Teardown: how five CRM brands show up in ChatGPT
We asked ChatGPT 40 buying questions across five CRM brands. Three brands took almost every mention, review sites took most of the citations, and none of the vendors published schema.
- 3 of 5
- Brands named in any answer
- 61%
- Citations pointing at review aggregators
- 0 of 5
- Vendors publishing Organization schema
The method
We wrote 40 prompts a real buyer would type — “best CRM for a 20-person sales team”, “CRM with the easiest HubSpot migration”, “compare Pipedrive and Close” — and ran each three times in ChatGPT with web browsing enabled. We logged every brand mentioned, every source cited and every claim made.
This is a snapshot, not a ranking. Models are non-deterministic. But the pattern is stable enough to be useful.
Finding one: half the category is invisible
Two of the five brands never appeared in a single answer. Both have strong classic SEO — one ranks in the top three for its primary category term. Neither has a meaningful presence on the review and comparison sites that ChatGPT retrieves for these prompts.
The models were not ignoring them. They were never retrieved in the first place.
Finding two: review sites own the citations
61% of citations pointed to review aggregators and comparison blogs. Vendor pages accounted for 14%. Reddit accounted for 11%.
This has a direct strategic implication: your own content is necessary but not sufficient. Citation earning — being present and accurately described on the sources models already trust — carries more weight than another product page.
Finding three: the facts are wrong
For three brands, at least one retrieved source described the product incorrectly: outdated pricing, a discontinued feature, or an acquisition that never happened. Because the model synthesizes rather than links, those errors were presented as consensus.
Entity hygiene is not a branding exercise. It is a retrieval correctness problem.
What we would fix first
- Reconcile the fact sheet across every major profile and directory.
- Publish a comparison page that states the trade-offs honestly — models reward balanced, specific comparisons.
- Add Organization, Product and FAQ schema, and attach real author entities to category content.
- Earn placement in the two aggregators that appear in most answers for this category.
None of this requires a new content factory. It requires being legible.