What ChatGPT tells buyers about you
Somebody describes their problem to ChatGPT and gets three businesses back. This finds out whether one of them is yours, and hands you the changes that would make it so.
We read: API + web search · checked 2026-08
How people actually use ChatGPT
- They ask the way they would ask a friend, not the way they would search. Not “plumber Bristol” but “my boiler has started leaking and I need someone today, who should I call”. A whole situation, in one sentence, with the actual constraint buried in the middle of it.
- Then they narrow it down without starting again. “Which of those is cheapest?” “Do any of them come out on a Sunday?” Every follow-up is another chance to be dropped from a shortlist you were briefly on, and you never find out that it happened.
- They mostly do not click. The answer is where the search ends, not a page of links to somewhere it continues, so being the site that would have ranked first is not the same as being in the paragraph that replaced it.
Where its answers come from
ChatGPT · API + web search
We ask through the API with web search switched on, and every result you get says so. That is not the same thing as the ChatGPT app on your phone: the app carries your past conversations, your account, your location and settings nobody outside it can see. The API asks cold. That is the point: it is the only way to ask the same question twice, months apart, and have the difference between the two answers mean something rather than reflect whose phone it was asked on.
This is stated on every result you get, not only here. See how the score is calculated.
What we measure, and what counts as good
Every answer ChatGPT gives is graded on the same four-step scale as every other engine, so your columns are comparable. The scale is ordinal and every step carries a word and a mark as well as a shade — nothing here is colour alone.
- AbsentYou are not in the answer at all
- NamedMentioned, one of several
- RecommendedAI tells them to choose you
- CitedYour site is the source it quotes
- Predates your last change
What to expect on ChatGPT
Cited is the hardest verdict to earn here and the rarest, because this engine names businesses far more often than it links to them. Do not read a recommended without a citation as a near miss. On this engine it is the strong result, and it still puts your name in front of somebody who is ready to buy.
What moves this engine
In the order worth doing them. These are checks from the scan itself, not general advice. Each one is graded on your site and each one comes with the change written out.
- 1Let AI systems read your websiteIf ChatGPT and Perplexity cannot fetch your pages when someone asks about you, nothing else on this list matters.about 2 minutes
- 2Answer your customer questionsEngines lift sentences that answer the question directly. Pages that describe the company instead get skipped in favour of a competitor who simply says the price.about 120 minutes
- 3Help AI understand your servicesStructured data is the most reliable way to state facts about your business that a model will not misread.about 30 minutes
15 checks run on your website in total, and the scan reports every one of them. These are the ones that matter most for this engine.
What we will not tell you
- What share of your customers use ChatGPT. Nobody can measure that for your business, ourselves included, and a percentage invented to sound authoritative is worse than no number at all. Your scorecard shows each engine separately so you can weigh them against what you know about your own buyers.
- That we can guarantee an answer changes. We can tell you what it says today, what the engines cite instead of you, and which specific things about your site are stopping them. Then we re-scan and show you the before and the after. Anyone promising a position is selling you something they do not control.
- That a single scan settles it. These answers move. One reading is a snapshot, which is why the licence includes a re-scan and why monitoring exists as something you can add rather than something we pretend one scan already is.
Common questions
Is this the ChatGPT app I use on my phone?
No, and nothing you can buy scans that. The app answers you personally, using your history and your location, so no two people get the same answer and no answer can be reproduced tomorrow. We read the API with web search on, which asks your question cold, and we label every result with that. A tool that shows you a number for “what ChatGPT says” without telling you which of the two it read has not decided the question, it has just not mentioned it.
How much do the answers change between scans?
Enough that one scan is a snapshot rather than a verdict. The engines re-read the web, the models get updated, and the same question can come back differently a fortnight later. That is why every licence includes a re-scan after you have made the fixes, and why continuous monitoring exists as an add-on rather than being the thing we pretend a single scan already is.
I already rank first on Google. Is that not enough?
It helps and it is not the same thing. Ranking is about which links get shown; this is about which businesses get named in a paragraph that appears instead of the links. A site can be first for its main search term and absent from every answer, usually because the crawlers these engines send out cannot read it, or because the facts they need (what you do, where, for how much) are in an image, a PDF or a booking widget rather than in text.
The other engines
The quickest way to find out is to look at your own result.
Scan my site freeChatGPT is a trade mark of its owner. MentionMachine is not affiliated with, endorsed by or connected to it, and the mark drawn beside its name on this page is our own. What is described here about how ChatGPT behaves was last checked 2026-08; if something on this page is out of date or wrong, tell us and we will correct it.