How to check whether ChatGPT recommends your brand

A growing share of buying research now starts with a question typed into an AI assistant: “What is the best tool for…”, “Which agency should I hire for…”, “Is X better than Y?”. If the answer names three of your competitors and not you, you have lost a sale you never saw.

Here is how to find out where you stand, by hand first, and then how to make it a habit.

1. Write the questions your buyers actually ask

Start with ten to twenty questions, in the words a buyer would use, not your marketing language. Mix three kinds:

• Category questions: “best screen recorder for Mac”, “AI visibility tracking tools”.
• Problem questions: “why does my Mac say storage is full”, “how to separate Chrome profiles on Mac”.
• Comparison questions: “YourBrand vs CompetitorBrand”, “alternatives to CompetitorBrand”.

2. Ask more than one engine, more than once

Ask each question in ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude, in a fresh chat, without being logged in to anything that knows your preferences. Answers vary between runs, so ask each question two or three times.

3. Record four things for every answer

1. Were you named? Yes or no.
2. Where? First recommendation, somewhere in a list, or a passing mention.
3. Were you cited? Did the answer link to your site, or to a review or forum thread about you?
4. Who was named instead? The competitors that win the questions you lose.

A spreadsheet is enough to start. After one round you will already see a pattern: a few questions you win, many where you are missing, and a handful of competitors who keep turning up.

4. Look at the sources

When an engine cites its sources, open them. Assistants lean heavily on pages that answer a question directly, comparison articles, documentation and community threads. If your competitors appear in those sources and you do not, that is your to-do list.

5. Turn gaps into pages

For each losing question, ask: is there a page on our site that answers this plainly, in the first paragraph, with facts a model can quote? Usually there is not. The fix is rarely a trick. It is a clear, specific page that deserves to be the answer, plus making sure the places the engines read about your category know you exist.

6. Re-measure

Check the same questions again in a few weeks. Visibility moves slowly and answers wobble, so compare against the same questions and the same period, not a single lucky run.

Doing this without the spreadsheet

Doing this by hand every week is a lot of copy and paste. That is why we built ZwayRank. It asks the engines your buyers’ questions on a schedule, records every answer, scores how often you are named and cited, and shows who wins instead of you. Then a crew of AI agents drafts the pages and posts that close the gaps, and waits for your approval before anything goes live.

You can try it on one brand for free at zwayrank.com.