How to track your brand in ChatGPT with an API, step by step

To track your brand in ChatGPT with an API, you send the questions your buyers ask to an API that runs them on ChatGPT, run each question several times, and count the answers that name your brand, in which position and next to which sources. The six steps below take a brand team from an empty spreadsheet to a weekly figure. At the prices published on October 23, 2026, 50 questions tracked every week cost between about $1.30 and $30 a month, depending on the API and on whether it computes the metrics for you.

1. List the questions your buyers ask ChatGPT

Start from the questions buyers actually type. A buyer asks "What's the best accounting software for a five-person agency?", not "accounting software". Collect them from sales calls, support tickets, site search and the "People also ask" boxes of your topic.

Sort them into two kinds:

• Comparative questions ask for a choice ("best", "alternatives to", "X or Y"). These are the answers where brands get named and ranked.
• Informative questions ask how something works. ChatGPT names fewer brands in them (1.7 per answer in our survey, against 2.9 for comparative questions), but the sources it cites show who it trusts on the topic.

In the MentionLab project behind our survey of AI recommendations, 560 of the 800 questions were comparative and 240 informative. For a first set, 50 questions per product line is enough to see a trend. Tag each one by product, persona and country, so you can split the figures later.

2. Choose how the answers are collected

The ChatGPT app and the OpenAI API are two different products. The app answers with its own model, its own instructions and, for most questions, a web search with sources. The OpenAI API searches the web only if you add the web search tool to the request, and even then "the model can choose to search the web or not based on the content of the input prompt".

Collecting through the OpenAI API costs less and is fully documented, but you measure the model's answer, not the one your buyers see. To measure what a ChatGPT user sees, the API has to run the question on the ChatGPT interface. The vendors below say how they do it:

3. Pick an API that returns what you need

Two families do the job. Scraping APIs return the raw answer, the cited links and the brands named; you compute the metrics. GEO APIs return the metrics per brand as well. The four APIs below all cover ChatGPT; our ranking of ChatGPT tracking APIs keeps the 12 best of the 47 in our survey.

Prices and fields from each vendor's pricing page and API reference, checked on October 23, 2026.

API for GEO is our editorial pick after hands-on testing: one call returns the answer and the computed layer per brand, credits are charged per prompt, per model and per run, and reads of data already collected are not billed. cloro and DataForSEO cost less per answer if you have someone to write the counting code. The duels API for GEO vs cloro, API for GEO vs DataForSEO and API for GEO vs Profound go through the differences line by line.

4. Run each question several times

ChatGPT does not give the same answer twice. In the MentionLab run of October 20, 2026, only 8.7% of the vendors ChatGPT named for a question came back in all five runs of that question. A brand that appears in one run and not in the next is the normal case.

Plan three runs per question at least, five if the budget allows, and keep the schedule fixed: the same day of the week, the same country, the same language. API for GEO takes the number of runs as a parameter of the job (executionsPerQuery) and runs a whole prompt list on a list of models in one job.

Keep the raw answers. If you change how you count a mention later, you can count again without paying for new answers.

5. Turn the answers into four figures

Visibility tells you whether ChatGPT knows you on the topic. Share of voice compares you with competitors in the same answers. Position shows whether you come first or last in a list. The citation rate shows whether your own pages are among the sources ChatGPT read.

A GEO API returns these figures directly. The request below is the example API for GEO publishes on its AI Visibility API page: one prompt, ChatGPT, the United States, figures by week.

curl -X POST https://api.apiforgeo.com/v1/visibility/entities \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $API_FOR_GEO_KEY" \
  -H "x-project-id: $PROJECT_ID" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "prompt": "best project management tool for creative agencies",
    "models": ["chatgpt"],
    "country": "US",
    "bucketSize": "week"
  }'

The response gives, for each brand, its visibility, share of voice, average position, number of mentions and a sentiment score. With a scraping API, you get the answers and write the count yourself: match brand names and their variants in each answer, note their rank, then divide.

6. Budget the volume

The volume is questions × runs × engines × countries × frequency. For 50 questions, five runs, ChatGPT only, one country, every week: 50 × 5 × 52 ÷ 12, about 1,083 answers a month.

Each extra engine or country multiplies the total. The calculator on our home page gives the monthly cost of each API from your own figures.