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italki is the brand. ChatGPT doesn't always say so.
On the AI people actually use, italki shows up barely half the time.
Across 88 answers, Preply is cited more often than italki.
Every time a learner asks an AI engine how to find a tutor, these are the brands it names. The incumbent is being out-cited by its closest rival.
Head-to-head vs Preply
When both could appear, who the engine put first.
Why it matters
AI answers rarely list ten options. They name two or three. Being the brand the engine skips on a buyer-intent question is a booking handed to Preply, invisibly, before the learner ever reaches a comparison page.
The Spanish market is the softest spot, not the strongest.
The Valencia role was hiring for exactly this market. It is also where italki leaks the most citations to Preply, GoStudent and Busuu. A native Spanish operator closes this gap fastest.
Real, unedited answers where italki is missing and rivals are named.
No paraphrasing. These are excerpts from the actual engine responses in this audit.
italki already did the table-stakes. The gap is authority, not crawlability.
italki allows the answer-engine crawlers and even ships an llms.txt. But it blocks the training crawlers, so its ChatGPT presence depends entirely on live retrieval, and live retrieval is pulling from sources that name Preply and Verbling instead.
Where the engines actually pulled their answers
preply.com is cited as a source more than twice as often as italki.com, which sits behind Reddit, YouTube and Verbling. That is the retrieval-authority gap in one chart.
Five named KPIs. Baseline today, target in 90 days.
A pitch is a claim. A scorecard is an accountable engagement. These are measurable on re-run with this exact query set.