ChatGPT SEO for Professional Services Firms

A product can be compared on features and price that sit on a page. A services firm sells people, process and track record, and much of that is hard to show convincingly on the firm's own site. When a buyer asks ChatGPT for "a reliable software outsourcing partner" or "an accounting firm for US startups", the engine needs outside evidence to put a firm on a shortlist: directory profiles, reviews, lists by third parties, and pages that state concrete facts.

This page uses our own data from two services firms of Netbase JSC, the company behind Leadee: NetbaseJSC (netbasejsc.com, custom software development, Netbase-owned) and OutsourcingVN (outsourcingvn.com, software outsourcing). Both are IT services firms. We have not measured law, accounting, consulting or marketing firms, so where this page generalises to them, it says so. The general ChatGPT picture is on the ChatGPT SEO overview.

In the 2026-10-25 round, each firm had 8 US buyer questions plus 4 for a second market (the UK for NetbaseJSC, Singapore for OutsourcingVN; both firms are Netbase-owned), asked through official APIs. Across every question without the firm's name in it, neither firm was named once: NetbaseJSC 0 of 67 runs, OutsourcingVN 0 of 59. ChatGPT itself answered only 4 of those questions (8 runs, because the OpenAI account ran out of credit) and named neither firm.

Questions that contained the name went the other way. "Is Netbase JSC a good software outsourcing company" and "NetbaseJSC vs Rikkeisoft" produced a mention of NetbaseJSC (Netbase-owned) in 11 of 12 runs. OutsourcingVN did worse even by name: 4 of 12, and "OVN vs Designveloper" produced 0 of 6, because "OVN" is an abbreviation an engine does not tie to the firm.

Who was recommended instead: for NetbaseJSC's questions, FPT Software (19 US mentions), Rikkeisoft (16) and Saigon Technology (14); for OutsourcingVN's, Rikkeisoft (14), Designveloper (12) and Savvycom (9). These market players were named where the two Netbase-owned firms were not; we did not compare company size or review counts. The full analyses are in the Netbase JSC case study and the OutsourcingVN case study.

Mostly on directories and on other firms' own sites. For NetbaseJSC's US questions the most-cited domain was clutch.co (59 citations), ahead of netbasejsc.com (49, Netbase-owned), saigontechnology.com (28) and rikkeisoft.com (21); trustpilot.com, linkedin.com and themanifest.com also made the top ten. In the UK the list was clutch.co (13), sortlist.co.uk (8) and saigontechnology.com (8), and netbasejsc.com was cited 0 times. For OutsourcingVN, after its own domain (42 citations), came designveloper.com (34), clutch.co (26), themona.global (19) and designrush.com (14).

The pattern matches how a buyer researches: a directory list first, then the firms on it. A firm that is not on the lists the engine reads has little chance on an unbranded question, however good its own site is. We could not read clutch.co's robots.txt (it answered 403 to our request), so we cannot say how OpenAI's crawler is treated there. How to get cited when ChatGPT prefers other websites explains how to work out which of these pages matter for your questions.

Citation counts here pool three engines; our analyses do not split cited domains by engine, so this is not a ChatGPT-only list.

On 2026-11-10 we scored 8 pages of the two firms: both homepages, NetbaseJSC's four comparison and list pages published on 2026-10-26 after the tracker round, and two OutsourcingVN (Netbase-owned) service pages. Averages ran from 0.207 to 0.325 on a 0 to 1 scale. The best page was NetbaseJSC's list of Vietnam software development companies (0.325, a number in 15 of its 80 passages). The lowest was OutsourcingVN's outsourcing-cost page (0.207, a number in 2 of 58).

That cost page is an honest case, not a mistake. It states that it "carries no rate, no range and no currency figure", because the firm holds no reviewed source for one and sets prices per project. The trade-off is real: a buyer who asks ChatGPT "how much does software outsourcing in Vietnam cost" gets an answer built from pages that do print figures. A services firm can keep its prices private and still publish verifiable numbers: team size, years in a field, the scope of a named project, delivery time of a typical engagement.

A higher score means a passage carries the signals the GEO research associates with being quoted. It is not proof that ChatGPT quoted it. The four new NetbaseJSC (Netbase-owned) pages have not been re-measured in the tracker yet. How to write pages ChatGPT can quote shows the rewrite pattern.

The questions we track for these firms show the typical shapes: a "best ... for ..." list ("best Vietnam software development companies for US startups and mid-size businesses"), alternatives to a known name ("FPT Software alternatives for mid-size custom development projects"), a head-to-head ("Rikkeisoft vs Saigon Technology vs FPT Software") and a trust check ("is Netbase JSC a good software outsourcing company"). The trust check comes late, once the buyer already has the name, and it is the only shape where our firms were named.

So the work is about the early shapes. How AI chooses suppliers explains the retrieval step behind them, and how to find the prompts your customers ask ChatGPT helps you build your own list. For an industry view of B2B services, see AI search visibility for B2B service companies.

We do not know yet, and we will not guess. NetbaseJSC's new pages went live on 2026-10-26 and the next measurement with the same questions has not run, partly because the OpenAI credit ran out. What we can say is how to tell: measure the same unbranded questions on the same engines with at least 3 runs each, before and after, and compare the intervals, not single answers. Manual checks vs automated tracking shows how often one run misleads, and ChatGPT vs Gemini vs Perplexity why engines should be compared only on the same questions. (Netbase-owned: part of Netbase JSC.)