How to check if AI search engines mention your brand.

Two different checks.

Checking whether AI search engines mention your brand means checking whether assistants such as ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Google's AI Overviews name you in their answers. There are two questions hiding in that, and they need different checks.

• Does the assistant know you? Ask it about your business by name: "What is Acme and what does it cost?" This tells you what it has read about you and whether it gets the facts right.
• Does the assistant recommend you? Ask it what a buyer would ask, without your name in the question: "What's the best invoicing tool for a small agency?" This tells you whether you come up when someone is choosing.

The second is the one that brings customers, and it is the one most people skip. An assistant can describe you perfectly when asked and still never name you when a buyer asks for options.

We asked Gemini "What's the best tool to check if AI search engines mention my brand?" on 27 September 2026. It searched for "best tools to monitor brand mentions in ai search engines", cited 10 pages including Semrush's free checker and lists from Nightwatch and WP Engine, and named ten tools across dedicated trackers and SEO suites. It also suggested checking by hand for a baseline, which is where to start.

How to check by hand.

A manual check costs nothing and teaches you more about your market than any dashboard. Give it an hour.

1. Write down 10 buying questions in your buyers' words. Mix the kinds: "best X for Y", "alternative to X", "X vs Y", "how do I" questions your product answers.
2. Ask each one in the assistants your buyers use. Turn on web search where there is a choice, and start a fresh chat each time with memory off, so earlier chats do not steer the answer.
3. Record four things per answer: whether you were named, which businesses were named, how you were described if you were, and which pages were cited.
4. Ask each question again on other days. One answer is a sample of one.

A plain spreadsheet is enough: one row per answer, with columns for the date, the assistant, the question, whether you were named, who else was named, and the cited pages.

Then add your brand-name check: ask each assistant what your business does and what it costs, and note anything wrong. A wrong price or a retired plan in an answer usually traces back to a page that still says it.

The weak point of a manual check is how much answers vary. We track our own buying questions on Gemini every day. The ten answers to "I'm a marketer and I want to track AI recommendations. What are the best tools for that?" between 18 and 27 September 2026 named 34 different businesses between them. The one named most often, Mentionova, appeared in 5 of the 10. If you checked on a single day, you could have concluded either that Mentionova leads the category or that Gemini ignores it.

How to read what you collect.

Once you have a week of answers, turn them into three numbers per question.

• A rate, with its sample. Divide the answers that named you by the answers you checked, and keep both figures: "named in 3 of 20 answers" says more than "15%", because it shows how little the figure rests on.
• Where you appeared. If you were named, note the position and the words used: first in a list of five, described correctly, reads differently from a passing mention with last year's price.
• Who was named instead. Count the businesses named in your place across all answers. The one named most often is the one whose pages the assistant keeps finding.
• Which answers searched. When an assistant answers from memory without searching, no page you publish this month changes that answer. Set those aside, and put your effort into the questions where it searched and cited pages you could be on.

Then read the pages cited when a competitor was named. They tell you what to write, and where to ask to be listed.

Free tools that check for you.

Two free options remove most of the typing.

Semrush's AI Search Visibility Checker. You enter your domain and get a report across ChatGPT, Gemini, Google AI Overviews and AI Mode: a visibility score, mentions, citations of your site, and a comparison with competitors. It runs three times a day without an account. It draws on Semrush's own database of prompts and responses, so the report covers prompts from that database; you do not choose them. Semrush's free checker

outrankfast's free plan. You choose three buying questions, and outrankfast asks each one on Gemini, grounded with Google Search, six times, once every 30 days. It stores each full answer, the searches Gemini ran and the pages it cited, and shows who was named in your place. It needs an account but no card, and it measures Gemini only.

The two answer different questions. The first shows how you appear across four assistants on questions someone else picked. The second shows whether one assistant names you on the questions you care about.

Paid trackers, from $29 a month.

If a daily or weekly record is what you need, a tracker asks your questions on a schedule and keeps the answers. The cheapest entry plans we found, with prices read off each vendor's page on 26 September 2026:

Twelve trackers compared on price, prompts, assistants and MCP access are in the best AI recommendation tracking tools.

How to pick one.

Four questions settle most choices:

• Which assistants do your buyers use? A tracker that skips the one your buyers ask is measuring someone else's market.
• Whose questions does it ask? Some tools report on a database of prompts they chose; others ask the ones you write. For your own buying questions, you want the second.
• How often does it ask? Answers vary from day to day, so a daily check builds a usable rate within a couple of weeks. A weekly check needs longer.
• Can you read the answer behind each number? A rate is only as good as the answers under it. Being able to open the full answer, the searches and the cited pages is how you find out why you were left out.

What to do when you are not mentioned.

Most businesses are not, at first. We run this check on our own site: across 84 Gemini answers to 14 buying questions, 17 to 27 September 2026, outrankfast was named in none. That result is the starting point, and the cited pages in those answers say where to go next.

Look at which businesses were named instead and which pages the answers cited. Get onto the lists the assistant reads, and publish a page for each question where you have none. How to get your business recommended by ChatGPT and Gemini takes those steps in order, and how to track whether AI recommends your business covers keeping the record once you start.