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Does ChatGPT Recommend Your Brand? How to Check

A step-by-step way to test whether ChatGPT and other AI assistants recommend your products — and what to do when they don't.

By Anthony Gale — Co-Founder, Geoffy

AI DiscoveryGEO
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Most brands check whether ChatGPT recommends them the same way: they type in their own name. That's exactly how to learn nothing. Here's how to actually check, in about ten minutes, for free: ask the question a first-time buyer would ask — without naming your brand — and write down every brand the AI names. Let me walk you through it properly.

Step one: ask the way a customer asks. Of course the AI knows your brand if you name it — that tells you nothing. The real question is whether you come up when a shopper doesn't know you yet.

Open ChatGPT. Type the question a first-time buyer would ask in your category — "best magnesium for sleep", "a rain jacket that packs into a jersey pocket", whatever fits your shelf. Don't mention your brand. Then read the answer and write down every brand it names, in order.

That list is real data — your honest starting point. Those are the brands AI currently trusts in your category. If you're on it — where? First? Fourth? If you're not on it, that's worth knowing today rather than next year.

Step two: do it across the engines that matter, because they don't agree. Run the same question in Perplexity. Then take it to Google — check the AI Overview at the top of the results, or ask the same question in Google's AI Mode. You'll often get different brands. Perplexity might cite a review site that names you; Google might lean on a different source entirely. Each engine is a separate shelf, and you can be on one and missing from another.

Step three — and this is where the ten-minute version breaks down: to do it properly, you need to ask many questions, many times, across every engine. Here's why. Ask the same question twice and you can get different answers — these systems vary run to run. So one check is an anecdote, not a measurement. To actually know your position you need dozens of buying questions, each run repeatedly, across every assistant, tracked over time. That's not a manual job. That's a monitoring job.

That's exactly what we built Geoffy to do. It runs your category's real buying questions across the major AI assistants on a schedule, records every time you're named, who's named instead, and where you rank — and turns it into a single visibility score you can watch move. And because knowing isn't the point, Geoffy then does the fixing too: it engineers your product pages so assistants can actually read them, and builds the corroboration that makes you the safe answer. Monitoring tells you whether you're findable. Geoffy's job is to make you chosen.

But start with the free version today. Open ChatGPT, ask three buying questions the way a customer would, and write down who gets named. Ten minutes. You'll learn more about your real position in AI search than any report has told you. And if you'd rather skip the spreadsheet, you'll find us at geoffy dot ai.

If that was useful, subscribe — we publish the playbook for getting onto those lists. See you in the next one.

The fastest way to find out whether ChatGPT recommends your brand: ask it the questions your customers ask — without naming yourself — and see if you show up. Below is a repeatable method, how to read what you get back, and what to fix when you’re invisible.

A quick caveat first: AI assistants are probabilistic, and many now fetch the live web for each query. The same question can return different answers on different runs. So this is a pattern-finding exercise, not a single pass/fail — test several phrasings and several runs, and look at the trend.

How to check, step by step

1. Write your buyer-intent prompts

List the questions a customer would actually ask an assistant — phrased by need, not by your brand or SKU. For example:

  • “Best [product category] for [use case] under [budget]”
  • “What [product] should I buy for [specific situation]?”
  • “Recommend a [product] for [type of person]”

Aim for 10–15 prompts covering your main categories. These are the queries you actually need to win.

2. Ask without naming your brand

Open a fresh chat (no prior context that might bias the answer) and run each prompt. Don’t mention yourself — you want to see who the assistant recommends unprompted.

3. Record whether — and how — you appear

For each prompt, note one of three outcomes: recommended (named in the shortlist), mentioned (appears but not recommended), or absent. Also note who did get recommended — those are your real AI-discovery competitors.

4. Repeat across assistants and runs

Run the same prompts in ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and Claude, and run the key ones two or three times. Coverage varies a lot between assistants, and a single run can mislead.

5. Probe the gap

Where you’re absent, ask a follow-up: “What are the best options from [your brand]?” If the assistant can describe your products accurately, it knows you exist but didn’t rank you. If it’s vague or wrong, it can’t read your data well — a different, more fundamental problem.

How to read the results

  • Recommended consistently: you’re AI-visible for that intent. Protect it and expand to adjacent queries.
  • Mentioned but not recommended: the assistant knows you but doesn’t have enough signal to prefer you. Usually a structured-data and intent-page problem.
  • Absent, but accurate on follow-up: discoverable but not competitive — strengthen attributes, use-case coverage, and corroborating sources.
  • Absent and inaccurate on follow-up: the assistant can’t understand your catalogue. This is the foundational fix: crawlability and structured data first.

The common causes, roughly in order:

  1. Pages aren’t reliably crawlable by AI crawlers, so your data never enters the picture.
  2. Attributes aren’t structured — “premium quality” tells a model nothing it can match against intent.
  3. Pages that answer at only one depth — your product pages describe the SKU but never address the situation, constraint or comparison a shopper actually asks about.
  4. Stale or contradictory data — wrong prices or availability are strong negative signals and get sources excluded.
  5. Thin corroboration — few independent sources describe your products, so the model has low confidence.

These map directly onto how AI assistants choose which products to recommend and the groundwork in What is GEO.

What to do next

Fix the foundation in order: make pages crawlable, structure your product attributes and add schema, write the answer to the real intent question onto the product and category pages you already publish, and keep price and availability in sync. Then re-run the same prompt set and watch the pattern move.

If you’d rather not do the spot-check by hand every week, this is exactly what an AI-visibility tool automates — running a fixed prompt set across assistants on a schedule and tracking your share of recommendations over time. Geoffy both measures this and fixes the underlying data so the numbers move.

Frequently asked questions

How do I check if ChatGPT recommends my brand?

Ask ChatGPT the intent-based questions your customers actually use — for example “best magnesium supplement for sleep” — without naming your brand, and see whether your products appear. Repeat across several phrasings, a few assistants, and over time, because answers vary by run.

Why doesn’t ChatGPT recommend my products?

Usually because the assistant can’t find or can’t understand your product data: pages aren’t crawlable, attributes aren’t structured, the product page only answers at one depth of intent, or price and availability are stale or contradictory.

Why are the answers different each time I ask?

AI assistants are probabilistic and many now fetch the live web per query, so phrasing, timing, and the model version all change the result. Test multiple phrasings and runs and look at the pattern, not a single answer.

Can I track AI recommendations automatically?

Yes. Tools that run a fixed set of buyer-intent prompts across multiple assistants on a schedule turn this manual spot-check into a tracked visibility metric you can watch over time.

Sources

About the author

Anthony Gale is Co-Founder of Geoffy, a Generative Engine Optimisation platform for ecommerce brands. He has spent more than two decades in ecommerce and digital growth, helping retailers adapt to major shifts in online discovery.

Frequently asked questions

How do I check if ChatGPT recommends my brand?

Ask ChatGPT the intent-based questions your customers actually use — for example 'best magnesium supplement for sleep' — without naming your brand, and see whether your products appear. Repeat across several phrasings, a few assistants, and over time, because answers vary by run.

Why doesn't ChatGPT recommend my products?

Usually because the assistant can't find or can't understand your product data: pages aren't crawlable, attributes aren't structured, the product page only answers at one depth of intent, or price and availability are stale or contradictory.

Why are the answers different each time I ask?

AI assistants are probabilistic and many now fetch the live web per query, so phrasing, timing, and the model version all change the result. Test multiple phrasings and runs and look at the pattern, not a single answer.

Can I track AI recommendations automatically?

Yes. Tools that run a fixed set of buyer-intent prompts across multiple assistants on a schedule turn this manual spot-check into a tracked visibility metric you can watch over time.

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Search Console Cannot See Your AI Discovery Problem

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Structured outputs enabled
First-party pages published
Discovery coverage expanding