How to Track Your Rankings in ChatGPT
Tracking your brand's visibility in ChatGPT is challenging but not impossible 👇🏻
Ok, now that I have your attention with this false headline, let me be clear right away: There’s no ranki tracking possible with ChatGPT BUT you can definitely start analyzing your site’s viability there and optimizing for better visibility in ChatGPT.
Why is it not that easy (at least not as easy as it is with organic search):
There are no keywords: People use prompts, and there’s no way to track which prompts resulted in answers containing your brand or your link.
There are not always clicks: Many prompts just list brand and product recommendations.
Here’s what you CAN do:
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Monitor traffic from ChatGPT in GA4
In GA4:
Go to the “Traffic acquisition” section behind the “Acquisition” tab.
Select “Session source / Medium”
In the “Search” field, type “gpt” and click “Enter”:
From there, you can create custom reports to access this data more easily.
There are third-party solutions that you can use to filter GA4 data to track AI traffic. Databox lets you add this report to your dashboard, and it will also overlay it with other important data, like conversions:
There’s no way to know which prompts people were typing to get your site’s links in answers, but you can get some idea by exploring the landing pages ChatGPT users were landing on.
Go to the “Landing Pages” report inside the “Engagement” section
Use “Add filter” option
Again, select “Session source / Medium”
Select “Contains” and type “gpt”
Click “Apply”
This will filter the list of landing pages to those generating that traffic from ChatGPT.
Based on each page content, you can mostly figure out which questions may be asked in prompts for your URLs to be cited.
Monitor brand searches and impressions in Google Console
If your brand appeared in a ChatGPT answer without a link, people will likely use Google to research further. That will result in more branded searches. If you are doing everything right, you will see an increase in brand searches and impressions in Google.
In Search Console, go to your Performance section, and there:
Click “Add filter”
Select “query”
Type the most unique part of your brand name (for example, for me it would be “smarty”)
Click “Apply”
Do this regularly to see if your brand searches are increasing. Make sure to keep a close eye on your branded SERPs to make sure those customers will like the sentiment.
Track “commercial” intent prompts in third-party tools
There are a few new AI tracking solutions that help you monitor your ChatGPT visibility. These are two I’ve recently tested:
Knowatoa is an AI tracking analysis tool that monitors answers to your important “high-intent” prompts in several AI platforms, including ChatGPT.
Your report looks very much like a rank tracking tool, allowing you to see where your brand is included in answers and where you rank in those answers:
Clicking the green number will show you the exact answer that the AI platform gave to a given prompt.
Essio.ai is another premium AI analysis tool that analyses and tracks your brand’s “visibility” score in ChatGPT and other AI platforms:
The great feature of the tool is that it shows you better-performing competitors, i.e. those that are included in answers for your relevant prompts.
Track how much ChatGPT knows about your brand vs your competitors
Waikay is an AI solution that determines what generative AI platforms know about your brand vs your competitors. It shows whether those AI solutions know more about your competitors and which AI solutions have inadequate data about your brand.
Waikay identifies key concepts your site is associated with, and flags “knowledge gaps”, i.e., concepts associated with your competitors but not your brand.
As you develop brand knowledge content, you can rerun your reports to see how the training data is changing for your brand to be better associated with missing concepts. You can create a more specific report on any knowledge gap for the tool to suggest more topics and specific topic ideas for you to create more content to be better associated with those topics.
Bottom line
We are still figuring out analyzing, tracking and reporting brand visibility in AI but this is a good start. Let us know if you need help with getting traffic and sales from ChatGPT.
the landing page approach in GA4 is underrated. we've been tracking chatgpt referrals for our clients and the pattern is pretty clear - it sends traffic to pages that already have strong entity coverage.
what I find interesting is the gap between impressions in these tools vs actual clicks. for B2B especially, ChatGPT mentions often don't result in direct traffic because users get the info they need directly. curious if anyone's found good proxies for measuring "zero-click" AI mentions?