How to get cited by ChatGPT and track your brand

To get cited by ChatGPT, first measure where you stand, then change the pages its answers rely on. To track your brand, ask the same set of buying questions on a schedule, record whether each answer names your brand or links your site, and note which competitors and pages appear. One check tells you little, because ChatGPT can give a different answer to the same question an hour later. Weekly checks over a month show the real pattern.

This guide covers doing it by hand, doing it with a tracker, and what to change once you see the results. The same method works for Gemini, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews. If you want to use ChatGPT as a tool for your own SEO work instead, read ChatGPT for SEO.

Step 1: write the questions

Pick 15 to 30 questions a buyer asks before choosing a product like yours:

"What is the best [category] for [audience]?"
"[Your brand] vs [competitor]"
"Alternatives to [competitor]"
"How do I [job your product does]?"
"Is [your brand] worth it?"

Keep the exact wording fixed once you start. Changing a word makes it a new question and breaks the comparison over time.

Step 2: check by hand once

Ask each question in a logged-out or temporary ChatGPT chat, so your history does not shape the answer. Record:

Question	Brand named?	Site linked?	Competitors named	Cited pages

This first pass takes about an hour for 20 questions and shows whether there is a gap at all.

Step 3: track it on a schedule

Doing this by hand every week gets old fast, and you lose the history. A tracker asks the questions for you and keeps every answer. In zaDojo:

Create a project for your site and add your brand and competitors to the project context. Answers are matched against those names and domains.
Open Prompt Tracking, paste your questions and group them by topic.
Keep ChatGPT and Gemini selected (the defaults) and add Google AI Overviews if you care about Google. Claude and Perplexity are also available.
Pick the country and language, check the cost preview, and choose weekly.

A scheduled check costs about €0.002 per question per engine. Twenty questions on ChatGPT and Gemini weekly is about 170 checks a month, roughly €0.35. ChatGPT and Gemini answers are collected from their consumer apps, which is closer to what your buyers see than the API.

If you work in Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor or Codex, connect the zaDojo MCP server and ask: "Set up weekly ChatGPT and Gemini tracking for these 20 questions and show me the cost first." The agent calls estimate_ai_visibility_cost before it schedules anything.

Step 4: read the results

Look at three things:

Mention rate: the share of answers that name your brand, per engine.
Citation rate: the share that link to your site.
Cited pages: the URLs behind the answers. In zaDojo the Citations view splits them into your pages and third-party pages.

AI share of voice compares you with the competitors you track. Count every mention of a tracked brand across your answers, then divide each brand's mentions by that total. If 20 answers produce 40 brand mentions and 10 of them are yours, your share of voice is 25%.

It answers a different question from mention rate. Mention rate says how often you show up at all; share of voice says how much of the conversation you hold against named rivals. An answer can name you and four competitors, which is good for mention rate and weak for share of voice.

Three things keep the number honest:

Leave out branded questions. "Is [your brand] worth it?" always names you and inflates your share.
Fix the brand list. Share of voice only covers brands you track, so adding or removing a competitor changes everyone's share. It is not your share of the whole market.
Compare per engine and over weeks. One run is noise.

In zaDojo, the Competitors tab in Prompt Tracking shows share of voice for each tracked brand next to its mention rate, citation rate and average position (the order it is named in, among tracked brands). It uses non-branded questions by default.

Treat a failed or empty check as unknown, not as "not mentioned". For Google AI Overviews, an empty result usually means Google showed no overview for that search.

Step 5: change what feeds the answers

Work through the cited pages, most frequent first:

Third-party lists and reviews that name competitors but not you: write to the author with what is missing and why it matters to their readers. Offer a trial or data. Fix wrong facts about you.
Your own pages that get cited: make sure the first paragraph answers the question directly and prices and features are current.
Questions where nothing of yours is cited: check whether you have a page that answers the question at all. A comparison or "alternatives" page is often the missing piece.
Access: confirm robots.txt allows OAI-SearchBot and GPTBot. ChatGPT cannot cite what it is not allowed to read.

Then keep the weekly checks running and watch the mention rate per question.

What you cannot measure

How many people ask a question. OpenAI does not publish it, and any "AI search volume" figure is an estimate from Google data.
A ranking position. Order in an answer shifts between runs; the useful number is how often you are named.
Personalised answers. Logged-in users with memory or custom instructions can see different answers. Trackers measure the default answer.

Questions people ask

Can I see which prompts mention my brand without listing them myself? Not from ChatGPT. Some tools sell databases of prompts they generated; they are samples, not real user logs. Starting from your own buying questions is more useful.

Does ChatGPT use Google or Bing? ChatGPT search uses several providers, including Bing, plus OpenAI's own crawler. Pages that rank in Bing and are open to OAI-SearchBot have the best chance.

How fast do changes show up? If you get onto a page ChatGPT already cites, answers can change within days. Getting a new page of your own cited takes as long as getting it to rank.

For the wider picture, read what GEO is, what AEO is and GEO vs SEO vs AEO. Costs for every AI visibility tool are in the AI visibility docs. The plan is €10 a month with €10 of usage included, and new accounts get €0.10 of trial credits with no card.