Study: ChatGPT names brands before it searches

What happened?

Suganthan Mohanadasan, a search consultant based in Dubai, recorded the network traffic behind 60 ChatGPT conversations in late July and published the analysis on 10 August. He found that before ChatGPT fetches a single page, it writes brand names into its own search query, names the user never typed. That happened in 21 of the 27 conversations where he isolated the very first query by timestamp. Brands that appeared in that first query reached the final answer 68.9 percent of the time. Brands that were only retrieved during the search reached it 2.1 percent of the time.

Why does it matter?

If the pattern holds, much of the visibility contest is settled before your server is ever contacted. Schema markup, page speed and an llms.txt file cannot influence a query that gets written before any page is fetched. What decides whether ChatGPT names you is whether it already associates your organization with your category, which comes from being written about, cited and compared across the open web. Treat the numbers as directional rather than settled. They come from one account over two days, and the author says so plainly.

Should I do anything?

Ask ChatGPT the question a potential member, client or funder would ask, phrased without naming anyone, and run it five times. Write down which organizations it names each time. The names that show up every run are your real competitive set in AI search. If you are missing from that list, the work is slower and mostly off your own site: coverage, mentions and being listed where your category gets discussed. Start with the single question that matters most to you, not your whole service list.

Learn more

• The original analysis (Suganthan Mohanadasan)
• PPC Land coverage of the study
• Our guide: check your organization in ChatGPT
• Our guide: what are entities?