In what context is my company searched for in AIs, and where should I appear?
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Your company is not searched for in the same way depending on the question asked, and each context requires a different presence. When a user names your brand, for troubleshooting or a price, the AI will look at your site: on software troubleshooting, the documentation of the requested brand represents 58% of ChatGPT's citations. When they ask a market question without naming you, the AI chooses its own sources, and the website of a company it does not know is rarely among them. Before trying to appear in AIs, you must therefore know in which contexts you are being searched for, and in which ones you want to be found.
For what type of question? This page compares contexts with each other: a question that names your brand, a market question, a request for a specific platform, local search.
When the question names your brand
This is the context where your own site matters most. On professional software troubleshooting questions that named a brand, ChatGPT wrote the brand name or targeted its site in 76% of its searches. The documentation or support of the requested brand then represents 58% of its citations, 30% for Claude and 36% for Gemini, and almost never a competitor's site.
The effect varies greatly from one brand to another. On ChatGPT, HubSpot's support pages accounted for all citations on the question naming it, while Zoho's accounted for none. Clear, well-structured documentation that is accessible to AI bots makes the difference. BuzzStream, on responses from Gemini, Google's AIs, and GPT-5.4-mini published in July 2026, measures for its part that mentioning a brand is accompanied by a citation in 39% of cases when the question is about that brand, and 35.8% for a comparison between two brands.
When the question does not name anyone
On a market question, such as choosing software or a service provider, it is the model that decides where to look. On our troubleshooting questions without a brand, the administration represented 45% of ChatGPT's citations. On our other corpora, ChatGPT writes the name of a specific publisher in 78 to 91% of its searches: a company whose name it does not have in mind is neither named, nor searched for, nor found.
External studies confirm that this context favors third-party sources. Researchers from the University of Toronto measured in September 2025 a systematic bias of AI engines in favor of independent media, to the detriment of brand sites and social networks, which is much more pronounced than on Google. BuzzStream measures that, on a 'best X' type of question, a brand mention is accompanied by a citation in only 7.2% of cases. It is in this context that the site alone is not enough.
When the question designates a platform
An AI will look for the source that the question designates for it. If a user asks what is being said about a product on Reddit, it will go to Reddit; if they ask for Wikipedia's opinion, it will read Wikipedia. We saw this on a question about Wikipedia: ChatGPT cited the encyclopedia in 17% of its sources, whereas in our usual corpora, the Wikipedia pages it brings back are cited in less than 1.5% of cases.
Being present on a platform therefore serves the users who designate it. On questions that do not designate it, this presence guarantees nothing: on ChatGPT, the Reddit, YouTube, and Wikipedia pages brought back are cited at least seven times less often than the others.
When the search is local
We have not measured local searches. The 2026 SOCi report, published on January 28, 2026, on nearly 350,000 multi-location brand establishments in the United States, shows the gap between AIs: ChatGPT recommended 1.2% of the establishments, Perplexity 7.4%, Gemini 11%, compared to 35.9% present in Google's local pack. Company information was 100% accurate in Gemini, which relies on Google Maps, and about 68% in ChatGPT and Perplexity.
The local context therefore also depends on the AI: the Google listing serves Gemini and Google, without anything showing that it serves ChatGPT. None of these studies focus on France.
How to know where you should appear
The process begins with your customers, not with AIs. List the questions they actually ask, then classify them by context: those that name your brand, those that relate to your market without naming you, those that refer to a platform, and those that are local. Each context calls for a different presence: clear documentation and pages on your site for brand questions, pages that answer and earned mentions on independent sources for market questions, and the platform itself when your customers refer to it.
It then remains to check, question by question, what each AI looks for and cites, because ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini do not behave in the same way. This is the only way to know where you are absent, and in which context this absence is costing you customers. One clarification is necessary: Google warns, in its guide on generative AI updated on July 10, 2026, that searching for non-authentic mentions on the web is not as useful as it seems, and that its systems block spam. A useful mention is an earned mention.
What we do not know
Our measurements by context focus on troubleshooting questions for professional software and on market questions, in French and in English, via the models' API. We did not measure local searches, comparisons, or explicit requests for a platform as such.
Sources
- BuzzStream, Vince Nero — brand mentions and citations in AIs, .
- Chen, Wang, Chen, Koudas (University of Toronto) — "Generative Engine Optimization: How to Dominate AI Search", .
- Search Engine Land, Danny Goodwin — SOCi report on local visibility in AIs, .
- Google Search Central — "Optimizing your website for generative AI features on Google Search", .
- FaireDuBruit measurements, from September 4 to 16, 2026 — see "How we measured".