---
title: "AI Tracking: How to Track Brand Mentions in AI Search"
url: "/blog/ai-tracking"
canonical_url: "https://crunchjunkie.io/blog/ai-tracking"
markdown_url: "https://crunchjunkie.io/blog/ai-tracking.md"
language: "en"
last_updated: "2026-10-02"
type: "blog"
summary: "AI tracking: ask ChatGPT, Gemini and Google's AI your buyers' questions, count who gets named. The method, and what tracking our own brand showed."
site: "CrunchJunkie"
llms_txt: "https://crunchjunkie.io/llms.txt"
---

# AI Tracking: How to Track Brand Mentions in AI Search
Source: https://crunchjunkie.io/blog/ai-tracking
Published: 2026-10-02 · By Philipp Enders · AI visibility · 11 min read

AI tracking is how you find out whether AI assistants name your brand when people ask them about your category. You put your buyers' questions to ChatGPT, Gemini, Google's AI Overviews and the others, many times over, and count the answers that name you, link to you, or recommend someone else. It can be done, though not with a single lookup, and apart from Google, which reports impressions for its own AI surfaces, no AI company gives you the numbers. We track our own brand this way. Asked 22 questions about our own category, ChatGPT named us in 0 of 176 answers. Below is how to set it up, and what tracking ourselves taught us.

## Is it possible to track brand mentions in AI search?
Yes, by sampling. There is no Search Console for ChatGPT, and no AI company reports how often it recommends a brand. What you can do is ask the questions yourself, on a schedule, and keep count. That gives you a sample rather than a census. A few hundred answers is enough to see who gets named and who does not.

Four things are worth recording for every answer: whether the text names your brand, whether it links to your site as a source, where in the answer you appear, and which other brands it names. The first two are separate events. An answer can link your page and recommend a competitor in the same paragraph, which is why we treat them as two metrics ([cited isn't named](https://crunchjunkie.io/blog/cited-isnt-named-ai-search)).

The term has other meanings too, such as following objects in video or monitoring how staff use AI tools. This article is about brands in AI answers only.

## Why track your brand in AI answers?
Because the answer is often the shortlist. Ask ChatGPT for the best tool in a category and it names three to six, with a line on each. A buyer who reads that list may never search for you by name.

Your analytics will not show it. GA4 records a visit only when someone clicks a link in an answer, and most answers end without a click. Search Console now reports impressions in Google's AI Overviews and AI Mode, but only for Google's own surfaces, and an impression is not a recommendation. If you want to know what ChatGPT tells your buyers, you have to ask it, and more than once.

## How to track brand mentions in AI search, step by step
1. Write down 20 to 30 questions a buyer asks before they know your name: the best tool for a job, alternatives to a competitor, how to solve the problem you solve. Leave out questions that contain your brand. An engine names you when the question does, so such questions measure nothing. Our two brand questions named us in 48 of 48 answers.

2. Pick the engines your buyers use. For most markets that means ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews and AI Mode, Gemini and Perplexity, then Claude and Microsoft Copilot. Three is a reasonable start.

3. Ask every question more than once. The same question to the same engine gives a different answer on a different day, sometimes with a different winner. The chart at the top of this article is one question, asked eight times.

4. Record four things per answer: named or not, linked or not, position in the answer, and every other brand it names. Keep the full answer text.

5. Turn the answers into a number the right way. Visibility is the answers that name you divided by all answers. Add up first, divide once. Do not average daily or per-engine percentages, because a day or an engine with fewer answers would then count as much as the rest.

6. Read a sample of the answers behind the number. An empty or cut-off answer still counts as an answer, one that named nobody, and it pulls every brand down. We found exactly this in our own data while writing this article.

7. Repeat every week and compare months, not days.

A spreadsheet with one row per answer is enough to start. These three rows are real, from 30 September 2026.

| Engine | Named us | Linked our site | Brands from our list it named | Answer length |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| ChatGPT | No | No | Profound, Ahrefs Brand Radar, Otterly AI, Peec AI | 2,598 characters |
| Claude | No | No | Profound, Ahrefs Brand Radar, Otterly AI, Peec AI, SE Ranking | 2,145 characters, cut off |
| Gemini | No | No | Profound | 684 characters, cut off |

One question, "best AI brand visibility tracking tool", three engines, 30 September 2026. Brands counted are the ones on our competitor list.

## What tracking our own brand showed
We sell an AI tracking tool, so we track ourselves. Our project has 24 questions. Two contain our name. The other 22 are what a buyer of a tool like ours would ask, from "best AI brand visibility tracking tool" to "how do I track my brand's visibility in Google AI Mode and AI Overviews". Three engines answered each question on eight days between 5 and 30 September 2026.

Asked the 22 questions, ChatGPT named us in 0 of 176 answers and did not link to our site once. All 13 links to crunchjunkie.io that month came from the two questions with our name in them. Claude and Gemini did not name us in any of their answers either.

ChatGPT did name other tools, and often.

![Bar chart: share of ChatGPT's answers to 22 questions about AI visibility tools that named each brand. Profound 42%, Otterly AI 39%, Ahrefs Brand Radar 36%, Scrunch AI 36%, Peec AI 31%, AthenaHQ 10%, SE Ranking 5%, Conductor 2%, CrunchJunkie 0%.](https://crunchjunkie.io/blog/img/ai-tracking-chatgpt-brands-en.webp)

| Brand | Answers naming it | Answers counted | Share |
| --- | ---: | ---: | ---: |
| Profound | 74 | 176 | 42.0% |
| Otterly AI | 69 | 176 | 39.2% |
| Ahrefs Brand Radar | 64 | 176 | 36.4% |
| Scrunch AI | 55 | 154 | 35.7% |
| Peec AI | 54 | 176 | 30.7% |
| AthenaHQ | 16 | 154 | 10.4% |
| SE Ranking | 6 | 110 | 5.5% |
| Conductor | 4 | 176 | 2.3% |
| CrunchJunkie | 0 | 176 | 0.0% |

Answers from ChatGPT to the 22 questions that named each brand, 5 to 30 September 2026. Brands added to our list later were counted from that day on.

## What the numbers say, and what they don't
The top four are close. With 176 answers the margin of error on each share is about seven points either way, so the order of Profound, Otterly AI, Ahrefs Brand Radar and Scrunch AI is not settled. Our zero is settled. And a tool ChatGPT sometimes put first is not in the table at all, which the next section explains.

The table uses ChatGPT only. In the same month 20 of Claude's 176 answers to these questions came back empty, and many of Gemini's stopped after a few sentences: 62 of 176 were shorter than 300 characters. An empty or cut-off answer counts as one that names nobody, so including them would push every brand down. Every ChatGPT answer had text; the shortest was 1,171 characters long.

What we take from it: being found when someone asks about you is easy. Being named when someone asks about the category is a different problem, and a harder one. We have work to do.

## How to track competitors in AI answers
Record every brand an answer names, not only the ones on your list. Your list will be wrong. Ours was. Semrush was not on our competitor list, so the table above has no row for it. Yet ChatGPT's answer to "best AI brand visibility tracking tool" on 30 September opened with "Best overall: Semrush AI Visibility Toolkit", as it had on 28 September. And semrush.com was the site ChatGPT linked most often: in 84 of the 176 answers.

Then look at what the answers link to. For our 22 questions, the ten sites ChatGPT linked most often were all first-party: a vendor's own pages or a platform's own documentation. When an engine needs a fact about a product, it reads the product's own site. A plain page with your prices, features and the engines you cover is the cheapest fix on this list. We looked at this from the other side in [the pages AI already cites](https://crunchjunkie.io/blog/pages-ai-already-cites).

Share of voice, your mentions as a share of all brands' mentions, is only as good as the list behind it. Leave a brand out and everyone else's share goes up.

| Site | Answers linking it |
| --- | ---: |
| semrush.com | 84 |
| help.ahrefs.com | 46 |
| otterly.ai | 42 |
| tryprofound.com | 41 |
| peec.ai | 41 |
| ahrefs.com | 36 |
| developers.google.com | 34 |
| scrunch.com | 28 |
| support.google.com | 26 |
| help.openai.com | 24 |

The ten sites ChatGPT linked most often in its 176 answers to the 22 questions, 5 to 30 September 2026.

## How to track AI traffic in GA4 and Search Console
Both are free, and both are worth setting up, as long as you know what they cannot see.

GA4 has a default channel called AI Assistant. Google describes it as "the channel by which users arrive at your site from sources like ChatGPT, Gemini, Deepseek, Copilot, or Grok" and adds: "It excludes Google's AI Overviews and AI Mode." There is nothing to install. Open Traffic acquisition and switch the dimension to Session source to see which assistant sent each visit.

Search Console has a Generative AI performance report, which Google rolled out to all sites on 31 August 2026. It counts impressions, in Google's words "how many times links to your site were shown to a user in a generative AI feature", in AI Overviews and AI Mode. An empty report can mean you have too few impressions to show, not that you have none. We went through it in [Search Console's Generative AI report](https://crunchjunkie.io/blog/google-search-console-generative-ai-report).

Neither tool sees an answer that names you without a click, or one that names a competitor instead. That is the part AI tracking covers.

## Does it work the same in AI Overviews, AI Mode, ChatGPT and Perplexity?
The method is the same. The details differ by engine. Google's AI Overviews appear only on some searches, so a check is a Google search that may or may not show one. AI Mode is a conversation and behaves more like ChatGPT. ChatGPT and Perplexity answer in an app and through an API, and the two do not always agree; we compared them in [scraping vs API](https://crunchjunkie.io/blog/scraping-vs-api-ai-visibility-accuracy). The engines also disagree with each other about the same brand, so one engine is not a sample of AI search. Google's two surfaces have their own guide, [tracking AI Overviews and AI Mode](https://crunchjunkie.io/blog/track-ai-overviews-and-ai-mode-visibility), and [why AI engines disagree](https://crunchjunkie.io/blog/why-ai-engines-disagree-about-your-brand) covers the rest.

## How many answers before a number means something?
More than most dashboards show. ChatGPT's first pick for one question changed between four tools in eight answers. Across all 22 questions Profound was named in 74 of 176 answers, 42 per cent, and Otterly AI in 69, 39 per cent. The margin of error on each is about seven points, so that gap could be noise.

Two habits keep the numbers honest. Put the number of answers next to every percentage. And treat a change as real only when it is bigger than the margin of error, which on a few hundred answers is several points. We ran the same study twice to see how much rankings move when nothing has changed: [noise or signal](https://crunchjunkie.io/blog/ai-visibility-noise-vs-signal). Which metrics are worth reporting is in [AI visibility metrics that matter](https://crunchjunkie.io/blog/ai-visibility-metrics-that-matter).

## How to choose an AI tracking tool
Doing this by hand works for a month. After that the asking, counting and reading add up to hours every week, and that is when a tool earns its money. Check five things before you buy: which engines it asks and how, in the app or through an API; how often it asks each question; whether it shows the number of answers next to every percentage; whether it records every brand an answer names or only the ones you entered; and whether you can open the answer behind every number.

We build one of these tools, [CrunchJunkie](https://crunchjunkie.io/products/ai-visibility), so read this section with that in mind. Our [buyer's guide to AI search monitoring tools](https://crunchjunkie.io/blog/best-ai-search-monitoring-tools-2026) compares the others, with prices. Claude made the same point in one of the answers we tracked: "Most 'best of' lists online are written by vendors who rank themselves first, so I'd treat those rankings with caution." That includes ours.

### FAQ
**What is AI tracking?**
AI tracking is the practice of asking AI assistants such as ChatGPT, Gemini and Google's AI Overviews the questions your buyers ask, repeatedly, and recording whether each answer names your brand, links to your site, and which competitors it names instead. The result is a visibility rate: the answers that name you divided by all answers.

**Is it possible to track brand mentions in AI answers?**
Yes, by sampling. No AI company publishes how often it names a brand, so you put a fixed set of questions to each engine on a schedule and count the answers that name you. A few hundred answers is enough to see who gets named. A single check is not, because the same question gets a different answer on a different day.

**Can I track AI mentions for free?**
Partly. Asking the engines yourself and keeping a spreadsheet costs nothing but time. GA4's AI Assistant channel shows visits from ChatGPT, Gemini and other assistants, and Search Console's Generative AI report shows impressions in AI Overviews and AI Mode. Neither shows a mention that did not lead to a click.

**Does Google Search Console show AI Mode?**
Yes. Since 31 August 2026 every site has a Generative AI performance report in Search Console covering AI Overviews and AI Mode. It counts impressions of links to your site, not whether the answer named your brand.

**How often should I check my AI visibility?**
Weekly is enough for most brands. Answers change from run to run, so compare a month of pooled answers with the month before rather than one day with the next, and only call a change real when it is bigger than the margin of error.

**Is AI tracking the same as rank tracking?**
No. A search result is a list of links that stays fairly stable from day to day. An AI answer names a handful of brands in prose and changes between runs. Your position inside an answer exists, but whether you are named at all matters more.

### Methodology & data
Measured with CrunchJunkie, which we build, in the AI-visibility project for crunchjunkie.io, market United States. 24 tracked questions: two contain our brand name, 22 do not; one of the 22 is in German. Engines: ChatGPT (GPT-5.6 Luna through OpenAI's API, with web search), Claude (Sonnet 5.5 with Anthropic's web search) and Gemini (3.6 Flash with Google Search grounding). Each question was asked once per engine on each of eight scan days: 5, 7, 10, 14, 21, 28, 29 and 30 September 2026. That gives 576 answers, 528 of them to the 22 questions without our name, 176 per engine. A brand counts as named when the answer text names it; a link to its site without the name does not count. Brands are counted against the project's competitor list: Profound, Otterly AI, Peec AI, Ahrefs Brand Radar and Conductor for the whole period, Scrunch AI and AthenaHQ from 7 September (154 ChatGPT answers each) and SE Ranking from 14 September (110). Semrush was not on the list, so its mentions were not counted; what the article says about it comes from the answer text and the linked domains. The brand table uses ChatGPT's 176 answers only: 20 of Claude's 176 answers were empty and 62 of Gemini's 176 were shorter than 300 characters, most of them incomplete fragments. Shares are pooled: answers naming a brand, divided once by the answers counted. Margins of error are 95 per cent intervals (normal approximation). Linked domains count the ChatGPT answers whose cited sources include the domain; all 13 links to crunchjunkie.io came from the two questions with our name in them. Quotes from AI answers are taken from the stored answers on the dates given. Every number in this article was computed from the answer records by a script and checked against the totals CrunchJunkie shows.

### Sources
- [[GA4] Default channel group — Analytics Help](https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/9756891?hl=en)
- [Generative AI performance report (Search) — Search Console Help](https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/16984139)