The Truth About Your Website

Why does ChatGPT keep recommending the weaker competitor?

Most B2B founders we talk to have a version of that complaint. Your product says 2026. The team just closed its best year. Then a buyer types "who should I call for revenue cycle management" into ChatGPT, and the answer names a firm you beat every time you're in the same room.

Here's the diagnosis, and it's plain. The weaker competitor gave ChatGPT something it can explain. Your homepage stopped talking a few years ago, so the engines are describing the old version of you... or somebody else entirely.

We wanted to know how common that is, so we read the one line on 32,574 homepages that almost nobody looks at: the copyright year in the footer.

We ran it in September 2026 because the ground under this question moved in about eighteen months. Buyers who used to open a search box now open a chat window, and the answer comes back assembled from what the engines have already read and stored. That picture updates slowly, and it compounds. A site the engines can quote gets quoted again. A site with nothing new gets described from whatever they last found, for as long as that's all there is.

We scanned 32,574 US B2B homepages this month. Of the ones that show a year in the footer, one in four still says 2025 or earlier.

Here's the arithmetic, so you can check it.

• 32,574 domains scanned.
• 30,484 answered with a real homepage. The other 2,090 didn't load or served no HTML.
• 20,496 of those show a copyright year. The remaining 9,988 show none, and we left them out of the rate rather than calling them fresh.
• 5,022 of the 20,496 say 2025 or earlier. That's 24.5%.
• The other 15,474 say 2026. Three in four of the homepages that show a year are current, and this report is about the quarter that aren't.

Against everything we touched, the stale share is 15.4%. We lead with 24.5% because a footer with no year tells you nothing either way.

2,097 sites say 2025, so they missed one January. 993 say 2024. 513 still say 2023. 892 say 2020 or earlier.

Among the founder-owned B2B services companies in the scan, 28.0% of dated homepages are stale (2,961 of 10,558). B2B software companies of the same size come in at 21.8% (1,913 of 8,761). The funded companies on our Healthtech Index came in at 16.7% (33 of 198), for a reason we'll get to in the method notes.

Size matters too. Companies with 11 to 50 employees are stale at 27.5% (3,020 of 10,975). At 51 to 200 employees the rate drops to 22.2% (1,854 of 8,344). Smaller firm, older footer.

The verticals tell the sharper story, named the way we searched for them.

Read the top row twice. In revenue cycle management, 44.7% of the firms with a dated footer are telling the engines a year that's gone. When a hospital CFO asks ChatGPT for a shortlist of RCM firms, close to half the category has handed it a date that's gone. The firm with a current story in RCM is competing against silence.

At the bottom, AI companies (13.8%) and B2B SaaS (16.3%) keep their footers current. Some of that is care, and a lot of it is a footer that updates itself.

We also checked each homepage for a blog or insights link. Among the stale sites, 49.4% have none. The fresh sites come in at 30.8%. Half the frozen sites have nothing for the engines to quote.

Look at it from the engine's side. A buyer asks who to call. The engine looks for companies it can describe in words it can repeat. A homepage with one 2023 headline and no writing behind it hands the engine one sentence. One good sentence is a thin case for a company this far along.

Now look at the other side of the line. 10,708 homepages in this scan say 2026 and point at something worth quoting, which is 52.2% of every dated site we read. Those companies aren't lucky, and most of them aren't bigger than you. They gave the engines a current story and they kept adding to it, so a buyer asking who to call gets something recent to repeat. The distance between those two groups is a story and a habit, not a budget.

The engines noticed before you did.

The tempting fix is to log into WordPress and change the year. Don't.

Fixing the date treats the symptom and leaves the disease.

The engines get exactly as much to say about you as they had yesterday. Two things are wrong with a frozen site, and the footer is a symptom of both.

The way out is a shift in how the site gets made, and it has four moves.

That's what PitchKitchen's 90-day Sprint locks in: the truth, the twin, the first pages of the new site grown around the old one, and the speed lane with its rules.

The rebuild comes included in the work, because once the story is nailed, the site is a byproduct of the message.

On September 29 we run the first page of that shift on a real homepage, live, in sixty minutes. Bring your URL. One company in the room gets rewritten on air from a twenty-minute conversation, everyone runs the checker on their own site, and you leave with the four moves written down. The room is capped at 100 so it stays a room.