When someone asks ChatGPT "what's the best tool for tracking AI visibility" or asks Claude "which agency should I hire for AEO work," something comes back. Your brand either appears in that answer or it doesn't. Most businesses genuinely don't know which.
Closing that gap is what AI brand monitoring is for.
Why ChatGPT and Claude are the two LLMs to start with
There are plenty of AI platforms: Perplexity, Gemini, Grok, Copilot. So why start with ChatGPT and Claude?
> ChatGPT and Claude are very good LLMs to get started with. They represent most of the LLM market being tracked today. If you're getting started with AI tracking or AI visibility, already mastering ChatGPT and Claude will give you an unfair advantage. — Sofian Bettayeb
They handle a large share of AI-assisted searches and recommendations. But the more practical reason is that what works in ChatGPT transfers. The content strategy that gets you cited there will almost certainly improve your visibility in Gemini and Perplexity too.
> The recommendations that apply for those two LLMs apply for most of them. — Sofian Bettayeb
Starting with two platforms also keeps the data manageable. You can see patterns, act on them, and expand once you have a baseline worth building on.
The manual approach (and why it breaks down fast)
You can do this without a tool. Open ChatGPT, type a prompt, read the response, note whether your brand appeared, record the sentiment, repeat for Claude.
For one prompt, this takes a few minutes. For 20 prompts across both platforms, you're looking at a couple of hours — and the data you collected can't be compared to anything because you didn't run the same prompts last month. No trend. No history. No way to tell if things are getting better or worse.
There's also a session contamination problem. If you've been using ChatGPT for months and talked about your industry, your brand, your competitors, your session history shapes what it tells you. What you see is not what a stranger asking the same question cold would see. That matters when you're trying to understand what potential customers actually encounter.
Why your prompts determine everything
The data you get is only as good as the prompts you run. This is where most people go wrong.
A generic prompt like "what are the best marketing tools" returns a generic answer. ChatGPT and Claude respond differently depending on how specific the question is, what context is implied, and how closely the prompt matches what your actual customers ask.
Narrow the category. Not "best software" but "best project management software for remote agencies." The tighter the framing, the better your chances of appearing in the response.
Phrase prompts the way customers actually talk. "What should I use to track AI visibility for my clients?" is a real question. "What are AI visibility tools?" is not how most people phrase it when they're genuinely looking for a solution.
Vary the intent. A comparison prompt ("how does X compare to Y") pulls different responses than a use-case prompt ("best tool for freelancers managing multiple brands") or a problem prompt ("my brand isn't showing up in AI answers, what should I fix"). You want all three.
And match the audience. Agency prompts for an agency product. E-commerce prompts for an e-commerce tool. Prompts that don't reflect your real customers produce data that has nothing to do with how you're actually being found.
For more on building a prompt strategy: How to create AEO topics and prompts.
How many prompts you actually need
50 is the right number for most brands. Enough to spot patterns without producing more data than you can act on.
It's also the limit of AEO Copilot's free plan, which means you can run a complete AI brand monitoring setup for ChatGPT and Claude without paying anything.
A reasonable split: 15 to 20 prompts on your core use case (the main questions buyers ask in your category), 10 to 15 on competitor comparisons, and 10 to 15 on the problems you solve.
Don't try to cover everything. Start with the prompts most likely to surface your brand if things are working, and most likely to show the gap if they're not.
Tracking it with AEO Copilot (free for ChatGPT and Claude)
AEO Copilot's free plan tracks ChatGPT and Claude at no cost, no credit card required. One brand, 50 prompts, manual runs whenever you want.
Setup takes about ten minutes:
- Create your brand: name, website, and up to 10 competitors
- Define your topics: each topic groups a set of related prompts
- Add your prompts: the specific questions you want to test
- Run: AEO Copilot queries both platforms in fresh, isolated sessions and records the results
Each run returns a Visibility Score, a Sentiment breakdown, a Competitive Share, and a Visibility Trend as you build up runs over time.
The clean session approach matters. Every prompt runs as a new user with no history, so the results reflect what a cold prospect sees, not what ChatGPT returns to someone already deep in your industry.
Start tracking for free →
What to do with the data
Running the prompts is the easy part. Reading what comes back is the work.
When your brand appears, check how it's described. A mention isn't always a good one. "Brand X is an option, though some users report difficulty with onboarding" is a mention, but every time someone sees that response, the AI is adding friction before they've even clicked through. That's a content problem you can fix.
When your brand doesn't appear, look at who does. The competitors showing up in your place are getting cited for a reason. Read those responses and figure out what they have that you don't. It might be a clearer use case page, a more direct answer to the question, or just content structured in a way models can parse and yours isn't.
Run the same prompts consistently. One run tells you almost nothing. Six to eight weeks of runs tells you whether anything you're doing is actually moving the needle.
For the full breakdown of which metrics to track: AEO metrics that actually matter.
Frequently asked questions
Why does it matter if ChatGPT mentions my brand?
More buyers get recommendations from AI before they open a search engine or visit a website. If ChatGPT and Claude consistently recommend competitors instead of you, you're losing consideration before the comparison stage even starts, and you'd never know unless you checked.
Is tracking brand mentions in ChatGPT actually free?
With AEO Copilot, yes. The free plan covers one brand, 50 prompts, tracking across ChatGPT and Claude, no credit card required. Most other tools offer a short trial or put ChatGPT behind a paid tier.
How is this different from Google Alerts?
Google Alerts monitors web content for your brand name. AI brand monitoring tracks what language models say about your brand when someone asks a question. A brand can have strong web presence and still be invisible in AI answers. They measure completely different things.
How often should I run my prompts?
Once a week is enough. AI outputs don't shift dramatically day to day, and a single run is too noisy to mean much. The pattern over four to eight weeks is what you're actually looking for.
Can I track more than two LLMs on the free plan?
The free plan covers ChatGPT and Claude. Perplexity and Google AI Overviews are on paid plans. For most brands starting out, ChatGPT and Claude are the right focus. Once you have a real baseline there, adding more platforms is straightforward.
What if my brand doesn't appear at all?
That's still useful. Zero visibility usually means either a content gap (the AI doesn't have enough to work with to cite you) or a technical gap (crawlers can't access your site properly). The technical audit covers the second. For the first: how to show up on ChatGPT.