Does ChatGPT cite your brand?

Classic SEO ranks pages in Google's blue links. AEO measures whether your brand gets cited inside an LLM's answer when a buyer asks the question. They are different surfaces with different signal weights. AEO does not replace SEO, but for B2B and AI-category brands, AEO already drives more buyer-discovery sessions than the traditional SERP, and that gap widens every quarter.

Each answer engine ranks sources differently. Perplexity over-weights recent web sources. Claude over-weights long-form trusted publications. Gemini over-weights Google's own surfaces. Grok over-weights X content. ChatGPT blends the four. A single-LLM audit misses citation gaps that the buyer cohort would actually run into. Five-engine coverage is the floor for a credible AEO scorecard.

Ten queries is the diagnostic floor. Fifty is the program cadence. Below ten and the audit lacks statistical reliability per LLM. Above fifty and you're paying for noise. Mix three query shapes: head terms (high vol commercial), category-modifier queries (the verticals you sell into), and longtail decision queries (the exact wording a buyer types in the discovery loop).

Above 60% is healthy AEO surface across the five LLMs. The category-leader band is 70%+. Under 30% is pre-AEO state and signals that the brand has not invested in pillar content, comparison pages, or category-defining primary research. The FORKOFF AEO ledger median for unoptimized B2B brands sits at 38%.

When an LLM cites your brand, the cited snippet either originates on your own domain (you wrote it, you own the framing) or on a third-party site (a review, a listicle, a competitor's comparison page). Snippet ownership is the share that lives on your domain. High snippet ownership means the brand controls the answer; low means review aggregators and competitors define the brand for the buyer.

The audit logic is vertical-agnostic. The FORKOFF ledger calibration is strongest in AI agencies, Web3 marketing, founder-led GTM, and outcome-priced services because that's the corpus we run weekly. Audits in other verticals work but the scoring band may shift; treat the per-LLM grade as the leading signal and the absolute combined score as directional.

An audit completes in under 90 seconds for a 10-query set, under three minutes for 50 queries. The bottleneck is parallel LLM dispatch and rate-limit windows on Perplexity and Claude. Larger query sets queue and return inside ten minutes.

Citation share carries the heaviest base weight: a brand that never gets named cannot win the answer. Snippet ownership weighs second because it determines whether the brand controls the framing of the citation. Source freshness is a tie-breaker that drags older citations regardless of share.

Every managed FORKOFF Answer Engine Optimization engagement reports the combined AEO score and the per-LLM grade as the primary outcome metric. The free checker exposes the same scoring logic that runs against your engagement weekly. Brands typically run the checker before scoping AEO work, then again at week 4, 8, and 12 to confirm the program is moving the citation share on the LLMs that matter for their buyer.

Yes, by single percentage points. LLMs refresh their retrieval indexes on different cadences, and Perplexity especially shifts as fresh web content lands. Run the audit on the same day-of-week each cycle and treat week-over-week deltas as noise; treat month-over-month deltas as signal.

Single-brand audits return a shareable URL with the grade band, the per-LLM breakdown, and the recommendation. CSV export of the per-query citation results is on the managed engagement tier and ships with weekly cadence audits.

The single-brand audit on this page is free. The cohort-based weekly cadence audit, the multi-vertical brand portfolio audit, and the LLM-by-LLM optimization roadmap run as part of a managed FORKOFF AEO engagement. Talk to a strategist if you want to fold the audit into a full-cycle program.

Yes. The audit captures every brand-name surface in the answer, whether the LLM hyperlinks the source or only paraphrases it. Citations without source links count toward citation share but cap the snippet-ownership ceiling, because the brand cannot prove ownership without an attributable link.

Below 30% combined means the brand is invisible in the LLM-driven discovery loop for its buyer category. The fix is foundational: a category-defining pillar page, three to five comparison pages on the LLM-cited competitor cohort, and primary research the answer engines can cite. AEO programs typically lift a sub-30% brand to 50% inside one quarter and to 65% inside two, when the foundation work ships on cadence.