How to check if ChatGPT recommends your store

How do I check if ChatGPT recommends my store?

Ask ChatGPT the questions your shoppers ask, in a fresh temporary chat with web search on, three times per question, and record whether your brand is named, whether a page on your domain is cited, and which brands are named instead. Repeat in Perplexity, Gemini and Claude. Five to ten questions across four engines takes about an hour the first time; PositionBird's free scan runs five engines on three questions in a few minutes with no account.

The manual method in six steps

1. 01

   Write five to ten buying questions a shopper would ask10 minutes

   Not your product name. The category question ("best at-home inflammation test"), a comparison ("X vs Y for sensitive skin"), a problem ("how do I test CRP without a blood draw") and a buying constraint ("under $50", "ships to Canada"). These are the prompts engines are actually answering about your category.

2. 02

   Open a new temporary chat with web search on1 minute

   In ChatGPT use a temporary chat so your history and anything you have told it about your brand do not colour the answer. Turn search on. Ask one question per chat; a follow-up in the same thread is anchored by the first answer.

3. 03

   Record three things for every answerper answer

   Named: does your brand appear at all. Cited: does the answer link to a page on your domain. Winner: which brands are named ahead of you, or instead of you. A mention without a citation means the engine knows you from someone else's page; the citation is what sends the shopper to yours.

4. 04

   Ask each question three timesper question

   Engines sample. A brand that appears in one answer out of three is a coin flip, not a recommendation. Three samples per question is the minimum that separates a trend from luck, and it is what PositionBird's paid scans use by default.

5. 05

   Repeat in Perplexity, Gemini and Claude30 minutes

   They search different indexes and prefer different sources. A store absent from ChatGPT is often cited first by Perplexity, and Gemini leans on Google's index, so the pattern across engines tells you which sources to work on.

6. 06

   Check what the engine said about you, not just whetherper answer

   Price, trial terms, shipping, what the product is made of or how it works. Engines paraphrase old pages and third-party sites. A confident wrong fact costs more than an absence, because the shopper arrives expecting something you do not sell.

What counts as a good result?

Named and cited in most answers to the questions you care about, with your own pages as the source. Named but never cited means the engine knows you from other people's pages, and the fix is a page on your own domain that answers the question directly. Absent means the engine has no page it trusts for that question yet; both outcomes tell you which page to write next.

Why does ChatGPT recommend my competitor instead of me?

Because it found a page it trusts that answers the shopper's question and names your competitor: a roundup, a review site, a forum thread, a directory, or the competitor's own page. Engines cite third-party pages far more than brand pages for shopping questions. The two fixes are a page on your domain that answers the exact question, and a presence on the third-party pages the engine already cites for your category.

Can I see ChatGPT traffic in Shopify instead?

Partly. Shopify has no AI channel, but AI visits appear as referrals from chatgpt.com, perplexity.ai, gemini.google.com and claude.ai in the Sessions by referrer report once you add the Referrer site dimension. That shows who clicked, not what the engine said or whom it recommended when the shopper did not click.

The referrer method is covered step by step in how to see ChatGPT traffic in Shopify. For the difference between being found, being chosen and being paid, see AI search monitoring for ecommerce.

Is there a tool that checks this automatically?

PositionBird runs the manual method on a schedule through the engines' official APIs: ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude and Google, two samples per question, scoring named and cited, tracking share of voice against competitors you name, listing the sources each engine cited, and checking the facts engines state about you against a fact sheet you control. The free shopping scan needs no account; paid plans start at $19 a month for 25 tracked questions.