You probably haven't checked
Most companies have never asked ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, or Claude what they say about their brand. It sounds obvious once you think about it, but it's not something anyone was doing two years ago.
Now that two-thirds of consumers use AI to research products, it matters. What AI says about you is already influencing who people buy from.
So how do you actually check?
The manual approach
Open ChatGPT. Type "what's the best [your category] for [your audience]." Read the response. Screenshot it. Repeat for Perplexity. Repeat for Gemini. Repeat for Claude.
Now do that for 20 different queries. Then do it again next month to see if anything changed.
This works. You'll learn something. But there are a few problems:
You'll run out of patience around query 5. Each query takes 30-60 seconds to type, wait for, and read. Across 4 engines, that's 4 minutes per query. Twenty queries is over an hour of copy-pasting.
You can't track changes. You might screenshot a few responses, but you won't have a structured record of which engines cited you, which didn't, what sentiment they used, or who showed up instead. Next month, you're starting from scratch.
You'll miss things. Reading an AI response casually is different from systematically checking for your brand name, your competitors, and the tone of how you're described. A manual read-through catches the obvious mentions and misses the subtle ones.
Each engine behaves differently on the same query. ChatGPT might recommend you while Gemini doesn't mention you at all. Without running every query across every engine, you're seeing a partial picture.
What automation looks like
An automated approach does the same thing you'd do manually, but it does it for all your queries across all engines at once, and keeps a record of everything.
Here's what that looks like in practice with theogeo.ai:
1. You enter your domain. We crawl your site to understand what you do, who you serve, and what makes you different.
2. We generate the right queries. Based on your actual website content, we create 60+ queries across six categories: comparisons, features, alternatives, integrations, pricing, and general discovery. Half mention your brand name, half don't — so you can see whether AI recommends you even when nobody asks about you by name.
3. Every query runs across all 4 engines. ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Claude. Each response is captured and analyzed.
4. We detect every mention. Your brand, your competitors, the sentiment (positive, neutral, or negative), and the exact context of how you were described. If an engine mentioned your competitor but not you, that shows up too.
5. You get a score. Your GEO Score (out of 100) combines how often you're cited across engines with how well your website content is structured for AI to reference. Below the score, you see exactly which queries you're missing on and what to do about each one.
The whole process takes about 5 minutes. You can schedule it to run automatically so you're tracking changes week over week without thinking about it.
When manual checking makes sense
If you've never checked at all, start by manually asking one or two queries on ChatGPT and Perplexity. It takes 2 minutes and the result is often surprising. Most people find out they're either mentioned more than they expected or not mentioned at all.
That first manual check is usually what motivates people to want systematic tracking.
When you need automation
Once you've seen the initial picture, the questions that follow are the ones manual checking can't answer:
- Am I mentioned more on some engines than others?
- Are my competitors showing up on queries where I should be?
- Is the sentiment positive or negative when I am mentioned?
- Did my visibility improve after I updated my website?
- Which specific pages need to change to get cited more?
These require running dozens of queries across multiple engines repeatedly over time, detecting every mention, and comparing results. That's not something you can do in a browser tab.
How to get started
If you want to check manually right now, open ChatGPT and ask: "What is the best [your product category] for [your target audience]?" See if your brand shows up. Then try the same query on Perplexity.
If you want the full picture, theogeo.ai runs a free audit across all four engines with your first sign-up. No credit card required, takes about 5 minutes, and you'll see exactly where you stand.