How to find out if ChatGPT recommends your product

Why check at all?

Buyers have moved. In G2’s 2026 survey of B2B software buyers, 51% said they now start their research with an AI chatbot more often than with Google, up from 29% a year before. And 69% had chosen a different vendor than they planned because it came up in a chatbot’s recommendation (G2). HubSpot asked people who buy CRMs: 42% had used AI search while choosing (HubSpot).

So the shortlist is often made before anyone visits your site. If your product isn’t in the answer, you may lose deals you never see. Finding out takes nothing but ChatGPT, a notepad and a few minutes a day for a week.

1. Write down what your buyers ask

Think about what someone types when they need a tool like yours and don’t know you yet. Use your category and who it’s for, the way a buyer would. For a CRM for small sales teams, that might be:

• “What’s the best CRM for a small sales team?”
• “Simple CRM that works with Gmail, for a team of five”
• “Alternatives to Paperwren for a small startup”

Write five to ten. Mix the big, common question with the jobs you’re best at, and add the “alternatives to” and “X vs Y” questions buyers ask about your biggest rival. A buyer comparing tools may ask exactly that.

Don’t start with “Is Kettlebook any good?” (Kettlebook and Paperwren are invented products we use in examples.) That shows whether ChatGPT knows you. It doesn’t show whether it recommends you to someone who has never heard of you, and that’s the answer that brings in new buyers.

2. Ask in a new chat

Open a new chat for each question. In a chat where you’ve already talked about your product, that earlier talk is part of the conversation, and the answer may lean on it. You want the answer a stranger would get.

If you can, ask while logged out, or in a private window. Then add the details a buyer would give: the size of their team, the tools they already use.

3. Ask each question several times

This is the step most people skip, and it matters most. AI answers aren’t fixed like a place in Google’s results. Ask the same thing twice and you can get a different list.

SparkToro and Gumshoe tested this with about 3,000 runs of the same questions in ChatGPT, Claude and Google’s AI. The chance of getting the same list of brands twice was less than 1 in 100. The chance of the same list in the same order was about 1 in 1,000. Yet some brands still showed up in 60% to 90% of the answers to a question (Search Engine Land).

So one answer tells you little. What you want to know is how often you’re named. Ask each question at least five times, on different days if you can, and count.

“Any product selling AI rank movement is selling fiction.”

SparkToro’s verdict on tools that track AI answers like a leaderboard, reported by Search Engine Land.

4. Write down what you see

Keep a simple tally. For each answer, note the date, the AI tool, whether you were named, and who was named instead. Here’s one answer from the sample:

For a small sales team, three CRMs come up most often. Paperwren is the usual pick: simple pipelines and a free plan for two users.

Quillstack suits teams that live in their inbox, and Brindle CRM is worth a look if you need reporting.

Kettlebook was not named.

Sample answer. Invented products.

And here’s the same question asked once in each of four AI tools, written down:

Sample tally. Invented products.

AI tool	Named?	Who was named
ChatGPT	No	Paperwren, Quillstack, Brindle CRM
Gemini	No	Paperwren, Oxbow Desk, Brindle CRM
Perplexity	Yes, second	Paperwren, Kettlebook, Quillstack
Google AI Overviews	No	Paperwren, Quillstack, Mosswell CRM

After a week of this you’ll have a count, like “named in 2 of 20 answers”. That’s your starting point, and it’s the number to watch as you work on it.

The “who was named” column matters just as much. If the same two or three rivals come up in nearly every answer, look up where they’re mentioned: which “best of” lists, which review sites, which comparison pages. It’s a good clue to where the answers come from.

5. Check the other AI tools and Google

Don’t stop at ChatGPT. Different AI tools lean on different websites. AirOps looked at which sites AI tools quote and found that only 11% were quoted by both ChatGPT and Perplexity (AirOps). So you can be named by one and missing from another, like Kettlebook in the sample.

Ask the same questions in Gemini, Perplexity and Google. For some searches Google shows an AI Overview above the usual results. To be quoted there, Google says a page must be “indexed and eligible to be shown in Google Search with a snippet” (Google Search Central). In plain words: Google has to know your page and be allowed to show part of it.

What if you’re not named?

Most of what AI tools say about software comes from other websites. In AirOps’ review, “best of” lists were the kind of page AI tools quoted most, about four in five of those lists were on other people’s sites, and software was the industry where these lists made up the biggest share of quotes (AirOps). So the work that helps usually looks like this:

• Get onto the “best of” lists and review sites for your category. See where AI gets its answers about software.
• Make sure AI tools can read your pricing page and docs. See how to let AI tools read your site.
• Publish a fair comparison page against your biggest rival, and keep your pricing and features correct everywhere they’re listed.
• Ask happy customers for a review on the sites buyers check.

When you are named, read what the answer says about you. AI tools get things wrong. One person on Reddit described ChatGPT confidently recommending a business “that closed two years ago” (r/ChatGPT). If an answer has your pricing or features wrong, fix them where they’re published: your site, your docs and your review-site profiles.

Can someone do this for you?

Yes. Checking by hand works, but it’s slow. A fair count needs many answers, every week, in several AI tools, and then someone has to do the work the count points to. Marketers find the checking slow too. One wrote on Reddit, “We show up for a query one day and disappear the next,” and called checking by hand “tedious” (r/seogrowth).

If you hire anyone for it, a tool or an agency, ask three things:

• How many times do you ask each question? Once a week isn’t enough to count fairly.
• Will you show me the actual answers, or only a chart?
• Do you promise results? You shouldn’t hear yes. As one person who works at an AI search startup put it: “If any tool guarantees that you can consistently top AI answers, run for the hills” (r/SEO_LLM).

That’s the job outshone does. We ask your buyers’ questions many times a week in ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Google, show you each answer, count how often you’re named, and then do up to five jobs a week most likely to change it. See how we measure, or check your product free.