You ask AI for answers. Your next client is doing the same.
Same questions, same trust in whatever comes back. So when someone asks who to call for what you do — will they find you? Will you be the preferred choice?
The answer names two or three firms. There is no second page, no list to scroll, and no way to appeal it.
Who should I talk to about commercial financing in Montreal?
A few firms come up consistently for commercial financing in the Montreal area:
- A competitor — mid-market lending, downtown.
- Your business — commercial and multi-unit financing, Saint-Laurent. Works in French and English.
- Another competitor — construction lending.
Three names. Whoever is not in the list was never considered, and will never know the conversation happened.
Why search advice does not cover this
An assistant is not ranking pages. It is writing a sentence.
Search gave everyone ten links and let the buyer compare. An assistant does the comparing itself and reports a conclusion, so the shortlist is drawn before anyone visits a website. A firm can hold position one on Google and still be absent from that sentence, because the assistant needs facts it can state plainly, not pages it can rank.
What decides it is whether the machine can describe you accurately and without hedging: what you do, who you serve, where you operate, and on what terms. Most business websites never say those things in one place, which is why most businesses are left out.
The work
Four steps, run again every month.
- Establish the questions that matter. Not keywords. The full sentences your buyers actually type, in both languages, for the services you want more of.
- Record what the assistants say today. Across ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Claude: whether you were named, who was named instead, and whether anything said about you was wrong. This becomes the baseline everything is measured against.
- Correct what your site gives them to work with. Structured facts, service definitions, locations, and the questions answered in the words buyers use. This is the part that moves the result.
- Re-run the same questions and report the difference. Identical prompts, identical assistants, set against last month. The number either moved or it did not, and you see which.
Reporting
One page a month, in plain language.
- The questions you were named in, and the questions you were not.
- Who was named in your place, and what they have that you do not.
- Anything an assistant stated about you that was inaccurate.
- What was changed this month, and what is queued for next.
No dashboard to log into. If a report needs a walkthrough, the report was written badly.
Fit
Firms whose clients research before they commit.
This work pays off where someone is choosing a person to trust with something consequential — financing, property, health, their company's books. That is where buyers ask for a recommendation instead of clicking the first result, and where being named is worth more than being ranked.
Current clients include mortgage brokers, a commercial financing firm, a CFO practice, and several local businesses that found themselves invisible to anything newer than Google.
Common questions
What people ask before they start.
What does it cost?
There is no rate card, because a two-page site and a fifty-page site are not the same job. The initial assessment costs nothing, and so do the first three recommendations — you are welcome to take them and implement them yourself. If you would rather we ran it, we agree a monthly figure once we both know the scope.
Is this just SEO under a new name?
They overlap, but the target is different. SEO competes for a position in a list of ten. This competes for inclusion in a single written answer that names two or three firms. The techniques diverge because assistants need quotable facts, not rankable pages.
Can you guarantee ChatGPT will recommend us?
No, and anyone who guarantees it is misleading you. The assistants change their answers and do not publish their criteria. What we can do is establish a baseline, make specific changes, and show you what moved a month later.
How long before it shows?
Typically one to three months. Assistants re-read a site on their own schedule, so nothing you change appears in an answer until they have been back.
Is French worth doing separately?
It is often the better place to start. Far fewer firms have made themselves legible in French, so there is materially less competition inside a French answer than an English one covering the same service.
Where are you based?
Saint-Laurent, Montreal. The work is remote, so location only matters if you would prefer to meet in person.
Starting
We will run the assessment before you commit to anything.
Send us your details and we put your buyers' questions to four assistants. You get back what they said verbatim — whether you appeared, who did, and what they got wrong — together with the three changes that would make the largest difference.
There is no charge for this and nothing to sign. Take the three recommendations and implement them yourself if that suits you.
Or write to daniel@bepreferred.ca. Daniel Nataf, Saint-Laurent, Montreal. English or French.