When someone asks ChatGPT who to buy from in your sector, does it say your name? We ask it every day and tell you whether you came up, in what order, in what tone, and which of your competitors came up instead of you.
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Out of every 100 answers, how many name your brand
Last 30 days, 10 questions asked every day
People used to type a few words into Google and pick from a list of links. Now many of them simply ask ChatGPT: "which company should I use for this?" And ChatGPT answers with two or three names.
If your name is one of them, you get the customer. If it is not, you never find out. There is no list of results to check your position in, and usually there is no click either, so nothing shows up in your website statistics. You just do not exist in that conversation.
That is the blind spot this page is about. Below are the numbers on how big it is, where they come from, and what can really be done about it.
Fair question, and someone measured it. Similarweb followed what people did right after the AI recommended a company, and compared it with the competitor it did not recommend. Being named made two to four times more people go and visit that company's website.
Out of 100 people who got a recommendation, how many visited the website
Blue: the company the AI recommended. Grey: the competitor people went to instead
Source: Similarweb, 2026 Generative AI Landscape. United States, computers, July to December 2025. Bars drawn on a scale up to 15 people.
Now the honest part. This shows that the two things happen together. It does not prove the AI caused the visit, and plenty of other things push someone to buy. There is also a study that puts a number on the exaggeration: one website saw its visits from ChatGPT grow almost six times over, but when researchers compared it with other pages on the same site, most of that turned out to be simply ChatGPT growing. The part you could honestly credit to the work they had done was a little under double. So when you read a case study with a huge number in it, take some off.
ChatGPT used to answer from memory alone. Now it often goes off and reads web pages first, then writes its answer from what it found. That matters to you, because those pages are where your name either appears or does not.
In May 2026 it linked to web pages in about 7 out of every 100 answers, five times more than the year before. But the average hides the important bit: it looks things up most when people are comparing and buying, which is exactly the moment you care about.
Out of every 100 ChatGPT answers, how many link to web pages
United States, computers, May 2026
Source: Similarweb, 2026 Generative AI Landscape.
Here is the part most people get wrong. The pages ChatGPT reads before deciding who to recommend are mostly not your pages. More than half of them are customer reviews, forums, news sites and magazines. Your own website is a small slice of the total.
Where the links in ChatGPT's answers come from
United States, computers, May 2026, its 10,000 most used links
Source: Similarweb, 2026 Generative AI Landscape. Figures are out of 100 links. It changes a lot by subject: for holidays it leans on reviews, for beauty on online shops, for money on financial magazines. There is no single recipe that works for everyone.
University researchers found the same thing when they looked at types of page. Articles that compare several options, reviews and reports are the ones that get quoted most. Your product page and your price page are the ones that get quoted least. One study counted that "the 10 best…" style articles alone are behind about a fifth of everything ChatGPT quotes.
Which leads to something uncomfortable but useful to know: to be recommended, you usually have to appear on somebody else's page, not on your own.
Two numbers, and both need time to mean anything. The first is your share of days: out of thirty days, on how many did ChatGPT name you for a given question. The second is your share of voice: of all the brands named across your questions, what proportion of the mentions are yours.
Neither can be read from a single answer, and that is the whole difficulty. A screenshot tells you what happened once. The share of days tells you what happens normally, which is the only version a competitor cannot argue with.
Yes, and you do not need a card. The free plan asks your questions to the real ChatGPT every day and keeps the history, so within a week you can already see how often you come up and against whom. It uses the same live queries as the paid plans, not samples or estimates, so the numbers are the ones a customer would get.
What it does not include is the other eight assistants, the competitor comparison and a bigger allowance of questions. The full breakdown is on the pricing page.
Researchers went through more than 100,000 AI answers about more than 100 companies. How often a brand gets named depends enormously on how well known it already is.
Out of every 100 relevant answers, how many name the brand
More than 100,000 answers about more than 100 companies, March to May 2026
Source: P. Kumar, Generative Engine Optimization at Scale, arXiv:2606.20065.
Now the good news, from a different study. Researchers showed the AI two products that were identical in every way except the name: one a real brand, one made up. The real brand won all 670 times. Then they gave the unknown one a tiny edge, and everything changed. Less than a tenth of a star more in its rating was enough to flip the result. The famous name only wins while the AI has nothing else to go on. Give it one honest reason to prefer you and most of that advantage disappears.
Ask ChatGPT the same question twice and you get two different answers. Not slightly different. Researchers repeated the same questions many times over and compared the web pages the AI used each time: only about three to five out of every ten pages were the same from one go to the next.
So if you take one screenshot on a Tuesday and you are not in it, that proves nothing. And if a competitor shows you a screenshot where they are and you are not, that proves nothing either. Two things follow, and they are why we ask every single day:
The tone of what is said about you moves around even more: the same research found the tone changes almost seven times more often than whether you get named at all. One bad answer is not a crisis. A month of bad answers is.
This is also why asking more often is worth it. The more times you ask, the smaller the margin of error, and the surer you can be that what you are looking at is real and not a coincidence.
One more useful finding. The pages ChatGPT reads and quotes are usually buried deep inside a website: guides, comparisons, detailed articles, two or three clicks in from the front page. But when somebody actually clicks a link in an AI answer, six out of ten of them land on the home page.
How deep the pages are: the ones ChatGPT quotes against the ones people land on
United States, computers, May 2026. Blue: pages it quotes. Amber: pages people land on
Source: Similarweb, 2026 Generative AI Landscape, with analysis by Aleyda Solis (Orainti). Figures are out of 100.
In practice that means two different jobs. Your deep pages are what convince the AI to name you. Your home page is what greets the person who then clicks. Improving one does nothing for the other, so we report them separately instead of mixing everything into a single "AI traffic" number that tells you nothing.
We ask ChatGPT your 10 questions every day and save the whole answer. Everything below comes out of those saved answers. Nothing is estimated.
| What we look at | What you see | Why it is useful |
|---|---|---|
| Whether it names you | Yes or no, for each question, each day | How many days out of thirty you came up. That is your real number |
| Where it names you | First, third or last in the list | Being named last out of six is not the same as leading the list |
| How it talks about you | Good, neutral or bad | The jumpiest signal, so read it over weeks and never from one answer |
| Who it names instead | The competitors sharing the answer with you | You see exactly who is taking the customer when you are not there |
| Which pages it read | The links behind each answer | Usually other people's pages: reviews, magazines, comparisons |
| What it searched for | The searches it ran before answering | The AI telling you what it went looking for and could not find on your site |
Put all the research together and the to-do list is shorter and less exciting than most advice you will read:
And a warning we would rather give you ourselves: a review of 45 studies on this subject found that what has really been proven is fairly modest. You can improve how you get used once the AI has already found your page. Reliably making it find you more often has not been proven yet. Anyone promising you guaranteed results is going further than the evidence does.
Nothing to install. No code to add to your site.
Real ones, the way a person would say them. Or let our AI suggest them from your sector and change whatever you want.
The real ChatGPT, with web browsing on, the same one your customers use. Every answer is saved whole.
How many days you came up, how you compare with your competitors, which pages are behind the answers you are losing, and what the AI went looking for.
The full method, with the research behind it, is in how we measure whether an AI names your brand.
Not everybody uses the same one, and they do not answer the same either. Each attracts a different crowd: ChatGPT is the general public, Claude is used far more by professionals and university people, Gemini by more technical users. The same account covers all of them.
| Assistant | Why it matters |
|---|---|
| Google AI Mode | Google's own chat-style answer, in front of the biggest audience there is |
| Google AI Overviews | The summary above the normal Google results, read by people who never scroll down |
| Perplexity | Shows its sources for everything, popular with people researching before they buy |
| Gemini | Comes built into Google's apps and Android phones |
| Copilot | Comes built into Windows and Office, so it is everywhere at work |
| Claude | Very popular with professionals and university users |
| DeepSeek | Growing fast, especially outside Europe and the US |
| Qwen | The main assistant in Chinese-speaking markets |
It is a tool that asks ChatGPT the same questions your customers ask, and writes down whether it names your brand, in which order, and which other companies it names. A normal SEO tool checks your position on Google's results page. This one checks whether you are inside the answer ChatGPT writes.
Because ChatGPT does not answer the same thing twice. When researchers asked the same question over and over, only three to five out of every ten pages it used repeated from one go to the next. So one answer tells you almost nothing. How many days out of thirty you came up tells you a lot.
In May 2026, in about 7 out of every 100 answers, five times more than a year earlier. It depends on the subject: nearly 23 out of 100 for travel, about 13 for shopping, only 5 for education. It looks things up most when people are comparing and deciding what to buy.
Yes. The free plan asks ChatGPT your questions every day at no cost and with no card. It asks the real ChatGPT, so the answers are the real ones. Paid plans add the other assistants, more questions and the competitor comparison.
Give us your brand name and up to 10 questions your customers would ask. We ask ChatGPT those questions every day, save every answer, and show you when you were named, where, and who was named alongside you.
It looks like it. Two to four times more people visited a company's website after the AI recommended it than visited the competitor it did not recommend. Bear in mind that shows the two things happening together rather than proving cause, and headline numbers in case studies are usually inflated.
Mostly pages that are not yours. Customer reviews and forums are behind 29 out of every 100 links it gives, news sites and magazines another 26. Comparison articles, reviews and reports get quoted a lot. Your own product and price pages get quoted the least.
We keep a comparison of the five main options, checked against each vendor's own pricing page: best ChatGPT rank trackers. It says plainly which of them is the better pick for four of the five situations.
There is a free plan. ChatGPT is included from the Lite plan at €19.90 a month plus VAT, together with Gemini, Perplexity and Google's AI Overviews. Pro adds AI Mode, DeepSeek, Qwen and Copilot, and Agency adds Claude, nine assistants in total. Cancel whenever you want. All the detail is on the pricing page.
Everything on this page comes from published research, not from us. Here is the full list so you can check it yourself:
We ask ChatGPT your questions every day and keep the history, so you can see how many days you came up, who came up instead of you, and which pages are behind it. Free plan, no card needed.
Start tracking freeAlso check your brand in Google AI Mode · Google AI Overviews · Perplexity · Gemini · Claude · DeepSeek · Qwen · Copilot.
