How do I know if ChatGPT mentions my brand?

What exactly are you measuring?

Your Mention Rate: the share of your buyers' real questions where an assistant names your company. It counts mentions, not traffic, and it is the one number a analytics report cannot give you.

Define it before you measure it, or you will compare two different things next month. A Mention Rate needs three fixed parts: the question list, the assistants asked, and the number of runs per question. Change any of them and the series breaks.

Why does one assistant not tell you enough?

Because they do not agree. We asked four assistants the same unbranded buying questions about the S&P 100. Of the companies any of them named, only 67% were named by all four.

Seven of the largest public companies in the United States were visible in exactly one assistant and invisible in the other three. A company measuring itself in ChatGPT alone would conclude the opposite of a company measuring in Gemini.

This is why a single screenshot proves nothing, in either direction. Absence in one place is not absence; presence in one place is not coverage.

How do you check it properly?

Five steps, about ten minutes. The point is to remove everything that makes the answer about you rather than about your category.

1. 01

   Open a fresh conversation. Memory, custom instructions and earlier chats change what comes back. A logged-out window is cleanest.

2. 02

   Ask the buying question, not your name. Ask what a buyer types — 'best X for Y', 'who should I hire for Z'. Asking about your company guarantees it appears.

3. 03

   Ask all four. ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity. Perplexity browses the live web; the others answer largely from what they have learned.

4. 04

   Repeat each question. These systems are stochastic. The same question returns different companies on different runs, so a single run is an anecdote.

5. 05

   Write down the model and the date. Answers drift as the sources drift. A result without a model ID and a date cannot be compared to anything later.

What counts as being mentioned?

Your company named in the answer the reader sees. Being used as a source without being named is a different thing, and it is more common than most teams expect.

Keep the two apart when you record results. A citation in the source list with no mention in the text means the model read you and did not think you were worth naming — a different problem from being invisible, and it has a different fix.

Why will your analytics never show this?

Because almost nobody clicks. Pew Research Center metered what 900 US adults actually did: when an AI summary appeared, people clicked a link inside it in just 1% of visits.

Across 68,879 Google searches, a result was clicked 8% of the time when a summary appeared, against 15% when none did.

One percent means the reader takes the names and leaves. No referrer, no session, no line in your reporting. A traffic report cannot show you a buyer who never became a visit, which is why the thing worth counting is mentions.

Questions people ask next

Is there a tool that does this for me?

Several, priced from roughly $29 to $499 a month. They earn their keep once you know what you are measuring and want it tracked over time. Before that, four browser tabs and ten minutes tell you the same thing.

How often should I check?

Answers move when the sources move, not on a schedule. Weekly is enough to see a real change. Daily mostly measures the models' own randomness and will have you reacting to noise.

Does asking about my own company work?

No. Ask an assistant about your company and it will talk about your company. The only question that tells you anything is the one a buyer asks, which never contains your name.