To rank in ChatGPT, your company needs to appear on the pages it reads when buyers ask their questions, and most of those pages are company websites. We analysed over 1.3 million citations in AI answers about B2B technology. The pages cited most often gave a direct answer near the top and kept their content visibly up to date. Your own site can do part of this work, while the rest comes from comparison pages and trade press coverage on other people's sites.
People often ask us how to get into ChatGPT's answers as if it were a new search engine with an algorithm waiting to be cracked. We wanted to see what the assistants actually read before recommending anyone, so we measured it systematically. Agentcy, our AI visibility platform, recorded every source cited when ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and other assistants answered the questions B2B buyers ask about 116 technology brands. That produced almost 190,000 answers over 11 months. The full findings are in our free report, What AI reads before it recommends, and this post sets out what they mean for a company that wants to be recommended.
When ChatGPT searches the web for an answer, it builds its reply from a handful of pages that it considers relevant. Nobody outside OpenAI can see how it ranks those pages, but across tens of thousands of questions we can see which pages it picks again and again.
Most of the pages it picks are company websites. About two-thirds of all citations went to other companies writing about the category, many of them competitors, and about a sixth went to the brand being asked about. Every other kind of source, including review sites and the press, accounted for about 17% between them.
Blog posts and articles were the most-cited type of page, with 22% of citations. ChatGPT leans harder on documentation and product pages than the other assistants do, and those two page types together took about 30% of its citations.
The most likely reason is that the questions shaping your buyers' shortlists don't mention you. When a buyer asks about your company by name, the assistants cite your own site for about 29% of their sources, whereas the share falls to about 6% when the buyer asks which platform suits a particular need.
Those category questions are where shortlists form, and the pages the assistants read to answer them usually belong to someone else. Comparison pages and best-of lists earned about one citation in ten across all the company websites we saw, against about one in thirty on brands' own sites. Of the comparison and best-of pages cited for unbranded questions, only about 2.5% sat on the brand's own site. When ChatGPT weighs you against your competitors, then, it is usually reading a page that one of them wrote, or a list you've never seen.
The pages that assistants return to repeatedly share some recognisable habits. We audited about 190,000 cited pages to see what separated those cited repeatedly from those cited once, and a few features stood out.
Article markup on its own made no difference, and a named author made only a small one. We read these findings as the habits of well-kept pages, because sites that bother with FAQs and dates also tend to have strong content and plenty of links. These are associations, so they don't prove cause on their own.
Citations also cluster around a small number of pages. The top 1% of cited pages take 30% of all citations, which suggests that one comprehensive reference page on a subject will usually achieve more than several thin ones.
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On the whole, fresher pages are cited more often. For pages with a detectable publish date, the typical page was about five months old when an assistant cited it.
How long a page stays useful depends on what kind of page it is. Tech news tends to be cited within a few weeks of publication before it fades, whereas trade features and company pages often remain in use for many months. For most companies the useful habit is a quarterly review of the most important pages, with the date of each update shown on the page.
Much of the groundwork is shared, since well-structured pages that search engines can crawl easily help with both disciplines. The biggest difference lies in where the answer comes from.
An AI answer reads a few pages and makes the choice on the buyer's behalf, often from sources you don't control. The assistants turn to review sites and the press for a view from outside the vendor, so a good share of the work happens off your own site. Our report on earned media in the age of AI answers covers the media side. It found that trade and specialist titles supplied most of the media citations on buying questions.
The assistants also disagree with each other about what to read. Best-of lists and comparison pages make up under 2% of ChatGPT's citations but about 14% of Perplexity's. Gemini also cites YouTube and Reddit far more often than ChatGPT does. Buyers who use more than one assistant will therefore see different sources, which is a good reason to build a presence on several kinds of page.
We work through the following list with clients, and none of it requires additional headcount or a specialist team.
Once the assistants do mention you, it is also worth checking what they say. When we checked almost 50,000 answers against verified facts, two in three got something wrong about the company. Our report on what AI gets wrong about B2B tech brands explains where those mistakes come from.
You can't pay to be one of the sources ChatGPT cites. It chooses those from what it finds on the web, so the realistic route is to publish pages worth citing and to earn coverage on the publications it trusts.
No official list exists, but in our data the most-cited pages answered questions directly and showed when they were last updated. Pages with FAQ markup averaged about 36% more citations than pages without it.
The timing varies considerably, because an assistant that searches the web can find a new or improved page as soon as it has been indexed. What the model learned in training changes more slowly, so a consistent description of your company across the web over several months also helps.
Review sites, trade media and forums are cited as sources in their own right, alongside company websites. They are often where the assistants look for an independent view of you, so a presence on them adds to what your own site can do.
Ask it the questions your buyers ask, including the ones that don't mention you by name, and then look through the sources it lists. A fuller picture across several assistants needs a monitoring tool that works at scale, and we'll happily run a free AI visibility snapshot for your company.
Pick a few questions a buyer would ask before they had ever heard of you, and note which pages come back when you put them to ChatGPT and Perplexity. If none of the pages are yours, you have identified the first page to write. For the detail behind every figure in this post, download the free report, or ask us for a free snapshot of what AI reads about your category.
Source: Resonance analysis of Agentcy AI visibility data, covering over 1.3 million citations in almost 190,000 AI answers about 116 B2B technology brands, October 2025 to September 2026, with figures rounded.