How to check whether ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini cite your site

There is no built-in report for "how often does ChatGPT recommend me". You can measure it yourself with a spreadsheet and an hour. The method below is deliberately simple, because the hard part is consistency, not tooling.

Mention versus citation

A mention is your brand name appearing in the answer text. A citation is a link or source card pointing at your domain. They are different outcomes: an engine can recommend you without linking, or link to you without naming you. Track both separately.

Step 1: write the questions

List 10 to 20 questions a real buyer would ask without knowing your name. For example, "best invoicing tool for freelancers" rather than "is Acme any good". Include category questions, comparison questions ("X vs Y") and problem questions ("how do I stop late client payments"). Questions that already contain your brand name tell you very little.

Step 2: ask every engine

Run each question in ChatGPT with search on, in Perplexity, in Gemini, and in Google where AI Overviews appear. Use a logged-out or fresh session where you can, since personalization and chat history shift results. For each answer, record whether your brand was mentioned, whether your domain was cited, and which competitors appeared.

Step 3: repeat

Answers vary between runs, even for identical questions. A single run can show you cited by luck or missing by bad luck. Repeat each question at least three times, across a few days, before treating a result as real. Report a rate rather than a yes or no: "cited in 4 of 15 answers" is meaningful, "we're cited" is not.

Reading the results

• Mentioned but never linked: you are known, but your pages are not the ones the engine retrieves. Look at page structure and crawler access.
• Competitors cited and you are absent: read the pages that are cited. They usually answer the question directly, early on the page, under clear headings.
• Not mentioned anywhere: confirm search crawlers can reach you, then work on being described by third-party sources the engines already trust.

Automating it

Manual checking gets tedious past a few dozen runs, which is why tools exist for it, including Cited Lens. Whatever you use, keep the same question set over time so that week-to-week changes mean something. Be wary of any tool that reports a single snapshot without showing the underlying answers; you should be able to read the actual answer text behind every result.