Have you ever checked whether ChatGPT knows your product exists?

A founder told me something this week that I have not seen said plainly anywhere, so I am passing it on.

He runs a directory that has done 100k over four years. He can see AI traffic arriving, but only through Bing Webmaster Tools. Never in his analytics.

That took a second to land and then made complete sense. ChatGPT's retrieval leans on Bing's index, so Bing sees the crawl and impression side of it. Your analytics never gets the chance, because most assistant traffic arrives with no referrer at all and quietly files itself under direct. So you can be getting cited, and getting clicks off the back of it, while your dashboard shows you nothing.

Which makes Bing Webmaster Tools about the cheapest AI visibility check going, and almost nobody has it installed because we all wrote Bing off a decade ago.

The other half of the check is free and takes two minutes. Open ChatGPT, or Perplexity, or Claude, and ask the question a buyer would actually ask. Not your product name. The problem. Best tool for X, or how do I do Y. Then see whether you get named, paraphrased without credit, or ignored entirely. I did it for my own thing and it was humbling.

So, two questions for anyone who fancies it.

Have you actually checked, and were you cited, paraphrased, or absent?

And if you have been named in AI answers, did you ever work out why? I am trying to understand whether it tracks with ranking, with being talked about on Reddit, with having a Crunchbase or Wikipedia entry, or with something else entirely.