There’s a moment in Mad Men where the ad man tells a panicking client that when the conversation is going badly, you don’t argue with it. You start a different one. That was about cigarettes in 1960. It’s a pretty good job description for your website right now.

Here’s what nobody warned you about with AI search. When a buyer asks an assistant whether they should go with you or the shop across town, the assistant does not visit your homepage and admire your mission statement. It goes looking for text that already frames that exact choice. The head-to-head. The “which one is better.” The ranked list. And it finds one. It always finds one. The only real question is who wrote it.

For most companies, the answer is: a forum thread from four years ago written by somebody who had one bad week with you. A review aggregator whose business model is selling you a rebuttal. A directory that charges for placement and doesn’t mention that. Or, best case, a competitor’s marketing team who was clever enough to write the comparison first and generous enough to include you in it, in the column where you lose.

None of this advice is new in spirit. Researchers looking at how these systems pick what to cite keep landing in the same place: the machine surfaces what’s clear, current, specific, and easy to lift out of the page in one piece. Marketers have been saying a version of this since the first assistant started eating clicks. What is new is that a real chunk of your buyers now never land on your site at all, so your copy has to survive being read by software, compressed into three sentences, and repeated to someone who will never check.

So write the comparison yourself. Ten ways to do it.

1. One page per rival. Not one page listing eight of them. A page that lists eight competitors is a page about nothing, and a retrieval system treats it that way. Give each real competitor its own URL, its own headline with both names in it, and 600 to 900 words of actual comparison. Six of these beat one big roundup every time, because each one matches a question somebody is actually typing.

2. Lead with the question. Your headline should be the sentence a buyer would say out loud, not a clever phrase your agency likes. If people ask which is cheaper for a small team, that’s your H2, word for word. Then answer it in the first two sentences underneath, before any setup. Front-load the conclusion. Machines pull the paragraph directly under the heading, and so do skimming humans.

3. Concede something real. Say plainly where the other guy is better. Not a fake weakness, a real one. This does two things: it makes the rest of the page believable to a human, and it gives the model a balanced passage it’s far more willing to quote than a page that reads like a press release. Pages that only flatter themselves get treated as marketing and skipped. I’ve watched a client double their comparison traffic by adding one honest paragraph.

4. Best for whom. End every comparison with two short verdicts instead of one. Choose us if you’re this kind of buyer. Choose them if you’re that kind. Be specific enough that it stings a little: team size, budget, timeline, technical skill. Assistants love this structure because the question they’re usually answering isn’t “who is best” but “who is best for me,” and you’ve just handed them the answer key.

5. One yardstick, both ways. Pick five or six criteria that buyers actually raise and run both companies through all of them, in the same order, in prose. Not a chart. Charts get stripped out when a page is parsed, and half the meaning goes with them. Write it as short subheads with a paragraph under each. If you cover response time for yourself, cover it for them too. Uneven coverage reads as dodging, to people and to software.

6. Put a number on price. Everyone wants to write “contact us for pricing” and everyone gets punished for it. You don’t have to publish a rate card. Publish a range, a typical project, a starting point, what drives it up. A page with a real number in it becomes the source; a page without one becomes the thing a Reddit guess gets cited over. If your pricing is genuinely complicated, say what makes it complicated. That’s an answer too.

7. An alternatives page. Separate from the head-to-heads, build one page titled around the phrase people search when they’re leaving somebody else in your category. List the real options, describe each fairly in a short paragraph, include yourself, don’t rank yourself first. It feels insane the first time. It works because it’s the exact shape of the question, and because a page that treats the reader like an adult gets cited more than one that treats them like a lead.

8. Make switching concrete. Nobody stays with a vendor they like. They stay because leaving looks like a nightmare. So describe the leaving: what gets moved, who does it, how long it takes, what breaks, what it costs. A page that walks through a switch step by step answers a question no competitor is answering, which means it has almost no competition in the index.

9. Date everything. Put a visible “last reviewed” line at the top, and actually review it on that cadence. Stale comparisons are worse than no comparisons, because now you’re the one publishing wrong information about somebody else. Retrieval systems weigh freshness heavily on anything that looks like a product claim. A quarterly calendar reminder is the whole implementation.

10. Mine your sales calls. Stop guessing what the comparison should cover. Go pull the last thirty deals you lost and the objections you heard, and write the pages in the buyer’s vocabulary instead of your category’s vocabulary. They don’t say “end-to-end solution.” They say “I don’t want to babysit it.” Use their words. That phrasing match is most of why one page gets surfaced and a better-written one doesn’t.

Two things about posting it. Give each page a clean, boring URL with both names in it, keep the whole comparison on one page rather than behind tabs or accordions that hide the text, and add basic FAQ markup so the questions and answers are machine-readable. And don’t let these pages sit in a dusty resources folder. Link them from your pricing page and your navigation, mention them in sales emails, and say the same things in the places where your buyers actually argue, so the claim shows up in more than one house.

One caution, since somebody always takes this too far. Comparative copy is legally fine when it’s accurate and it’s opinion where it’s opinion. It stops being fine the second you invent a fact about somebody else’s product. Write it the way you’d want a competitor to write about you: firm, specific, a little generous, and true.

The alternative is leaving the sentence about you to a stranger, a scraper, and a directory getting paid by the person who wants your customers. That conversation is already happening. Go change it.