Is there a free AI visibility checker that shows if ChatGPT mentions my company?

Free AI visibility checkers exist, and the useful ones do one simple thing. They put real buyer questions to ChatGPT and other engines, then record what comes back.

A good check tells you three things for each question:

• Whether you are named. Does the answer mention your company at all?
• How you are described. Is the price, product name or category right, or is something wrong?
• Who gets cited instead. Which sites does the engine point to when it answers?

That is a real signal. If a buyer asks "best payroll tool for a 20-person agency" and ChatGPT lists five competitors, you've learned something you can act on. For a fuller breakdown of the outputs, see what an AI brand checker checks.

What a free check cannot do is tell you how often you appear across every question buyers ask, or whether that is changing. It is a photograph, not a film.

The same question can get a different answer tomorrow. Four mechanisms cause this, and none of them is under your control.

ChatGPT decides when to search

As of October 2026, ChatGPT search is model-discretionary: the model chooses per question whether to fetch live web results. With search off, it answers from training data frozen at a cutoff. OpenAI's model docs list a February 16, 2026 cutoff for the GPT-5.6 family and August 31, 2025 for the Instant path, so "what ChatGPT knows" is not one value.

ChatGPT rewrites the question

OpenAI's help page on ChatGPT search says it "typically rewrites your query into one or more targeted queries" before sending them to search providers. The prompt a checker types is a proxy for the queries that actually run.

Memory changes results

Logged-in users with memory enabled can get answers shaped by their saved context. A checker measures a clean session, which is not what every buyer sees.

Models change

Vendors update default models and routing without notice. A result from last month may describe a different system.

The practical move: treat a free check as a baseline, and re-run the same questions later to see whether anything moved.

Most free checkers roll results into a single number. Read it with three limits in mind.

It averages two kinds of answer. Because retrieval fires per question, a score blends live-search answers with training-data answers. Nobody outside the engine can fully separate them. The page on how an AI visibility score is calculated covers the weighting.

It is not a rank. Google's Search Console report for AI features exposes impressions only, with no position data, and ChatGPT publishes no ranking factors beyond "multiple factors". There's no ground truth for an AI position, which is why AI rank checkers have no rank to check.

It hides platform differences. In OtterlyAI's 2026 experiment with two AI-generated sites, Otterly reported that 2,718 of 3,934 tracked citations for one site came from Microsoft Copilot, while ChatGPT cited it effectively zero times. A blended number would have hidden that split. Compare the approaches in one score vs per-platform scores.

A low score is also not proof that AI has never heard of you. It means you were not named for those questions on that day. More on that in what a zero score means.

The levers with the strongest evidence are access levers. They work by removing blocks, not by adding tricks. Check these before rewriting anything.

1. Per-bot robots.txt rules. OpenAI's crawler docs say each setting is independent. GPTBot governs training use. OAI-SearchBot controls whether you can appear in ChatGPT search answers. A blanket AI block can remove you from ChatGPT search without anyone noticing.
2. Firewall and CDN rules. A firewall can return a 403 to a crawler that robots.txt allows. OpenAI says eligibility requires allowing OAI-SearchBot and letting its published IP addresses through.
3. JavaScript-only content. Vercel found that ChatGPT and Claude crawlers fetch JavaScript files (11.50% and 23.84% of requests) but don't execute them. Pricing or product facts that load only after JavaScript runs may be invisible to them.
4. Specific, fetchable facts. A plain sentence stating your price or what you do gives an engine something it can quote.

A robots.txt that keeps training out but allows ChatGPT search looks like this:

User-agent: GPTBot
Disallow: /

User-agent: OAI-SearchBot
Allow: /

Fixing access makes you eligible. It does not guarantee a mention, because the model still decides what to say. Skip schema-for-citations, llms.txt and "AI-friendly" rewrites: the evidence does not show they get you cited.

A free check is only as good as the questions you give it.

1. Use buyer questions, not your brand name. "Best accounting software for a small bakery" tests whether you're recommended. "What is [your brand]" mostly tests whether you exist.
2. Read the answer text. Note wrong prices, old product names or competitor mix-ups. Wrong facts are often the most fixable finding.
3. Look at the cited sites. When engines cite other sites, being named on those sites is associated with appearing in the answer.
4. Repeat later with the same questions. Change nothing in the prompts so the comparison means something.

The free checker on this site runs up to three buyer questions, yours or ones written from your homepage, and scores the answers per engine. For a ChatGPT-only walkthrough, see the free ChatGPT brand mention check.

Can a free checker show what ChatGPT tells my actual customers? Not exactly. Logged-in users may get answers shaped by memory and custom instructions, and ChatGPT rewrites each question into its own search queries. A checker runs a clean session with the questions you choose. That makes results comparable over time, but it is a proxy for what any one buyer sees, not a recording of it.

Does blocking GPTBot remove me from ChatGPT answers? Not from ChatGPT search. OpenAI's crawler documentation says each setting is independent: GPTBot covers training use, and OAI-SearchBot controls whether your site can appear in ChatGPT search answers. You can block GPTBot and still allow OAI-SearchBot. Blocking OAI-SearchBot is what removes you from search answers, though your site can still appear as a navigational link.

How often should I re-run a free AI visibility check? Often enough to see change, rarely enough that something could have changed. After you fix a crawler block or correct facts on your site, re-run the same questions a few weeks later. Keep the wording identical. Answers vary between runs on their own, so treat one shift as a prompt to look closer, not as proof of a trend.

Why does Perplexity or Gemini name me when ChatGPT doesn't? Each engine draws on different indexes, crawlers and models. Google's AI features require a page to be indexed in Google Search, while Copilot grounds on Bing, and ChatGPT uses its own crawler plus partner search providers. Access can be fine for one engine and blocked for another. Check each crawler's permission and reachability separately rather than assuming one result explains the rest.