How do you check if ChatGPT mentions your brand?
Ask ChatGPT the questions your buyers ask, not your own name, in a temporary chat with memory off. Ask each one several times, then count how many answers name you and how many name you first. One chat can't tell you, because the next answer to the same question can name different brands.
Checked against the studies and help pages it cites on October 9, 2026.
Check it yourself in five steps.
You can do this in an afternoon with a spreadsheet. The steps matter more than the tool: one question asked once, in your own account, measures your account.
Ask what buyers ask
Skip your own name. Write 5 to 10 questions a buyer types before they know you, such as “best cookieless analytics for a small shop” or “Google Analytics alternatives”, and use the same words every time.
Use a temporary chat, with memory off
ChatGPT can draw on your past chats, saved memories and custom instructions. A temporary chat creates no memories, and before you start one you choose whether it uses the ones you have: turn that off. Claude's memory is on by default on its Free, Pro and Max plans; its incognito chats stay out of it.[1, 2]
Ask each question several times
Start a new chat for each try. The next answer to the same question can name other brands, in another order, from other sources.
Count three things apart
For each answer, note whether it names you, whether it names you first, and whether it cites a page on your site. These are the three rates our methodology counts, and each can move without the others.
Repeat on the other engines
Gemini, Perplexity, Claude and Google's AI Overviews draw on different sources. In one audit, ChatGPT's and Gemini's answers to the same request shared 5.4% of the sites they cited, and none at all in 76.7% of comparisons.[3]
Ask again, and the answer changes.
Two studies and our own runs measured how much the answer moves when the same question is asked again. For the causes, from OpenAI's own pages, see why ChatGPT doesn't give everyone the same answer.
chance that ChatGPT or Google's AI gives the same list of brands twice, and about 1 in 1,000 for the same order.[4]
question-and-engine pairs named the same product first in every run, when we asked the same questions again within about an hour.
of ChatGPT's answers that named City of Hope put it first, in SparkToro's hospital prompt. Named in 69 of 71 answers, it came first in about a third.[4]
of cited sites, on average, are shared by the ChatGPT and Gemini apps' answers to the same request.[3]
SparkToro and Gumshoe ran 12 prompts through ChatGPT, Claude and Google's AI with 600 volunteers, 2,961 runs in all (January 2026). The study isn't peer-reviewed, and Gumshoe sells AI tracking.[4] The audit (September 2026) compared product recommendations in the ChatGPT and Gemini apps.[3]
Our figure comes from the answers GEOFast recorded for its two demo projects (4 runs within 66 minutes for trygeo.fast, 3 within 62 for plausible.io), on 6 engines in US English, leaving out questions about the brand itself: 737 answers. A pair counts when every run answered it and one answer named a product first.
Use ChatGPT and Claude for the fixes.
ChatGPT, Claude and Claude Code can't tell you how often buyers see you. They're good at the fixes that get you seen.
robots.txt rules
Ask for rules that let AI search crawlers in, from the robots.txt guide's examples, then test the live file with the robots.txt checker.
Pages that answer the question first
Paste a page and the buyer question it should win, and ask for an opening paragraph that answers it in two sentences, with your product's name and the facts a reply would quote.
Structured data from your own page
Ask for JSON-LD built only from what the page already says: product, price, FAQ. Check that every value appears on the page.
Text that only appears with JavaScript
Claude Code or Codex can move the text that matters into the HTML your server sends. The JavaScript rendering checker shows which pages need it, and the rendering guide explains why.
How many answers make a number.
A rate from a handful of answers is a guess with a wide margin. The margin shrinks as the answers add up.
4 of 10 answers
A mention rate of 40%, but the true rate could be anywhere from 19% to 65%, at 90% confidence.
16 of 40 answers
The same 40%, now somewhere from 28% to 53%.
64 of 160 answers
From 34% to 47%: narrow enough to see a real change from one month to the next.
A free first look
GEOFast's free X-ray checks how AI crawlers read your site. It then asks ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini three of your buyer questions once each, and with a free account six once each: 18 answers, each rate with its range. That's a first look, not a measurement, and the methodology says so.
Counted for you
AI visibility tracking asks ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Google's AI your questions on a schedule, the same way each time, and shows each rate with its 90% range.
Questions about checking ChatGPT.
Does ChatGPT recommend my business?
Find out by asking what your buyers ask, several times each, in a temporary chat with memory off, and counting the answers that name you. Asking ChatGPT whether it recommends you leads the answer, and one reply tells you little, since the next can name different brands.
Why can't one chat show whether ChatGPT mentions my brand?
Because the next answer to the same question can name different brands. In SparkToro's study of 2,961 runs, the chance that ChatGPT or Google's AI gave the same list of brands twice was under 1 in 100. Why ChatGPT's answers differ
Does a temporary chat remove personalization?
Part of it. A temporary chat creates no memories, and before you start one you choose whether it uses the memories you already have, so switch that off. ChatGPT can still use the approximate location your IP address gives, which changes local results.
How many times should I ask each question?
Enough times that the range around your rate is narrow enough to act on. Named in 4 of 10 answers, your true rate could be anywhere from 19% to 65%; named in 64 of 160, from 34% to 47%.
Do I need an AI visibility tool?
Not to look once. To know whether ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude and Google's AI name you more this month than last, you need hundreds of answers asked the same way each time and read the same way. A tracker does that asking and counting for you.
Where each fact comes from.
Each numbered source is the page a fact comes from: published studies and the AI companies' own help pages, read on October 9, 2026. The answers above repeat facts marked in the guide. Help pages change, so check them before you act.
- 1OpenAI: Memory in ChatGPThelp.openai.com/en/articles/8590148-memory-in-chatgpt
- 2Anthropic: Use Claude’s chat search and memory to build on previous contextsupport.claude.com/en/articles/11817273
- 3Uberti-Bona Marin et al., arXiv: “If I Had to Buy Just ONE: Galaxy S26 Ultra”: Auditing AI-Generated Product Recommendationsarxiv.org/abs/2609.18729
- 4SparkToro: NEW Research: AIs are highly inconsistent when recommending brands or products; marketers should take care when tracking AI visibilitysparktoro.com/blog/new-research-ais-are-highly-inconsistent-when-recommending-brands-or-products-marketers-should-take-care-when-tracking-ai-visibility/
- 5OpenAI: Searching the web with ChatGPThelp.openai.com/en/articles/9237897-searching-the-web-with-chatgpt
- 6Sharma et al., Anthropic: Towards Understanding Sycophancy in Language Modelsarxiv.org/abs/2310.13548
- 7OpenAI: Expanding on what we missed with sycophancyopenai.com/index/expanding-on-sycophancy/
Keep reading
- The free AI visibility checkerCheck your AI visibility for free: what AI crawlers can read on your site, then who ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini name for three of your buyers' questions.
- AI visibility tracking across six AI enginesTrack how often ChatGPT, AI Overviews, AI Mode, Gemini, Perplexity and Claude name you, put you first and cite your site, with a 90% range on every rate.
- ChatGPT rank tracker, counted as first picksTrack your rank in ChatGPT as a first-pick rate with a 90% range, read from the ChatGPT app signed out in your country, with the searches it ran. From $29.
- AI visibility tools, comparedEvery tool we have checked, by starting price.
- What is GEOGEO, generative engine optimization, in plain words: how AI answers pick their sources, what research shows helps, and how to measure your AI visibility.
- AEO vs GEO vs SEOAEO vs GEO vs SEO: where each name came from, what Google and Microsoft say, the work all three share, and the four things that change with AI answers.
- Find the competitors ChatGPT recommendsA method for finding who ChatGPT recommends instead of you: which questions to ask, how many times, how to count the names and work out your share of voice.
- Does ChatGPT give everyone the same answer?No. ChatGPT writes each answer afresh and can use your memory, location, a web search and your plan's model. OpenAI's own pages, and our repeat-run numbers.
- AI visibility metricsMention rate, first-pick rate, citation rate, share of voice and sentiment: what each one counts, how to work it out, and why each needs a range.
- Get ChatGPT to recommend your businessWhat gets a business named in ChatGPT's answers: what you control, whether you can submit your business, how long changes take, and how to measure it honestly.
- Get cited by ChatGPTHow ChatGPT search finds and picks the pages it links, from OpenAI's docs, what makes a page usable as a source, and which kinds of pages our data shows cited.
- Why ChatGPT doesn't show your websiteSix reasons ChatGPT leaves a site out, in the order to check them: robots.txt, firewalls, noindex, JavaScript, Bing's index and who the pages it reads name.
- Does ChatGPT use Google or Bing?What OpenAI documents about where ChatGPT search gets results (Bing, its own crawler and index), what is only reported about Google, and what it means for you.
- Rank in Google's AI OverviewsWhat Google says you need to show up in AI Overviews, how query fan-out and nosnippet work, and what studies show: 38% of cited pages rank in the top 10.
- Rank in Google AI ModeWhat sets Google's AI Mode apart from AI Overviews: query fan-out, follow-ups, a custom Gemini and Search Console's counts, and how often the two cite one page.
- Perplexity SEOHow Perplexity finds, reads and cites pages: its two crawlers, what its docs say and leave out, the Cloudflare dispute, studies, and what our runs show.
- Which AI crawlers to allowWhich AI crawlers feed ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity and Google's answers, which only train models, and what the 1,529 of 1,605 cited sites we could read allow.
- robots.txt for AI crawlersCopy-ready robots.txt rules that keep AI search crawlers in and training crawlers out, how each crawler reads the file, and the mistakes that lock AI out.
- What is llms.txt?llms.txt is a Markdown file that tells AI agents what a site holds. Its format, a real example, who reads it today, and what studies show about its effect.
- Firewalls that block AI crawlersCloudflare, Vercel, AWS WAF and others can turn AI crawlers away even when robots.txt lets them in. Where each setting lives and how to let crawlers through.
- Do AI crawlers render JavaScript?Google's and Bing's crawlers render JavaScript. OpenAI, Anthropic and Perplexity don't say, and Vercel's 2024 study found theirs don't. Our data on cited pages.
Find out what AI says about your site.
Paste your URL and leave with a ranked list of what to fix, with steps and code.
- Free
- No account