How to check whether ChatGPT recommends your brand
Your buyers now ask AI assistants what to buy. Here is a repeatable way to see whether ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Google’s AI answers name you, who they name instead, and which pages they cite.
Why AI answers are worth tracking
When someone asks ChatGPT for “the best CRM for a five-person startup”, they get a short list, not ten blue links. If you are not on that list, you are not in the running, and no analytics tool will tell you so. The only way to know is to ask the engines yourself, the way your buyers do.
Step 1: Write the prompts your buyers ask
Start from sales calls, support tickets and the Reddit threads in your category. Good prompts are specific, and most compare:
- “best CRM for startups”
- “HubSpot alternatives for a small team”
- “is [your brand] good for agencies?”
Group them by stage: category questions (who is best), comparisons (A or B) and brand questions (what is X). Each group tells you something different.
Step 2: Run each prompt on every engine
The engines read different sources, and some answer from memory unless they search. Run the same prompt on each and keep the results apart.
| Engine | What you are checking |
|---|---|
| ChatGPT | The answer the chatgpt.com app shows a person |
| Gemini | The answer the gemini.google.com app shows a person |
| Claude | A live answer from the model with web search on |
| Perplexity | A live answer from the model with web search on |
| Google AI Overviews | The AI summary above Google’s results |
| Google AI Mode | Google’s conversational AI answer |
Step 3: Log mentions, rivals and citations
For each answer, record whether you were named and where in the list, which brands were named instead, and which URLs the engine linked. A spreadsheet is enough. Put the date and the engine on every row, so you can see change over time.
Step 4: Fix what the engines read
Citations show where the engines learn about your category. Three moves follow: improve your own pages that get cited, pitch the best-of lists that are cited but leave you out, and correct wrong facts at their source. Also check that AI crawlers can read your site: a robots.txt that blocks them keeps you out of every answer.
Run this in your agent
Connect Manifold to Claude, ChatGPT or Cursor, then paste this prompt.
Check whether ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini recommend us for the questions our buyers ask. List who they name instead and which pages they cite, then tell me the three pages to fix first.
Step 5: Run it again every month
Answers move. Run the same prompt set monthly, or weekly for the prompts that matter most, and compare against the last run. When you drop out of an answer, look first at what changed in the sources it cites.