023 one for most commercial queries.
This is where our AEO and GEO services come in. We help businesses in Chandigarh and across India understand what these assistants say about their category and how to get into the sources they read.
Step 1: Find Out Where You Stand Today
Ask the assistants the questions your buyers ask. Best [category] for [audience], alternatives to [competitor], [category] tools for [use case]. Do it in ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and Claude, because they retrieve differently and the answers diverge more than people expect.
Write down the sources cited, not just the names recommended. Those cited URLs are your target list for everything that follows. This is the single most useful hour in the whole process.
The Kitstarter study found that ChatGPT named only 48% of the same products when asked the identical question twice. Gemini was steadier with 74% product consistency but cited mostly different pages each time, with only 19% source overlap. One screenshot of one answer tells you very little about where you stand.
Step 2: Get Onto the Pages That Are Already Being Cited
Take the URLs from step 1 and work out how to appear on each. Most are listicles maintained by someone who updates them, which means an email works. Send a note about what is out of date on their page, your entry written in their format so it can be pasted in, and a link to a page that backs up the claim. Not a request to be added because you exist.
This is the highest-leverage action available and almost nobody does it. It looks like link building, but it is really source placement. The pages that get retrieved are the pages that get cited, and being on them is what gets you recommended.
Step 3: Be Describable in One Sentence
Models repeat descriptions rather than inventing them. If the sentence describing your business differs on every page, no consistent description exists to repeat. Write the sentence once, put it in your homepage title, your meta description, your about page, your directory listings, and your social bios, and keep it identical.
Category first, differentiator second, audience third. For a Chandigarh dental clinic: family dental practice in Chandigarh, accepting new patients, book online. For an SEO agency like us: SEO, AEO, and paid ads agency in Chandigarh for local businesses across India.
Step 4: Publish Comparison Pages That Name Competitors
Queries like X versus Y and alternatives to X are among the most common commercial prompts, and the pages answering them are what gets retrieved. Be fair to the competitor. A comparison page that finds nothing good in the alternative is discounted by readers and reads as promotional to a model summarizing it.
Put pricing in a table, not in a paragraph. Put the feature list in a list. Name the integrations explicitly. Answer the obvious question in the first sentence under the heading that asks it.
Test it yourself: paste your page into an assistant and ask it to state your pricing and your three differentiators. If it gets any of it wrong, the page is not extractable and no amount of traffic fixes that. We help with this through our SEO services, building pages that both people and AI systems can read.
Step 5: Get Third-Party Validation With Structure
Review platforms, directories, and comparison sites are heavily retrieved because they are structured and current. G2, Capterra, Trustpilot, and the category-specific directories in your niche. Volume and recency both matter. Forty reviews from this year read as an active business. Four hundred from 2022 read as a business that peaked.
The Kitstarter study found that review sites like G2 and Capterra appeared in only 4% of ChatGPT answers and 9% of Gemini answers. ChatGPT preferred app store pages, while Gemini cited Reddit in 22% of answers and YouTube in 16%. Getting into comparison posts, Reddit threads, and YouTube reviews in your category is what shapes Gemini’s lists.
Step 6: Keep Your Dates Current
A page dated 2024 competing against one dated 2026 loses on most commercial queries regardless of which is better. Update the content and the date together, and never only the date. Set a review cycle for the pages that matter, quarterly for commercial pages. This is boring and it works.
What Does Not Work
- Keyword stuffing for AI. Retrieval is semantic. Repeating a phrase does not increase the chance of extraction and it makes the page worse to summarize.
- Hidden text and prompt injection. Instructions aimed at a model, embedded in a page, are a reputational risk and are increasingly filtered.
- Buying placements on link-farm listicles. Pages that exist to sell placements are not the pages being retrieved, because nobody else cites them either.
- Waiting. Six months of the pages in step 1 being maintained by other people, without your name in them, is six months of a compounding disadvantage.
Why Local Businesses Have an Opening
The Kitstarter study found that for local service queries, ChatGPT and Gemini overlapped by only 7%, and in 9 of 16 questions they named no business in common. Sixty-three different dental practices were named across 16 answers about Austin dentists, and none appeared in more than four. Most local citations were the businesses’ own websites, followed by directories like Healthgrades and Zocdoc.
For a local business that cuts both ways. Nobody owns these answers yet, so a clear website and complete directory profiles can get you in. But a single check means even less here than it does for software. You need to ask several questions, to several engines, more than once.
If you want help figuring out what AI assistants say about your business and how to get into the sources they read, get in touch or book a meeting with us. We work with businesses across Chandigarh, Mohali, Panchkula, and the rest of India.