For twenty years, search has meant ranking. Your brand showed up on a results page somewhere between position one and position 10, and the rest was up to the user. AI changed that. When someone asks ChatGPT or Google’s AI Mode "what are the best lip balms for hydration?", the model doesn’t hand back 10 links. It picks a few brands and puts them in the answer; your brand is either in that answer or it isn’t.
That’s a different job than SEO, and the data backs it up. In our recent Glimmer research survey on changing consumer search behavior, traditional Google search and the LLMs agreed on a brand only 33% of the time. If GEO were just SEO with a new name, those numbers would match. They don’t, so your brand’s strategy can’t either. The LLMs have effectively added a new search channel.
This new search channel is one that doesn’t send much traffic. Consumers now get their answer inside the chat and often never click through, which means the old scoreboard (rankings, sessions, clicks) tells brands less and less about whether they’re actually being chosen.
If your brand traffic has been flat or falling while your rankings hold steady, or if competitors keep showing up in AI answers when you don’t, that’s the gap ChatTrak was built to close.
WHAT CHATTRAK IS
ChatTrak is the AI visibility platform we built in-house to measure how brands show up across AI search. Not just whether your brand was mentioned, but where it landed, how favorably the AI talked about your brand, and who your brand was up against. Back to that lip balm question: ChatTrak tells you whether your brand was in the running, where it landed if it was, and what the AI actually said about it.
WHY WE BUILT CHATTRAK INSTEAD OF BUYING IT
Before building anything, we ran a competitive analysis on the AI visibility tools already in market. They’re capable tools, but they all run through the same expensive layer. Prompt tracking typically costs a dollar or more per prompt per month, packaged as credits or tiers depending on the vendor. At the scale our clients need—tens of thousands of prompts a week—that math gets ugly fast.
So, we asked the obvious question: why pay a middleman at all? ChatTrak queries the AI engines directly. That takes the vendor markup out of the equation, and it means we can track at real scale for our clients without giving up any depth of insight.
EVERY MAJOR AI ENGINE IN ONE PLACE
ChatTrak tracks answers across ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Google AI Mode, Gemini, Microsoft Copilot, Perplexity, and Grok. We can turn on all of them or just a few, depending on the brand. Not every brand needs every engine tracked with the same intensity, and the mix should follow where a brand’s customers are actually asking questions.
Knowing where to look is half the problem. Knowing what counts as a mention is the other half.
ENTITY-LEVEL BRAND MENTION TRACKING
Most tools measure AI visibility by whether your domain gets cited. That’s a useful signal, but it’s not the full picture. AI answers name brands constantly without linking to them, and a brand that gets named and recommended with no link attached does better than one that gets a citation buried at the bottom of the response.
ChatTrak analyzes the actual text of every AI answer and pulls out the brand names mentioned, link or no link. It also tracks where in the answer your brand appears, because the first brand named in a response is usually the one recommended, not just referenced. And ChatTrak reads the sentiment of what the AI said, so you know whether your brand was the pick or the cautionary tale.
All of that rolls into a Share of Voice calculation that weighs presence, position, salience, and sentiment together. For the brands that we work with, that’s the number that matters. Being cited was the goal two years ago. Being recommended, and favorably, is the goal now.
NO MORE MANUAL COMPETITOR SETUP
Once you know who’s showing up in your brand category, you need to keep tabs on them without a new manual task every time the landscape shifts. Setting up competitors in most tools is a chore. In ChatTrak, when a new competitor shows up in your data, you click a "+" next to the name and it’s added to your tracked set going forward. No re-setup, no refresh.
What this means for brands is a clearer read on where they actually stand and a more honest picture of AI search ROI. The guessing game around whether your brand is chosen stops here.
A NEW CHAPTER IN SEARCH
AI search is still being written; the brands that win this new chapter will be those that can see themselves the same way that the models see them. ChatTrak gives our clients that view across every major engine, and it’s evolving fast. We’re just getting started.
Want to know where your brand actually stands the next time someone asks an LLM for a recommendation? Connect with us.
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