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Issue 2 · Tuesday, November 24, 2026

What ChatGPT says when a buyer asks about you

Last week was inbox rules. This week is the other place buyers now meet you first: the answer box.

What changed

People still search, but more of them stop at the answer. SparkToro's tracking, as reported by Ahrefs, puts the share of Google searches that end without a click at 68% in 2026, up from 45% in 2016. Searches for "AI visibility" are up 258% year over year, and "generative engine optimization" is at about 12,000 searches a month, up 161%. (Ahrefs, 2026)

Freelance marketplaces see the same thing from the buying side. Fiverr said in August 2026 that demand for these services on its platform had grown more than fivefold since May 2025. (Fiverr figures, as reported by Kojilab)

For a B2B service firm, the question is narrow: when a buyer describes their problem to ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini or Google's AI answers, does your company come up, and is what it says true?

What usually goes wrong

Three patterns are common, and each one takes minutes to check:

  • You show up for your name, not for the problem. Ask "Fieldline Consulting reviews" and you are there. Ask "who can fix our RevOps reporting" and you are not.
  • The facts are old. An archived pricing page or a directory profile from three years ago becomes the answer.
  • The engines cite pages you are not on. Directory listings, roundup articles and forum threads carry a lot of weight. If you are missing from the five sources an engine trusts in your category, your own site has to work much harder.

(Fieldline is a made-up name used for this example.)

A 30-minute test you can run today

  1. Write 10 questions a buyer would type, in their words. Include price ("how much does X cost"), comparison ("alternatives to [competitor]") and problem questions, not only your name.
  2. Open a private window. Ask each question in ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google. Do not log in.
  3. For each answer, write down three things: were you named, who was named instead, and which sources were linked.
  4. Count. If competitors are named three times more often than you, look at the sources column. That is your to-do list.

Two cautions. Answers change by day, location and user, so one run is a snapshot. And skip anyone selling llms.txt as the fix: Ahrefs found 97% of llms.txt files on 137,000 sites got zero visits in May 2026. (Ahrefs llms.txt study)

If you want it done for you

AI Answer Audit, $395. We run 15 buyer questions across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Google's AI answers in clean sessions, record who gets named and which sources get cited, check your site the way a crawler sees it, and give you a ranked list of 10 fixes. Delivered in 5 business days. See a sample report.

What it is not: a promise that AI will recommend you. Nobody controls that, and anyone who says otherwise is guessing.

Yan

Plaintext was founded by Yan Moukoury. Reply with a question and we may answer it in a future issue.