Your competitors show up in ChatGPT and you don't. What to do if you sell B2B software in Singapore

Updated 27 September 2026 · Satayu Isariyaphorn

The short answer. An AI assistant can only name you if it has read a page that answers the buyer's question and mentions you. Getting there takes six steps, in this order:

1. Make sure the assistants can read your site.
2. Measure properly, with the same question asked several times.
3. Find out which pages they cite for your buyers' questions.
4. Publish a page shaped like the question, with the Singapore details a buyer would ask about.
5. Get mentioned where the assistants already look.
6. Re-measure every month without changing the wording.

Expect results in weeks for Google AI and Perplexity, and longer for ChatGPT and Claude.

Why it happens

When a buyer asks "which payroll software should a 50-person company in Singapore use?", the assistant runs one or more web searches, reads the top pages and summarises them. Whoever those pages mention gets named. So if you are absent, the cause is almost always one of three things:

• the assistant cannot find your pages;
• your pages don't answer the question the way it was asked;
• no one else's page mentions you.

Each assistant reads from a different place:

The six steps

1. Check you can be read.

• In robots.txt, allow OAI-SearchBot, ChatGPT-User, Claude-SearchBot, Claude-User, PerplexityBot, Googlebot and bingbot.
• If your site sits behind Cloudflare, check its AI-crawler blocking setting too. Cloudflare can block these crawlers even when robots.txt allows them.
• Verify the site in Google Search Console and in Bing Webmaster Tools, and submit your sitemap to both.
• In Search Console, confirm that the pages you care about show as "Indexed". Until they are, no amount of content work will count.

2. Measure properly before you change anything.

• Ask the question the way a buyer would, and include the country: "…for a company in Singapore".
• Ask in a fresh session with no history. Your past chats and saved memory can change the answer you see.
• Ask each question more than once, on different days. The same question can return a different list of companies each time. In one study of 2,961 runs across three AI tools, the chance of two answers giving the same list was less than 1 in 100.
• Write the wording down and never change it. Otherwise you cannot tell a real change from a reworded question.

3. Look at what gets cited, not only at who gets named. Each answer lists its sources, and those are the pages you need to be on or to match. When we asked our own version of this question, 89 sources were cited. Only 11 of them had anything to do with Singapore or Southeast Asia, and 10 of those 11 came from a single Claude answer. ChatGPT and Google AI cited nothing Singapore-specific. That gap is the opening.

4. Publish a page shaped like the question. The pages that get cited for "why does my competitor show up in ChatGPT and not me" are titled almost word for word like the question. Do the same for your buyers' questions, and on each page:

• Answer in the first two sentences.
• Add a table where a comparison helps.
• Show a visible date, and update it only when the content really changes.
• Include the Singapore details a buyer here actually asks about:
• pricing in SGD;
• where data is hosted;
• local customers you can name with their permission;
• the local rules your product handles, for example GST and InvoiceNow for finance software;
• whether you are a pre-approved solution under the Productivity Solutions Grant, if you are, with a link to the official listing.

5. Get mentioned where the assistants already look.

• Third-party pages carry most of the weight on "which tool should I buy" questions: comparison articles, LinkedIn posts, Reddit threads, YouTube videos and review sites.
• Find the independent articles that are already cited for your category and give their authors something worth adding, such as data, a customer story or a correction.
• Always state who you are. Don't use fake reviews, and don't run "independent" sites that you own.

6. Re-measure monthly, with the same questions.

• Count how many answers name you, out of how many were asked.
• With a few dozen answers, only large changes mean anything. Treat a 5-point move on a small sample as noise.

What not to do

• Mass-produced AI pages. Google's spam policy (last updated 28 August 2026) now covers "attempting to manipulate generative AI responses in Google Search". Bing's webmaster guidelines treat language engineered to trigger AI citations as keyword stuffing (the section "Artificially Engineered Language").
• "Best of" lists that rank yourself first.
• Hidden instructions aimed at AI crawlers.
• Changing your test questions until the number looks good.

Our own before-and-after

We sell this work, so we are doing it on ourselves first, in public.

• Baseline, 23–24 Sep 2026. We asked ChatGPT, Google AI, Claude and Perplexity five questions a buyer of our service would ask, twice each. That is 40 answers. Forty Questions was named in 0 of them, and our site was cited 0 times out of 386 sources.
• What happens next. Every step we take is logged with its date on /client-zero, along with each month's number. The number is published even if it doesn't move.

Questions

How long does it take? Google AI and Perplexity search the live web, so a new, indexed page can be cited within weeks. ChatGPT and Claude usually take longer. Nobody can promise a placement, and we don't.

Can I do this myself? Yes. Everything above is free apart from your time. Our method, including how we count, is published at /method.

Can I see where I stand first? Yes. Our free first report asks 5 of your buyers' questions to ChatGPT and Google's AI answers, 3 times each on separate days: 30 answers.

What does it cost to have it done? Our prices are on our pricing section: a one-off audit at $390, then $1,500 a month for our founding clients.