How to Track Your Brand's AI Mentions Over Time
Tracking AI mentions means regularly asking AI models the same kind of questions a real customer would ask, and recording whether your brand comes up, how it is described, and how that changes over time. Website analytics alone will not show you this, since most AI mentions happen with no link and no referral traffic at all.
Why analytics do not tell the whole story
Some AI tools, like Perplexity, do send referral traffic when they cite a source. Others, like ChatGPT in a normal chat, often mention a brand by name with no link attached. If you are only watching your analytics for AI referral traffic, you are missing every mention that did not come with a click.
What a real tracking process looks like
- Write down a realistic set of questions a customer would actually ask, not just your brand name, but the underlying need, like "best CRM for a small sales team"
- Run those questions against the models people in your category actually use, not just one
- Record whether you are mentioned, how you are described, and whether it is favorable, neutral, or negative
- Repeat this on a schedule, since model answers change as models get updated and retrained
What to do with what you find
A single check tells you where you stand today. Repeating it tells you whether whatever you are doing, fixing crawler access, publishing clearer content, getting mentioned elsewhere, is actually changing anything. Without tracking over time, you are guessing.
Doing this without building it yourself
QueryTrace runs this whole process automatically, checking your brand across ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and more on an ongoing basis, so you do not have to manually ask the same questions over and over.
See where you stand
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