You can find out whether AI assistants recommend your brand to shoppers this afternoon, with a browser and a notes file, by running five checks: text mentions, product cards, card routing, sentiment, and competitor ads. The card check matters most, because that is where recommendations turn into commerce — 88.8% of ChatGPT shopping answers carried product cards in GEOly's US monitoring (June 20–30, 2026). Below is each check, what to look at manually, and how a tool measures the same thing continuously.
Key takeaways
- Being mentioned is not being recommended: in GEOly's June 2026 US data, 14% of brand mentions in ChatGPT shopping answers had no buyable product card attached.
- A card is not a sale either. Track where it routes — even Sony, the strongest audio brand on this measure, keeps only 12.8% of ChatGPT card destinations on its own store; most cards route to Best Buy, Target or Walmart.
- Recommendations are now partly paid: 38.2% of ChatGPT shopping answers carried ads in June 2026, from 3,042 active advertisers. A competitor can buy placement above your organic mention.
- Every check has a manual version you can run today and a tool version that runs while you sleep. Do the manual pass first — it tells you which tool capability you actually need.
Check 1: Are you mentioned at all?
What to look at: open ChatGPT in a clean session and ask five to ten questions the way your buyers ask them — "best budget espresso machine," "is [your brand] worth it," "[your brand] vs [rival]." Count how often your brand appears in the answer text. Ask each question more than once; answers are sampled, so a single run can flatter or slander you.
How a tool measures it: mention rate — the share of repeated runs in which you appear — tracked per prompt and per engine, usually rolled up into a Share of Model figure against competitors. The full workflow for doing this across ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity is in our cross-engine tracking guide.
Check 2: Do you get a product card?
What to look at: for the same shopping prompts, look past the prose to the card carousel — the images with prices and buy links. Is your product there, or are you a name in the paragraph while rivals occupy the shelf? This gap is common enough to have a number: 14% of brand mentions come with no buyable card. And since 88.8% of shopping answers carry cards, the shelf is the default interface shoppers see, not an edge case.
