We run a niche B2B platform and our company is only mentioned in ChatGPT/Claude when users ask very specific queries about our exact use case—but we're completely absent from broader category-level answers (e.g., 'what is [our category]?'). Our competitors with lower organic traffic get cited in those broader answers. We suspect it's a training data recency issue, but we can't tell if we should be investing in more top-of-funnel content, building citations on higher-authority domains, or if this is just a model cutoff problem we can't solve. How do we diagnose which lever to pull?

Start by checking your company's Wikipedia presence and industry database listings (Crunchbase, PitchBook)—LLM training data heavily weights these authority sources. If you're missing there, that's your first fix, not content creation. Then audit which competitor domains appear in those answers and reverse-engineer their backlink/citation profiles. If you're present in those systems but still absent from LLM answers, it's likely a training cutoff (models trained before your rise to prominence), not a visibility problem—wait for model updates or experiment with paid answer engine sponsorships if available.