Checking what LLMs says about your brand is the new 'Google yourself'!

So this started as a random Friday afternoon thing at our agency.

A client asked us half jokingly "what does ChatGPT say about us when someone asks for the best [their category] tool?" We typed it in.

Silence. Competitor mentioned three times. Our client? Not once.

That was about 14 months ago. Since then I've become a little obsessed with this.

We started running the same test for every client we onboard and the results are honestly wild.

Some brands with mediocre SEO are consistently cited by ChatGPT because they have a few well-placed Reddit threads and some third-party review mentions.

Others with years of solid Google rankings are basically ghosts in AI search.

The rules are just different. AI search doesn't care about your DA.

It cares about whether credible external sources talk about you, whether your content directly answers the question being asked, and whether your brand exists in enough contexts across the web for the model to feel confident citing you.

I've spent the last year building a tool around this called Scout, we're launching on Product Hunt on June 2nd.

But genuinely, I'm curious before then: has anyone here tested this for their own product? What came up when you asked ChatGPT to recommend something in your category?

The answers are usually either really reassuring or a bit of a gut punch. Either way they're useful.