How to track whether ChatGPT and Gemini mention your brand

A ranking report answers “where does my page appear for this keyword?” An AI answer is a different product: a short written recommendation, assembled from several sources, often naming two to five businesses. Your page can be in the sources and your brand still left out of the text — or the reverse.

Buyers increasingly ask an assistant for a shortlist before they search for individual businesses. If you are missing from that shortlist, you will see it later as fewer branded searches and fewer enquiries, with no obvious cause in your SEO reports. Tracking mentions directly is the only way to see the problem while it is still small.

Start from real language. A buyer in Jaipur might ask “Which CA firm is good for startups in Jaipur that also handles GST?”, not “chartered accountant Jaipur”. Prompts are longer and more conversational than keywords, and the extra context — budget, location, situation — changes which brands appear.

Group prompts so you can see where you are strong and weak. Add a few brand prompts too, such as “What do you know about [your brand]?” and “[your brand] reviews”, to check the facts the assistant holds about you. Then freeze the set. Changing prompts every month makes trends meaningless; add new ones in a separate group instead.

• Category: “best [service] in [city]”
• Situation: “[service] for [type of customer or problem]”
• Comparison: “[you] vs [alternative approach]” or “X or Y for…”
• Cost: “how much does [service] cost in [city]”
• Brand facts: “what do you know about [brand]?”

Ask the same question three times and you may get three different lists. That is normal, not a bug. It means a single screenshot — good or bad — should never drive a decision, and it means your tracking method needs repetition built in.

Reduce the noise you can control. Use a temporary or logged-out chat so personal memory and history do not shape the answer. Set the location the way your buyers would experience it, or include the city in the prompt. Run each prompt more than once per check — three runs is a sensible minimum — and record how many of those runs named you. Over a month, that gives you a mention rate per prompt rather than a yes or no.

A simple spreadsheet works: one row per prompt per engine per run, with columns for date, prompt group, engine, named (yes or no), position, description summary, competitors named, and sources cited. After a month, pivot it by engine and by prompt group.

The source column is where the action is. If Gemini keeps citing a directory with your old address, that is a fix you can make this week. If every engine cites the same two comparison articles and you are not in either, you know which publishers to approach. If the description of your business is wrong or vague, your own pages are probably not stating it plainly enough.

Manual checks are slow, but they teach you things a dashboard hides: how the answers are phrased, which sources keep appearing, where the facts about you are wrong. A month of manual tracking also gives you a baseline to check a tool against.

AI visibility tools run prompts at scale, across engines and locations, and chart a share-of-voice figure over time. Ask how often they run each prompt, from which locations, whether they use the consumer apps or the developer APIs (answers can differ), and whether you can see the raw answers behind the score. A score you cannot trace back to real answers is hard to act on.

In GA4, create a custom channel group with an “AI assistants” channel that matches session sources such as chatgpt.com, perplexity.ai, gemini.google.com, copilot.microsoft.com and claude.ai. Place it above Referral in the channel order so these sessions are not lumped in with other sites. Then mark your key events — enquiries, bookings, purchases — so you can see whether this traffic converts.

Google’s own AI Overviews and AI Mode are different: clicks from them arrive as ordinary Google organic traffic, and Search Console includes their impressions in its Web search totals without a separate filter. Watch branded search volume alongside AI referrals; a rise in people searching your name is often the clearest downstream sign that assistants are mentioning you.