Does ChatGPT recommend your store? Here's how to check.

Shoppers increasingly ask ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI "where should I buy X" instead of googling it. There's no rankings page to check anymore — just one answer. Here's a free, manual way to see if that answer includes you, in about 10 minutes.

1. Ask the question a real shopper would ask

Not your brand name — the question someone types when they don't know your store exists yet. Open ChatGPT (or Perplexity, or Google's AI Overview) and ask something like:

Use the phrasing your customers would actually use, not your marketing copy.

2. Try 5–10 variations, not just one

A single answer can be noisy — AI models don't return the same result every time. Vary the wording, ask about specific products you sell, and ask about your category in general. Keep a simple tally: mentioned or not, and who else showed up.

3. Write down who actually gets named

This is the useful part. You're not just checking if you appear — you're mapping who AI trusts instead of you. If a specific competitor keeps coming up, that tells you where to look next: their reviews, their content, where they're mentioned online.

What actually influences the answer

AI assistants aren't ranking pages — they're synthesizing an answer from what's been written about you elsewhere: reviews on Google/Trustpilot, mentions on Reddit and forums, comparison articles, structured product data, and how clearly your own site states what you sell and who it's for. Thin or vague product pages give the model nothing to cite.

The catch with doing this manually

It works, but it doesn't scale: answers shift over time, there are three-plus AI engines worth checking, and you need to repeat this regularly to catch changes — not just once. That's the whole reason we built ShelfRadar: it runs this exact check across your real buying questions and tells you, in one report, whether you're mentioned and who's beating you.