Your CEO asks ChatGPT for a recommendation in your category. Your company shows up. Great. Your investor asks the same question an hour later. Nothing. Your competitor shows up instead.
This isn't a bug. It's how LLMs work. And understanding it is the difference between random visibility and consistent citations.
TL;DR
- •ChatGPT responses are probabilistic, not deterministic. Same question can yield different answers.
- •Six factors affect whether you appear: query phrasing, confidence level, context, temperature, personalization, and model version
- •Inconsistent visibility means you're on the edge. Strong brands appear consistently.
- •The fix: increase AI confidence through entity strength, not just content optimization
The Six Factors Behind Inconsistent Results
Try it yourself. See how small changes affect whether a company appears:
Each company appears based on their AI confidence level.
Watch how "Your Company" sometimes appears and sometimes doesn't.
Here's what's actually happening behind the scenes:
LLMs have a "temperature" setting that adds randomness. Even with identical inputs, outputs vary. Higher temperature = more variation.
"Best SIEM tools" vs "Top SIEM software" vs "SIEM recommendations" activate different neural pathways. Slight wording changes = different results.
ChatGPT only mentions brands it's confident about. If you're at 60% confidence, you appear sometimes. At 90%, you appear consistently.
Previous messages in a chat influence responses. Your CEO's earlier questions about security may prime different results than your investor's funding discussion.
ChatGPT Plus users with memory enabled get personalized responses. Someone who's discussed enterprise software gets different recommendations than a startup founder.
GPT-4, GPT-4 Turbo, GPT-4o have different training data and cutoffs. Your company might exist strongly in one version, weakly in another.
What This Actually Means
If you're seeing inconsistent results, you're on the edge of ChatGPT's confidence threshold. Good news: you're in the game. Bad news: you're not winning it.
Strong brands don't have this problem. Ask ChatGPT about CRMs and Salesforce appears every time. Ask about cloud providers and AWS shows up consistently. These companies have such strong entity recognition that temperature and phrasing barely matter.
The goal isn't to optimize for specific queries. It's to build enough entity strength that you appear regardless of how the question is asked.
Stop testing individual queries. You'll drive yourself crazy chasing inconsistent results. Instead, focus on what increases overall AI confidence in your brand:
Entity strength: Consistent information about your company across authoritative sources. Same description, same positioning, same key facts.
Authority signals: Mentions in publications, podcasts, and sources that AI models trust. This is what moves you from "maybe" to "definitely."
Structured data: Schema markup that tells AI systems exactly what your company is and does. Reduces ambiguity, increases confidence.
Frequently Asked Questions
Yuval Halevi
Helping SaaS companies and developer tools get cited in AI answers since before it was called "GEO." 10+ years in B2B SEO, 50+ cybersecurity and SaaS tools clients.