How to check if ChatGPT recommends your brand (manual workflow + free tools)

Somewhere right now, a potential customer is typing “best [your category] for [their situation]” into ChatGPT. An answer comes back naming two or three brands. Either you’re in it or you’re not — and most businesses have never once checked.

The manual audit (30 minutes, zero cost)

Step 1 — build your question set. Not questions about you; questions your customers ask: category questions (“best rank tracker for agencies”), comparison questions, problem questions (“how do I know if AI mentions my brand”). Our free prompt library generator gives you 20 in ten seconds, localized to your market.

Step 2 — ask them where it matters. ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini at minimum. Fresh chats, no account history influencing answers.

Step 3 — log three things per answer. Were you named? Who was named instead? Which websites did the answer cite as sources? That third column is gold: it’s the list of pages you need to appear on.

Step 0, actually — the 10-second version. The spot-check on our homepage does one full cycle for you: your brand, one question, the live AI answer with your brand highlighted or conspicuously absent.

What you’ll probably find

The typical first audit finds: you appear for brand-name questions (people asking about you specifically), you’re missing from category questions (where new customers actually are), and one or two competitors show up everywhere — usually because a handful of listicle pages cite them and AI engines lean on those pages heavily.

Why manual doesn’t scale — and what does

Answers drift weekly. Engines disagree with each other. Twenty prompts × five engines × every week is a part-time job — which is why we automated exactly this workflow: Asheard runs your prompt set on schedule across 10 engines, alerts you when answers change, and shows which sources to win. The manual audit tells you where you stand today; tracking tells you whether anything you do about it works.