How to Track Your Brand’s Mentions in Large Language Models (LLMs)

In the rapidly evolving digital landscape, a critical question has emerged for marketers, SEO professionals, and brand managers: "Is my brand being mentioned by AI?" With millions of users turning to Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude for answers, your brand's visibility within these platforms is no longer a futuristic concern—it's a present-day necessity. If you're not in the AI's answer, you're invisible to a growing segment of your audience.

Traditional SEO is no longer the full picture. Ranking on Google is still vital, but it doesn't guarantee you a spot in AI-generated recommendations. This guide provides a comprehensive roadmap for tracking your brand mentions in LLMs, catering to all levels of technical expertise and budget. We'll explore everything from manual do-it-yourself methods to sophisticated, automated tools and full-service professional audits.

The Do-It-Yourself (DIY) Approach: Manual and Semi-Technical Tracking

For those just dipping their toes into the world of AI brand monitoring, a hands-on approach can be both insightful and cost-effective. These methods are perfect for getting a foundational understanding of your brand's current standing without significant investment.

Option 1: The Manual Spot-Check (The Non-Technical Route)

This is the most accessible and cheapest way to begin. It involves directly querying various LLMs to see if and how your brand appears. It’s a gut-check method that can reveal immediate blind spots.

How to Do It:

Choose Your LLMs: Start with the most popular platforms. ChatGPT offers a powerful free version (GPT-3.5) and a more advanced paid subscription (GPT-4). Google's Gemini also has a free public version, and Anthropic's Claude is another key player to check.
Craft Your Prompts: Ask questions a potential customer would. Use a mix of query types:
- Direct Brand Mentions: "What are the pros and cons of [Your Brand]?"
- Problem-Based Queries: "How do I solve [problem your product solves]?"
- Competitor Comparisons: "[Your Brand] vs. [Competitor Brand]"
- Generic Recommendations: "What is the best tool for [your product category]?"
Repeat, Repeat, Repeat: An LLM's response can vary even when given the same prompt twice. To get an accurate picture, you must repeat each query at least 10 times. This accounts for the probabilistic nature of AI and helps you identify consistent patterns versus random mentions. As we demonstrated in our study on the reliability of brand-monitoring platforms, single queries don't tell the whole story because responses can have significant variance.
Log Everything: Use a simple spreadsheet to track the date, LLM used, prompt, and whether your brand was mentioned (and in what context).

This route is ideal for: Non-technical users, small businesses, or marketers wanting a quick, initial assessment without any budget.

Option 2: The API Method (The Semi-Technical Route)

If you're comfortable with basic scripting, using APIs provides a more scalable way to track mentions. This approach automates the querying process, allowing you to test hundreds of prompts systematically.

How to Do It:

This method involves writing a simple script (e.g., in Python or JavaScript) to call the APIs of various LLMs. You'll need to sign up for API access from providers like OpenAI, Google AI Platform, or Anthropic. Be mindful of the costs—while often low per query, they can add up. Your script will send your list of prompts to the API and save the responses.

The main challenge here is data processing. You'll receive raw text responses that you need to parse and structure. This means writing additional logic to identify brand names, analyze sentiment, and count mentions. This data then needs to be organized in a structured format (like a CSV file or a database) for meaningful analysis.

This route is ideal for: Technically-inclined marketers or developers who want a more robust, repeatable process for tracking mentions over time.

Using Tools for Effortless Brand Mention Tracking

For those who need reliable data without the manual effort or technical overhead, a range of free and paid tools are available. These platforms are designed to automate the process, provide structured insights, and offer a much deeper level of analysis.

Option 1: Use Sellm's Free Tools for a Quick Start

For non-technical users who want a quick and actionable first look at their AI presence, our suite of free tools is the perfect starting point. Each tool is designed to answer a specific question about your brand's visibility in the AI ecosystem.

ChatGPT Presence Score: Wondering how visible your brand is inside ChatGPT? This tool gives you a straightforward score. It's a quick diagnostic to see if you're on the map or completely invisible. It's the fastest way to get a baseline of your presence.
AI Search Query Detector: Google is increasingly using AI to generate its own search queries. This tool analyzes your Google Search Console data to identify which of your traffic-driving queries are likely generated by AI. This helps you understand how much of your current SEO performance is already influenced by AI.
AI SEO Share of Voice: This tool lets you directly compare your brand against a competitor to see which has a greater "share of voice" within ChatGPT's training data. It's a fantastic way to benchmark your core presence against your main rival and understand your competitive standing in the AI world.

Option 2: Paid Tools for Comprehensive Brand Tracking

When you're ready to move beyond spot-checks and get serious about managing your AI brand presence, dedicated paid tools are the answer. These platforms offer continuous monitoring, in-depth analytics, and competitive intelligence.

Here’s a look at some of the top platforms:

Sellm

Sellm is engineered for the new frontier of Generative Engine Optimization (GEO). Unlike traditional SEO tools that monitor search engine results pages, Sellm focuses exclusively on how your brand is represented within responses from major AI models. Its core strength lies in turning conversational AI recommendations into measurable growth opportunities, providing a specialized lens into this emerging channel. It's the ideal platform for teams looking to not just monitor, but strategically influence their position in AI-generated answers.

AiCarma

AiCarma offers a unique, metric-driven approach by systematically querying top LLMs with industry-specific prompts. This process generates a proprietary "Visibility Score," giving teams a quantifiable benchmark of their brand's prominence in AI responses. This makes AiCarma an excellent choice for teams that need a clear, reportable KPI to track and report on high-level brand visibility within major language models.

AthenaHQ

AthenaHQ positions itself as a specialized platform for GEO, helping brands boost visibility within AI search responses. It goes beyond simple tracking to pinpoint content gaps and surface competitor performance across major LLMs. This dual focus on monitoring and optimization guidance makes it a powerful tool for marketing teams that need deep, actionable insights to proactively shape their AI presence.

For a more detailed breakdown of these and other platforms, check out our comprehensive review of the top 12 tools for tracking LLM brand mentions.

Get a Full Audit: The Definitive Analysis of Your AI Presence

For businesses that need a complete, 360-degree understanding of their brand's position in the AI landscape, a professional audit is the ultimate solution. This goes beyond simple mention tracking to provide deep, actionable context about your visibility, your competitors, and your opportunities.

With Sellm's brand presence audits, you will get:
Visibility of your main keywords: Check if your key terms continue to position your brand. We measure if what has worked for you so far is still relevant and to what extent.
Coverage of your differentiators: Discover if the attributes that make you unique are associated with your name or that of your competition.
Conversational opportunities: Detect generic questions that could recommend your products before those of others.

Global Vision and Actionable Detail

Our audit offers a complete picture of how your brand is mentioned compared to the competition. You will be able to delve into each question and answer from the AI models and discover which keywords bring your brand closer to or push it further away from the user. This isn't just data; it's a strategic roadmap for winning mindshare in the age of AI. To learn more, explore our GEO Audit service.

A Real-World Example: How Vercel Shows Up in AI Search

To understand the power of this analysis, let's look at a real-world case study. We conducted a deep-dive analysis of Vercel, a leading frontend cloud platform, to see how it fares in AI-generated responses. The results, detailed in our AI Search Insight post, reveal the nuanced and often surprising nature of AI visibility.

Our analysis uncovered that Vercel is mentioned in 42.4% of high-traffic queries. However, this figure hides a critical vulnerability. When it comes to generic, high-intent phrases like "deploy site" or "SvelteKit hosting," the mention rate drops below 25%. This is the "Ghost Zone," where developers with no prior brand preference are making crucial decisions, and where Vercel is often invisible.

The Feature-Based Brand Leaderboard

When we analyzed prompts based on core features (like CDN, cron jobs, etc.), the competitive landscape became even clearer. Netlify dominated in raw mention volume (46.5%), but Vercel showed a surprisingly high rate of being mentioned first (34.2%), suggesting it makes a strong initial impression before being crowded out in longer answers. This kind of insight is impossible to gain without targeted AI search analysis.

These findings highlight that even for a top-tier brand like Vercel, there are significant opportunities and threats within the AI search ecosystem. You can explore the data for yourself and run your own keyword analysis on our interactive dashboard.

Conclusion: Take Control of Your AI Narrative

Tracking your brand's presence in Large Language Models is no longer an optional task for the forward-thinking marketer it is an essential practice for survival and growth in the modern digital ecosystem. Whether you start with simple manual checks, leverage our free tools for a quick analysis, invest in a paid platform, or commit to a full professional audit, the goal is the same: to understand and actively shape your brand's narrative in the age of AI.

The methods you choose will depend on your resources, technical comfort level, and strategic goals. But inaction is not an option. Your customers are already talking to AI. The only question is whether your brand is part of the conversation.