When a buyer asks an AI engine about recruitment agencies, the answer is usually assembled before your website is consulted. Sector specialisation decides the answer and is usually buried in job listings rather than stated plainly anywhere an engine can read it. For this category the engine that matters most is ChatGPT, and the sources it leans on are job-board presence, LinkedIn, Reddit threads in the category. That ordering, surfaces first, own site second, is the part most recruitment agencies get backwards, and it is why publishing more pages often changes nothing.
Where answers about recruitment agencies come from
Sector specialisation decides the answer and is usually buried in job listings rather than stated plainly anywhere an engine can read it.
In practice the citation surfaces for this category are job-board presence, LinkedIn, Reddit threads in the category, industry directories. None of those is your website, which is the uncomfortable finding and also the useful one: the fastest improvements here are usually off-site.
This category does not carry the heightened Your Money or Your Life evidence bar, so well-made content moves answers faster here than it does in regulated categories. For recruitment agencies that speed is the advantage worth pressing: publishing a permanent page naming the sectors and seniority you place can change what ChatGPT says within weeks, where a regulated category would need corroboration on LinkedIn first.
What the answer actually looks like
Ask for a recruiter in a sector and the answer reaches for directories and job boards. Because specialisation usually lives in listings that expire, recruiters are frequently described generically while a competitor with a permanent sector page is named.
That is the shape to check against. Run the question yourself before accepting anyone's advice about it, including ours, because the answer for your city, your specialism and your size will differ from the general case in ways that change what is worth fixing.
The mistake recruitment agencies make most often
It is burying sector specialisation inside job listings that expire. That single habit accounts for more missing answers in this category than any ranking factor, because it removes the fact the engine needed before any judgement about quality is reached.
The corresponding fix is narrow and concrete: publish a permanent page naming the sectors and seniority you place. It is usually an afternoon of work, it is checkable, and it is the thing to do before commissioning any content at all.
What to fix first
Start by asking ChatGPT the question a buyer would actually type, something close to “best recruiter for <role> in <sector>”, and write down what comes back, with the date. That single answer tells you whether you are absent, mentioned, or mentioned third, and those are three different problems.
Then audit your presence on the surfaces above in the order listed, because they are ordered by how much they influence the answer in this category. Fixing your own pages before fixing job-board presence is the most common wasted quarter in recruitment agencies.
Finally, re-check on a schedule. One reading is not a measurement: engines return different answers to the same question across days, so a change only counts if it holds.
Measuring this for recruitment agencies
The check worth running is narrow: ask ChatGPT “best recruiter for <role> in <sector>”, record whether you are named, and record which competitors are named instead. Repeat it daily rather than once, because a single answer from any of these engines is a sample, not a position.
Cituna does exactly that across all six engines, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude, Grok and Google AI Overviews, on the $39 Starter, and joins it to Google Search Console so a movement in ChatGPT can be checked against real clicks rather than taken on trust. For recruitment agencies the most useful output is usually not the score but the competitor list, because it tells you which job-board presence entries are outranking yours. We do not track Microsoft Copilot.
Drafted with AI assistance from our own research and Search Console data, and reviewed by Rahul A before publishing. Rules and prices change; check the linked official source before you act.