Does ChatGPT know your brand exists? Here's how to check

Open ChatGPT. Not later, now, in another tab. Type the question your best customer would type: “what’s the best [your category] in [your city]?” Read the answer slowly.

If your company isn’t in it, you just watched a sale get handed to a competitor while you weren’t in the room. Nobody sent you a notification. It happens quietly, dozens of times a day, and until recently there was no way to even see it.

The list of ten blue links is gone

For twenty years the game was ranking on page one of Google. You optimised, you built links, you fought for the top three results, and the customer scrolled a list and picked. That list is dissolving. Ask ChatGPT, Gemini or Perplexity for a recommendation today and you don’t get ten links. You get a paragraph. One answer, two or three names, delivered with the confidence of a friend who knows a guy. Roughly 60% of searches now end without a click to any website, because the answer on the screen was enough.

So the question changed. It used to be where do I rank? Now it’s am I in the answer at all?

Run the test yourself

Don’t trust me on this. Spend five minutes and check your own brand. Open each engine and ask what a real buyer asks:

• “What’s the best [your category] in [your city]?”
• “Who should I hire for [the thing you sell]?”
• “Compare the top companies for [your customer’s problem].”
• “Is [your brand] any good?” and see whether it has anything to say at all.

Run each one in ChatGPT, then Gemini, then Perplexity. They won’t agree, which is the first uncomfortable lesson: you can be the hero in one engine and a ghost in the next. Screenshot what you find. That mess is your starting line.

Three numbers that tell you where you stand

Once you’ve stared at a few answers, three numbers turn the anecdote into something you can manage:

• Mention rate. Out of all the relevant questions, how often does the AI name you at all? Show up in three prompts out of twenty and your mention rate is 15%. This is the “are you even in the conversation” number.
• Share of voice. When you and your competitors are both in the running, who gets named more? If Perplexity picks your rival nineteen times and you three, you’re losing share of voice six to one, whatever your Google position says.
• AEO score. Answer Engine Optimisation rolled into one figure: how visible you are, how often you’re cited, how well you’re described across the engines. Treat it like a credit score. One number that hides a lot of detail but tells you fast whether you have a problem.

”Invisible in AI” is the new “page 2 of Google”

You know the old joke that page two of Google is the safest place to hide a body. Being absent from an AI answer is worse, because there is no page two. The engine names a few companies and stops. No “see more,” no scrolling to find you at position eleven. If you’re not in the paragraph, you don’t exist for that buyer.

And the traffic that does come through is the good kind. Someone who arrives because an AI recommended you converts three to four times better than a cold click off Google, because they didn’t get a list to comparison-shop. They got an endorsement.

Why checking once isn’t enough

The answers move. Models get retrained, Perplexity re-crawls the web, a competitor publishes something that gets cited, and a brand that was recommended in June is gone by August without anyone touching its website. A prompt you typed by hand on one afternoon is a snapshot. It tells you today’s score and nothing about the trend, and the trend is the part worth managing.

That’s the difference between a fun experiment and actually measuring. To manage it you need the same buyer questions asked on repeat, across every engine, with the receipts kept.

How we measure it

This is what our AI visibility engine was built to do. It runs the buyer questions across ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity and Google’s AI Overviews on a schedule, and it saves the evidence: the real answer text, who got mentioned, who got cited, and where you land against the competitors you name. Not a vibe or a gut feel. Quotes and screenshots you can put in front of a skeptical boss.

Where to start

If the test above stung, good. That’s the cheapest market research you’ll do all year, and you ran it in the time it takes to make coffee.

The honest next move is to get a proper baseline before you spend a cent fixing anything: your mention rate, your share of voice and your AEO score across all five engines, with the evidence attached. That’s exactly what the AI visibility audit is. The strategy for actually moving those numbers lives on the AEO page, and if you’d rather hear straight from the person who built the engine whether any of this is worth your attention, our founder will tell you honestly.

Ask the question you’re afraid of first. Then measure it. Then fix it, in that order.