Is My Brand Cited in ChatGPT? Here's How to Actually Check

It's the question every brand is starting to ask and almost none can answer with a number: when buyers ask an AI assistant about my category, do I come up?

You can check it. There's a quick manual way that gives you a gut read, and a rigorous way that gives you something you can track. Here's both.

The two-minute manual check (do this first)

Open ChatGPT with web search on and ask the questions a buyer would actually ask — not "tell me about [your brand]," but the category questions that lead to a purchase:

• "What's the best [your category] tool for [your customer]?"
• "Which [category] platform do you recommend for [use case]?"
• "Top [category] tools in 2026?"

Read the answers and look for three things:

1. Are you named at all? Not "does it know you exist if asked directly" — does it bring you up unprompted for the category question. That's the real test.
2. Who is named instead? Write down every brand and source it recommends. That list is your competitive map.
3. Where do you go missing? Note which questions you're absent from. Those are your gaps.

Two minutes in, most brands discover something uncomfortable: the assistant has a confident answer about their category, and they're not in it.

Why the manual check isn't enough

The gut read is useful, but it has three problems if you're trying to actually manage this:

• It's not repeatable. Ask the same question twice and you can get different phrasing. You can't see a trend in noise.
• It's not scoreable. "It mentioned us once-ish" isn't a number you can put in front of a client or track week over week.
• It doesn't scale. One brand, four questions, by hand is fine. A dozen client domains, monthly, is not.

To manage GEO — and certainly to bill for it — you need the rigorous version.

The rigorous check: a real, repeatable score

A proper GEO scan does what the manual check does, but consistently and at scale: it asks the assistant your category's buying-intent questions, with web search on, and measures three things every time —

• a visibility score (0–100): are you cited, and how prominently;
• the competitors named instead: the exact brands and sources the model recommends in your place;
• the gaps: the specific buying questions where you're invisible.

Run it on an established brand and it scores high; run it on a new or misfiled one and it scores low — often zero. The point isn't the single number. It's that the number is consistent, so when you do the work to improve, you can prove it moved.

What the score is really telling you

A low or zero score almost never means "your product is bad." It usually means one of three fixable things:

• You're misfiled — the model thinks you're in a different category than you are, so it never offers you for your real one.
• You're under-cited — the sources the model trusts (roundups, directories) don't mention you yet.
• Your pages aren't legible — nothing on your site clearly tells the model what you are and why to recommend you.

All three are addressable. The score just tells you where to start.

For agencies: this is a client conversation, not a vanity check

If you run an agency, the rigorous check is a service. Run it on a client's domain, hand them the score and the "who's recommended instead" list under your brand, and you've turned an anxious "are we in ChatGPT?" question into a measured baseline with a plan attached. Do it monthly and it's a retainer line-item — one your competitors aren't offering yet.

Check yours now

Skip the guessing. Enter a domain and a category and get the real number — your visibility score, the competitors AI recommends instead, and where you're invisible.

It might tell you you're the answer. It might tell you you're a zero. Either way, you'll finally have the number — which is more than most brands competing in AI search can say.

Check your brand free →

Free, no signup — takes under a minute.

GEO Grader gives you a real, repeatable AI-visibility score plus the competitor and gap breakdown — built for agencies, with branded client reports. $89/mo flat.