This issue walks through a seven-day experiment to find those gaps, prioritise the most important ones and measure whether the fixes improve your visibility.
The tactic: Run an entity gap sprint
Your website might describe your company as a specialist in one category, while an industry directory puts you in another. Your LinkedIn page might use a vague description. A partner page might list your old services or link to an outdated URL.
Individually, these look like minor branding problems. Together, they can make it harder for search systems to establish exactly what your company does and when it is relevant to a question.
The opportunity is to identify those inconsistencies and fix them systematically.
The hypothesis: If you make your brand's identity and expertise clearer across relevant, independently maintained sources, you may increase the likelihood that AI answer engines recognise and cite your company for relevant queries.
This is a testable hypothesis, not a guarantee. AI citations depend on many factors, including query intent, source quality, content relevance and changes to the models themselves.
Here is how to run the experiment.
Day 1: Find the queries where competitors get cited
Start with 10 questions your potential customers might ask an AI assistant before choosing a provider.
Avoid branded queries. You want to discover who gets recommended when the user has not already decided which company to investigate.
For example, a B2B cybersecurity company might test:
- Which companies help small businesses prepare for a security audit?
- What are the best managed security providers for healthcare organisations?
- Which cybersecurity firms specialise in compliance for financial services?
- How do I choose a provider for continuous security monitoring?
- What should I look for in a penetration testing company?
Build your list around three types of queries:
- Category: Who provides this service?
- Use case: Who solves this particular problem?
- Industry: Who specialises in this sector?
Run all 10 queries in ChatGPT, Gemini and Google AI Overviews where available. Record the date, exact prompt, brands mentioned, cited URLs and the sources linked in each answer.
Do not paraphrase the prompts between platforms. Consistency matters more than clever wording.
Day 2: Build your entity gap sheet
You now have a list of answers, competitors and cited sources. The next step is to find out what those sources say about the brands that appear.
Create a spreadsheet with these columns:
Next, inspect the sources that repeatedly appear in your results.
Look for four specific gaps:
1. Category gap
A directory lists your competitor as a specialist in a specific service, while your own listing uses a generic category such as "technology company."
2. Expertise gap
