Ask the API behind ChatGPT for the best tech recruiting agencies in Austin, and most of the answer comes from one article. We sent that question on September 26, 2026, with web search on. The answer carried 11 citations. Eight pointed to a single Built In Austin roundup of 23 local recruiting firms, and the other three went to ClearlyRated's page for Austin IT staffing. No agency's own website got a citation.
Hiring managers and candidates now put questions like that to ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Google's AI Mode. This playbook covers the pages those answers get built from, and how a recruiting agency gets its own pages among them.
Who's asking AI for a recruiter
Candidates got there first. In a June 2025 iHire survey of 1,645 US workers, about four in ten said they'd used tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity or Gemini in their job search. One r/linkedin post from this September went further. After a bad run with LinkedIn's new AI job search, the poster moved their whole search to ChatGPT, which they said "searches the whole internet to a tee."
I've abandoned LinkedIn Job Search and using ChatGPt
After terrible experiences using the new AI job search, I now use ChatGPT for job searches and it searches the whole internet to a tee. As long as you give it clear instructions on what you are looking for it does a great job! It is also sa...
The client side is harder to measure. We couldn't find a single survey of hiring managers using AI to pick a staffing firm. The nearest proxy is software buying, where G2's survey of more than 1,000 B2B decision-makers found AI chat had become the top source for building a shortlist, ahead of review sites. A hiring manager who builds a software shortlist in ChatGPT will probably build an agency shortlist the same way.
We also read through r/RecruitmentAgencies, where owners swap notes on winning clients. In a thread from August and three others like it, the advice ran to cold calls, referrals and LinkedIn. AI search never came up. Most agencies haven't started on this yet.
What the answers cited when we asked
We ran six questions a hiring manager or candidate might ask through the APIs behind ChatGPT and Perplexity, with web search on. The consumer apps can answer differently, since they add memory and personalization, so read this as a snapshot from one day.
| Question | ChatGPT's API | Perplexity's API |
|---|---|---|
| Best tech recruiting agencies in Austin | 11 citations: 8 to one Built In roundup, 3 to ClearlyRated | 20 sources, including three different KORE1 pages |
| Staffing agency for travel nurses in Texas | 9 sources: agency sites and Texas pages, plus the Texas Board of Nursing | 20 sources, mostly agencies' Texas pages and a nurse job marketplace |
| Executive search firm for a Series B SaaS CFO | 7 firm sites | 20 sources, mostly CFO and SaaS search pages |
| How do I find a good recruiter for software engineers | No search, no citations | 20 sources, about a dozen of them "best recruiters" roundups |
| Best recruiting firms for accounting and finance roles in Chicago | 11 firm pages, 7 of them practice-area or city pages | 19 sources: city pages, roundups, Clutch |
| Recruiting agency or in-house for engineers | No search, no citations | 20 sources, mostly comparison posts by recruiting firms |
The two advice questions split the engines. ChatGPT's API answered both from what the model already knew, named no firms and cited nothing, while Perplexity searched on all six.
When a question named a city or a role, narrow pages won. For Chicago accounting recruiters, only four of the 11 firm pages ChatGPT's API cited were homepages. And one firm can hold several seats in the same answer. KORE1 filled three of Perplexity's 20 Austin sources with three different pages: an Austin IT staffing page, an Austin staffing agency page, and its own roundup of Austin tech staffing agencies.
Your competitors are building backlinks while you read this.
Organic outreach, social mentions, and citations from Editorial Circle member sites, with managed backlinks available as an add-on. Grow your domain authority without running the campaign yourself.
Build a desk page for every specialty and city
Recruiters already split their work by desk: one team on accounting in Chicago, another on travel nurses in Texas. Your website should split the same way. Call it a desk page. It's one URL per specialty and market, and it says who you place, where, how fast and what it costs.
KORE1's pages drew six of Perplexity's citations across our questions, second only to FrontLine Source Group. Look at what its software engineer recruiters page puts in plain text. Engineers placed in an average of 17 days, with 92% one-year retention. A first shortlist in three to five business days. And an FAQ that answers the fee question outright: most contingency engineering searches run 18% to 25% of first-year base.
Your homepage can't carry that much detail for every desk you run. Build desk pages first for the specialties and cities where you want clients, then link them from the homepage and from each other. Contractors face the same split between one general site and many local services, which we covered in our contractor playbook.
Put your numbers where a crawler can read them
Numbers get quoted. Numbers that only exist after JavaScript runs may never be seen. When we fetched LaSalle Network's Chicago page, which Perplexity cited, its track-record block read "0 Candidates Placed" in the raw HTML. The real figure, 257,892, sits in a data attribute and only shows up when a script animates the counter in a browser. A crawler that reads the HTML without running scripts gets the zero.
Check your own stat blocks the same way. Open the page source, which is different from the page you see, and search for the number. If it isn't there, write it into a sentence too.
The same goes for salary guides. Robert Half's site was cited five times in our test, and every one of those links went to a practice-area or location page, never to its salary guide. Pull the headline numbers from your guide into the desk pages where hiring managers land.
Get onto the roundups, and write your own
Roundups carried a lot of weight. ChatGPT's Austin answer leaned on Built In's list of 23 firms. Perplexity pulled from Clutch's recruiting directories, Instawork's city pages and ClearlyRated, whose Best of Staffing awards come from client and candidate satisfaction surveys.
The other roundups came from somewhere less obvious. For "how do I find a good recruiter for software engineers," about a dozen of Perplexity's 20 sources were "best recruiting firms" lists, and most were written by recruiting firms about their own market. Christian & Timbers had two in that one answer.
So work the lists from both sides. Get listed and reviewed on the directories that cover your city and specialty. Then publish your own fair roundup of firms in your market, with your firm in it and the others described accurately. We covered why that format earns citations in our guide to best-of lists.
You're getting AI traffic. But do you know where it comes from?
RankControl credits every visit to the assistant that sent it: ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini, Copilot, or Grok. Full source attribution, next to your Google traffic.
Answer the questions that come before a firm name
Plenty of searches start before anyone asks for a name. "Should I use a recruiting agency or hire in-house for engineers?" got 20 sources from Perplexity, and most were comparison posts written by recruiting firms. KORE1 and FrontLine Source Group both showed up, each with a page on cost and speed.
ChatGPT's API answered that question without searching, so for now these pages pay off mostly on Perplexity and on Google's AI answers, which Google says are built on its regular ranking systems.
Start with the questions your recruiters hear on every intake call: fees, guarantees, contract-to-hire, how long a search takes. Each one makes a short post that links into the desk page it leads to. Our guide to finding the exact prompts buyers ask shows how to build that list.
Let the crawlers in and tag the visits
None of this works if AI crawlers can't reach the pages. Check that your robots.txt and firewall rules allow OAI-SearchBot and PerplexityBot, and use our AI crawler list for the rest.
Then set up your analytics to catch the visits. Several links ChatGPT's API returned for the travel-nurse question ended in ?utm_source=openai, and clicks from ChatGPT itself usually arrive tagged utm_source=chatgpt.com. Filter for both, plus referrals from perplexity.ai, and you'll see which desk pages bring people in.
Check your desks once a month
Pick five questions per desk, phrased the way a client or candidate would say them, with the city in. Once a month, ask each one in ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Google's AI Mode. Note who got named, which page got cited, and whether the facts about you are right. Across five desks that's 100 checks a month, or two to three hours by hand.
You can run the whole thing yourself: write the desk pages, fix the counters, get onto the directories and check the answers every month. Or RankControl can take the checking and most of the writing.
AI visibility tracking runs up to 50 questions every week on seven engines: ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini, Grok, Google AI Mode and Google AI Overviews. It shows which firms got named instead of you. The content engine plans and writes up to 100 pages a month, desk pages and comparison posts included, and publishes them as native posts on your site. Auto-publish stays off until you turn it on.
Want a quick read first? Run a free check of your firm in AI answers.
We'll show you exactly where your brand stands in AI search.
No commitment. $0 due today, cancel anytime. See how ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini, Grok, Google AI Mode, and Google AI Overviews talk about your brand today.
