Your Competitors Get Cited by ChatGPT. You Don't.

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In today’s newsletter,

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Picture this. A buyer opens ChatGPT and asks for a recommendation in your category. Your competitor's name comes up. Yours doesn't. And that buyer never makes it to your website.

That's happening right now in markets everywhere. And most teams don't know it's happening because it never shows up in their analytics.

HubSpot AEO shows you exactly where your brand stands in AI search, where competitors are getting recommended instead of you, and tells you specifically what to fix. No expertise needed.

Try it free for 28 days. Just $50 a month after.

Ask ChatGPT to recommend a product in your category right now.

It names three brands. You're not one of them.

Same on Google. Someone searches the exact question your product answers, and a competitor's page sits at the top. Not yours.

You did everything right. You published the posts. You wrote the 1,200 words. Three months later the post has 14 views, 9 of them you.

Here's why. You guessed the topic.

Ranking on Google and getting cited by ChatGPT reward the same thing now: the page that answers the exact question a real person asked, in the words they used. (We covered how to be the answer in Turn your pages into AI-ready answers and How to get ChatGPT to recommend your brand. This is the step before. The question itself.)

You can't answer the question if you don't know it. And the real ones aren't in a keyword tool. They're sitting in plain language on Reddit, where your buyers ask before they buy.

So we found a free tool that does one job. You give it your product. It reads what real people are asking about it on Reddit. It hands you back the exact questions.

I typed "daily vitamins."

It returned 40, pulled from r/Fitness, r/nutrition, r/Supplements, r/wellness.

That's not keyword soup. That's the sentence forming in your buyer's head, the one Google ranks and ChatGPT quotes when you answer it cleanly.

Forty posts mapped. Zero guessing. Here's the engine that turns them into pages that rank on both:

The Question Engine: Mine → Answer → Capture.

The complete workflow is at the end of this newsletter. Upgrade to AI Launch Codes if you haven’t

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Supplement brands are having a moment in the US, and a good chunk of what's selling traces back to manufacturers in China. More demand means more shipments, and more shipments mean more chances to get flagged at the border.

A supplement shipment from China lands at a US port. Two different agencies have to sign off before it goes anywhere. They don't compare notes.

CBP (Customs and Border Protection) handles duties, paperwork, and basic admissibility. The FDA checks whether the product is safe to sell and labeled correctly. You need both agencies to clear it, and either one can hold the shipment on its own timeline, independent of the other.

Pull up the FDA's import refusal database, and the same five reasons keep showing up:

It’s paperwork that should be in place months before a shipment leaves the factory.

Basically, a public list of other people's mistakes, sorted by frequency. Read it before yours gets added.

👉 Read the full Importing Supplements from China to the USA guide 

Nick Bartlett | Co-Founder @ Wayfindr | Asia's leading 4PL for global ecom brands

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