Your buyers no longer start on Google. They ask ChatGPT for a shortlist, and the shortlist is the market.
In April 2026, GetWhy showed up in 1% of AI answers about AI-driven qualitative research. Its own category. Six months later it shows up in 14%, ranks fourth of nine tracked brands, and new leads write “ChatGPT” in the “How did you hear about us?” field.
I asked Angie what the team found, what they shipped and what moved.
The challenge: the shortlist was being written without GetWhy
GetWhy sells AI-moderated consumer research to enterprise insight teams. Those teams had started asking AI assistants which platforms to look at. The marketing team had no idea what the assistants answered.
Checking by hand didn’t help. Every answer was different, and a handful of screenshots isn’t a trend you can take to a leadership meeting.
“We knew buyers were increasingly using AI search platforms like ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Copilot during their discovery and research process, to find out which vendors could help them solve their insights challenges. We just didn’t know where and when we showed up. We needed to find a way to centralise that and bring reputable data into meetings across the organisation, especially with leadership and our content team.”
Angie Lim, SVP of Marketing, GetWhy
What GetWhy found: absent from its own category
GetWhy tracked 100 questions in 3RD that a US insights buyer would ask, across 12 topics like AI user interviews, consumer insights and AI-moderated research. The first month was blunt:
- 1% visibility. GetWhy appeared in about one AI answer in a hundred.
- 8th of 9 brands. Legacy research firms and AI-native rivals were named far more often.
- 17 of 100 questions mentioned GetWhy at all. On the questions that matter most for pipeline, it was close to zero.
The citations showed why. The assistants answered from other companies’ “best platforms” lists and comparison pages. On those pages, GetWhy was missing or a footnote.
What GetWhy did: answer the questions buyers actually ask
The team treated the question list as its editorial plan. For each question GetWhy was losing, they wrote the page that should answer it:
- Buyer’s guides for the exact shortlist questions, like the best AI user interview platforms and the best AI qualitative research platforms.
- Honest comparison pages, including GetWhy against the market and against named alternatives.
- Clear facts about the company where AI looks for them, like a Wikidata entry.
- Third-party mentions on research industry sites that the assistants already trusted.
The publishing was GetWhy’s own work. 3RD showed which questions to go after, which sources the assistants used, and whether each page started getting cited.
“I am a big fan of codifying progress. The visibility score from 3RD was a powerful way to align the team around a shared goal. What we actually worked from day to day was the list of questions we were losing, and which pages the AI search platforms were quoting instead of ours. That list basically became the foundation of our content plan for the next six months.”
Angie
What moved: from 1% to 14%, and leads that name AI
- Visibility rose from 1% to 14%. The last week of October averaged 19%. On must-win questions, the ones closest to a buying decision, it went from 1% to 17%.
- From 8th to 4th of 9 brands. GetWhy now shows up more often than two of the largest legacy research firms.
- 67 of 100 questions now mention GetWhy, up from 17. Fifty-one of them went from never naming GetWhy to naming it.
- GetWhy’s own pages became a source. Its share of all citations in these answers rose from 6.6% to 9.9%. The buyer’s guides are now among the pages AI cites most.
- Inbound leads name AI. GetWhy asks every new lead “How did you hear about us?” in their own words. Since May, 19 leads have named an AI assistant. Their share of all inbound leads rose from 4% in May–August to 16% in September–October.
“Attribution is a constant battlefield within marketing and sales. A free-text field is about as low-tech as it gets. But when a lead types ‘ChatGPT’, ‘Claude’ or ‘AI search’ into it, there isn’t much left to argue about. The share of our inbound leads self-attributing to AI search went from 4% to 16% in just a few months.”
Angie
What it showed: AI reads the same pages your buyers read
- Start from the questions, not keywords. Write down what a buyer asks an assistant before they talk to sales.
- Look at what AI cites. If the answer comes from a competitor’s list, you need a better page, or a place on theirs.
- Be honest in comparisons. A balanced page gets cited. A sales page doesn’t.
- Ask leads where they came from. One free-text field shows the AI channel your analytics can’t.
“Use the data you already have from sales calls. Make sales run discovery and ask buyers to walk through their buying process. Run real user interviews and ask customers what they asked before they ever spoke to you. Then put those questions into AI search platforms like ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity or Copilot yourself. If you’re not in the answer, that’s where I’d start.”
Angie