What is brand visibility in ChatGPT?
Brand visibility in ChatGPT is how often ChatGPT names your brand when someone asks it for a recommendation in your category, and how prominently it places you in the answer. It is the ChatGPT version of ranking on Google.
It matters because buyers increasingly skip the search results page. They type “best invoicing app for freelancers” into ChatGPT and get a short list of names. If you're not on that list, that buyer may never hear of you, however well you rank on Google.
ChatGPT builds those lists in two ways. It can answer from what the model learned in training, which is months old, or it can search the web first and summarise the pages it finds. For questions about the best or latest tools it usually searches, so in practice your ChatGPT visibility depends heavily on whether the pages that rank for your category mention you.
How to check your brand visibility in ChatGPT, step by step
Method 1: check by hand (free, 20 minutes)
- Open a temporary chat. In ChatGPT, start a temporary chat (or use a logged-out browser). Your memory and past conversations otherwise nudge the answer toward things you've mentioned before, including your own product.
- Write 5 to 10 buyer prompts. Use the words a buyer would use, not your brand name: “best CRM for a 5-person agency”, not “is Acme CRM good”. The next section has a list to copy.
- Ask each prompt and record three things: whether you were named, your position in the list, and the other products named.
- Ask each prompt twice. If the two answers differ a lot, ask a third time. You're measuring a tendency, not a fixed ranking.
- Note whether ChatGPT searched. If the answer shows sources, it searched the web; check which pages it cited. Those are the pages to get onto.
Method 2: use a free ChatGPT visibility checker (2 minutes)
Our free AI visibility checker does the same thing automatically. Enter your product, your website and what buyers search for. It asks ChatGPT and Perplexity three buyer questions with web search on, then shows whether each answer named you, your position, and which competitors were named instead. Each check is saved, so you can compare next week's result with this week's.
Which prompts to test
Cover the different ways buyers ask. Each type tests something different about how ChatGPT sees you.
| Prompt type | Example | What it tells you |
|---|---|---|
| Best in category | best invoicing app | Whether you're in the default shortlist |
| For a specific buyer | best invoicing app for freelancers | Whether ChatGPT knows who you're for |
| Alternatives | alternatives to FreshBooks | Whether you're seen as a competitor to the leader |
| Price-led | cheapest invoicing app that is actually good | Whether your pricing story comes through |
| Problem-led | how do I get clients to pay invoices on time | Whether you show up before the buyer knows the category |
| Head to head | Acme vs FreshBooks | How ChatGPT describes you when asked directly |
Avoid prompts that contain your brand name except for the head-to-head one. They tell you whether ChatGPT knows you exist, not whether it would recommend you to someone who doesn't.
How to measure brand visibility in ChatGPT
Measure brand visibility in ChatGPT with three numbers across a set of prompts: mention rate (share of answers that name you), average position when named, and share of voice (your mentions against your competitors').
| Metric | How to calculate | Why it matters |
|---|---|---|
| Mention rate | Answers that name you ÷ answers checked | The headline number: how often you're in the conversation at all |
| Average position | Your average place in the list, when named | Buyers read the top of the list; #1 and #6 are not the same |
| Share of voice | Your mentions ÷ all product mentions | Your slice of the shortlist against competitors |
| Cited sources | Pages ChatGPT linked to when it searched | The exact pages you need to be on |
| Description accuracy | Does it describe you correctly? | A wrong description loses the buyer even when you're named |
Our checker rolls mention rate and position into one visibility score out of 100: first place counts fully, each place lower counts 10% less, and not being named counts zero. You can try the formula on the AI visibility page.
A real example: “best notch app for MacBook”
On 28 October 2026 we checked our own Mac app, NotchDodo, with three buyer prompts. Here is what ChatGPT recommended for “best notch app for MacBook”, in order:
- Boring Notch
- Alcove
- NotchNook
- MediaMate
- DynamicLake Pro
NotchDodo wasn't named in any of the six answers from ChatGPT and Perplexity. NotchNook and Boring Notch were each named in five of the six. That's a typical result for a new product, and it's useful: it shows exactly which apps own the answer and which pages to study. Search “best notch app for MacBook” yourself and you'll find the roundups and threads that list those two again and again.
Why ChatGPT gives different answers to the same question
If you and a colleague ask ChatGPT the same question, you can get different lists. Four reasons:
- Every answer is generated fresh. There's randomness in how the model writes, so lists shift slightly between runs.
- Personalisation. Memory, past chats and custom instructions shape what it recommends to each person.
- Search or no search. ChatGPT decides per question whether to search the web. A searched answer reflects today's pages; an unsearched one reflects training data.
- Location and model. Results can vary by country and by which model answers.
That's why one check is a snapshot. To measure credibly, use temporary chats, several prompts, and repeat runs, then look at the trend.
How to track your visibility in ChatGPT over time
- Fix your prompt set. Pick 5 to 10 prompts and don't change them, or you can't compare runs.
- Pick a cadence. Weekly while you're actively working on it, monthly once things settle.
- Log every run in a sheet: date, prompt, named (yes/no), position, competitors named, sources cited.
- Mark your changes (a new listing, an article, a homepage rewrite) on the same timeline, so you can see what moved the numbers.
If you'd rather not keep a spreadsheet, our checker saves every result to your account. The free check runs once a week, which is a sensible tracking cadence on its own.
How to improve your visibility in ChatGPT
- Get onto the pages ChatGPT reads. When it searches, it summarises the roundups, comparison pages, launch platforms and reviews that rank for the question. Look at the sources it cites for your prompts and work on getting into those.
- Describe yourself the same way everywhere. One plain sentence (what it is, who it's for, the category word) on your homepage, listings and profiles. Consistent descriptions are easier for a model to connect.
- Name your category on your own site. Put the words buyers use in your title tag and main heading, and answer common buyer questions in a short FAQ.
- Let OAI-SearchBot in. Check that robots.txt doesn't block OpenAI's search crawler, and that your page text is in the HTML rather than loaded later by JavaScript.
- Be part of real conversations. Community threads where people ask “what should I use for X” show up in answers. Contribute honestly where you genuinely fit.
- Publish something worth citing. A fair comparison or a useful guide in your category gives ChatGPT a page to quote. In one of our checks, a single Medium article was enough for Claude to name a brand-new Mac app.
A free DodoLaunch listing gives AI assistants a clear, permanent page about your product: structured data, open to AI crawlers like OAI-SearchBot, and listed in our llms.txt, with a link back to your site. Launch for free, then re-run your check in a few weeks.
ChatGPT
Claude
Perplexity
Grok