Your site scores 100 for SEO. Why can't ChatGPT find you?

One of our first clients, an engineering firm, scored 100 out of 100 for SEO on Google's PageSpeed Insights test. When we asked Perplexity who to call for the service that business sells in its own town, it didn't name the business at all.

That isn't a contradiction. It's two different tests measuring two different things.

What the SEO score actually measures

The SEO score in PageSpeed Insights is a checklist of basics: does the page have a title and a meta description, can links be crawled, does the page return the right status code, do images have alt text, is the page allowed to be indexed. Pass them all and you get 100.

Those checks matter. Fail one and Google may not show the page at all. But passing them only means the page is readable. It says nothing about whether a search engine or an assistant understands who you are, what you do, where you work, and whether you're a safe recommendation.

That score only checks the basics.

Where AI assistants look instead

An assistant answering "who should I call for…" doesn't read your page the way a checklist does. It pulls from a search index, then from whatever other websites say about you.

So a business that only ever worked on Google can be close to invisible in ChatGPT, simply because it was never set up properly on Bing. Most businesses only compete on one of them.

Perplexity leans even further on other people's websites.

AI search11 / 24

Did you know Perplexity mostly describes your business using other people's websites?

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Only about 13% of its citations point to a business's own site. Directories, review sites and news do most of the talking.

Source: 5W AI Citation Source Index, 2026

Claude is different again: its citations track Brave Search's rankings more closely than Google's, according to data reported by Search Engine Land in 2026. Each assistant reads different signals, which is why we test all five of the big ones separately.

What closes the gap

• Say it in machine-readable form. Structured data (JSON-LD) that states your business name, services, prices, area and contact details, so nothing has to be guessed.
• Answer the questions people actually ask. A short, direct answer under each real customer question, on the page and in FAQ markup.
• One name, one number, everywhere. Your site, Google profile, Bing Places and directories should agree to the letter.
• Be present where assistants look. Bing Webmaster Tools, Bing Places, and the directories and review sites the assistants actually cite for your type of business.

None of this shows up in a Lighthouse SEO score. All of it shows up in whether an assistant names you.