How do I find out if ChatGPT is recommending my brand to users? What we do for clients
Our step-by-step method for checking whether ChatGPT recommends a brand: build a prompt panel, check crawler access, read citations and track AI-referred visits.
This is the first question most new clients ask us, usually phrased as "are we showing up in ChatGPT?" The honest answer takes a few steps, because a quick manual check is misleading in both directions. Here is the process we use.
Step 1: write the prompts a buyer would ask
Before touching any tool, we sit with the client and list the questions their buyers actually ask. They fall into groups: category questions ("best CRM for small agencies"), comparison questions ("X vs Y"), alternative questions ("alternatives to X") and brand questions ("is X worth it for Z"). We aim for a panel of a few dozen prompts, tagged by topic and intent.
Skip prompts that only exist because you want to see your brand name. If a real buyer would never type it, it is not measuring anything useful.
Step 2: run them, repeatedly
A single ChatGPT answer is one sample. Run the same prompt on different days and you will often see different brands, different order and different wording. That is why we track a panel over time. A manual spot check is fine as a conversation starter in a kickoff call, and we do one live, but we never put it in a report.
We run the panel in Promptwatch, which tracks prompts daily per model, country and language. For ChatGPT specifically the output we read is Visibility Score, Share of Voice, Sentiment and Position in Answer. If a client wants to test the water first, the free Explore plan covers 10 prompts on ChatGPT only, which is enough to see whether the brand appears at all.
Step 3: check whether ChatGPT can reach the site
If the brand is absent, we look at crawler access before we touch content. OpenAI runs GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot and ChatGPT-User, and they serve different purposes. A CDN rule, a firewall setting or an old robots.txt line can block one or all of them without anyone noticing.
Agent Analytics in Promptwatch shows IP-verified crawler logs, so spoofed user agents are filtered out. It also shows errors and a citation rate per page. Crawler logs are available from the Professional plan upward, not on Essential, so we flag that when a client is choosing a tier.
Step 4: find out who ChatGPT is citing instead
When ChatGPT recommends a competitor, we want to know which pages it drew on. Citation analytics lists pages and domains, including Reddit and YouTube citations and offsite mentions where the brand is named on someone else's page. Very often the winning source is not the competitor's site at all. It is a comparison article, a forum thread or a review page. That tells us where the brand needs to appear.
Step 5: connect it to traffic
Mentions without visits are interesting, not valuable. Visitor analytics counts AI-referred traffic and conversions through a lightweight script, a GTM template or the WordPress plugin. We set it up in the first week so there is a baseline before any content changes ship.
Step 6: decide what to fix
The Action Board produces a prioritized list from the data. We review it with the client, assign owners and agree on a rhythm. The usual suspects are blocked crawlers, missing comparison content, thin product pages and absence from the third-party sources models rely on.
What we tell clients about results
We do not promise a recommendation, and nobody honest can. Models change, answers vary, and a competitor may simply have a stronger presence in the sources the model trusts. What we promise is a clear picture: whether the brand is named, how it compares, why, and what is most worth doing next.
We also tell clients that some of the impact will not show up as clicks. A buyer may read your brand name in an answer and search for you later. That is why we watch branded search and direct traffic alongside AI referrals.
A simple checklist
- A prompt panel built from real buyer questions.
- Daily tracking, reviewed weekly as a trend.
- Crawler access verified for the OpenAI bots.
- Citation sources mapped for the top prompts.
- AI-referred visits and conversions set up before changes ship.
- A short, prioritized action list with owners.
If you can answer "yes" to all six, you know whether ChatGPT recommends your brand, and you know what to do about it.