Measurement library
How to measure whether ChatGPT cites your company
Ask a fixed set of unbranded buyer questions, repeat each one, and record for every answer whether your hostname appeared in the returned source list. That is a citation. Whether the answer text names your company is a separate result called a brand mention, and the two must be counted separately because an answer can do either without the other. Asking ChatGPT whether it recommends you is not a measurement, because putting your brand in the question guarantees it appears in the answer.
Published 2026-08-03. Reviewed 2026-08-03. Published by ShiftNode Digital s.r.o.
Why you cannot use your own brand name in the question
The question you ask determines the retrieval. If you ask whether a named company is good at something, the retrieval is seeded with that name and the answer will almost certainly discuss it. That tells you how the model describes you when prompted, which is a useful sentiment check, but it tells you nothing about whether a buyer who has never heard of you would encounter you.
A visibility measurement therefore uses questions a buyer would actually type before they know the vendor set, with no brand name in them.
Separate the three results
Collapsing these into one visibility score destroys the only actionable part of the result. Being mentioned without a link and being linked without a mention call for different work.
- Citation. Your hostname appeared in a source URL returned with the answer. This is deterministic and checkable.
- Brand mention. The recorded answer text named your brand. This can happen with no link at all.
- Sentiment. How a confirmed mention was framed. Only meaningful when there is a mention to frame.
Record the denominator
A citation count is meaningless without the number of checks it came from, and that number is not the number of questions you asked. Some checks fail: a provider errors, rate limits, or returns an answer with no usable source list. Those are unmeasured, not zero.
Report the completion rate alongside the citation rate. A 10% citation rate from 40 completed checks and a 10% citation rate from 4 completed checks are not the same claim.
What crawler access does and does not buy you
OpenAI documents separate crawlers for separate jobs, and blocking the wrong one produces a confusing result. Allowing a crawler permits retrieval. It does not promise that any answer will select your page as a source.
What this page does not establish
- Answer engines are probabilistic. The same question can return different sources on repeated runs, which is why repeats and confidence intervals matter more than a single reading.
- A controlled question panel is a sample of plausible buyer language, not observed search-volume data. It does not tell you how often anyone actually asks those questions.
Sources
Run a free audit to see this measurement format applied to your own domain, or read the full measurement method.