Asked ChatGPT 'best devtool for X' — competitor cited 4×, my tool 0×. Here's what fixed Q1.
Posted this because I was confused why a smaller competitor was eating my AI-citation lunch.
Query: 'best CLI tool for managing local development environments'.
ChatGPT: cited Competitor (4×), Generic-other (2×). Me: 0×.
Three things changed Q1 mention rate from 0 → 22 %:
- Added a comparison page (
/vs/competitor) with honest tradeoffs. ChatGPT cited that page within 6 weeks. - llms.txt at root with a 180-word product summary. Trakkr-style.
- Press-release schema on a blog post announcing v2.0. Apparently this gets picked up faster than I expected.
Not a silver bullet. Q2 and Q3 still trail. Still figuring out competitors page strategy.
3 replies
- Nora
How did you handle the /vs/ page for a competitor who's also much bigger than you? I'm worried mine reads as punching up and coming off as desperate, but I'm not sure if that matters to the AI engines.
- Marcus B.
The press release schema point surprised me too. What field specifically — `NewsArticle` type on the post, or actual `PressRelease` schema? And was the announcement genuinely newsworthy or just a product update framed as a release?
The /vs/competitor page tactic is real. We've been doing this for 3 months across 4 competitors and it's consistently our highest-cited content type in Perplexity. One thing that seems to matter: conceding 2-3 genuine weaknesses in your own product on that page. Pages that are pure 'we win on everything' seem to get dismissed. The ones where we honestly said 'competitor is better for X use case' got cited more.