Updated October 28, 2026. Uptime, incident and honesty figures are StatusBird's own readings over the 90 days ending on that date; live values are on the linked status pages.
To check whether ChatGPT recommends your store, ask it the questions your shoppers ask, in a fresh chat with web search on, and record whether it names you, links to you, or names a competitor instead. Do that for five to ten buying questions, three times each, and you have a baseline. If you would rather not spend the hour, PositionBird's free shopping scan asks ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude and Google three buying questions about your store, with no account, and shows the answers.
How do I check manually whether ChatGPT recommends my store?
- Write the questions a buyer would ask, not the ones you would. "Best at-home inflammation test" rather than your product name. Five to ten of them, covering the category, a comparison, and a problem the product solves.
- Open a new temporary chat with web search enabled, so your own history and past answers about your brand do not colour the result. Ask one question per chat.
- Record three things per answer: whether your brand is named, whether it is linked (a citation to your domain), and which brands are named instead. A mention without a link is a weaker signal; the link is what sends the shopper to you.
- Repeat each question three times. Engines are sampled, not deterministic; a brand that appears in one of three answers is a coin flip, not a recommendation.
- Do the same in Perplexity, Gemini and Claude. They search different indexes and cite different sources; a store absent from ChatGPT is sometimes the top answer in Perplexity.
- Check what the engine said about you. Price, trial, shipping, what the product is. Engines paraphrase from old pages and third-party sites, and a confident wrong fact costs more than an absence.
What does a good result look like?
Named and cited in most answers to the questions you care about, with your own pages as the source. Named but never cited means the engine knows you exist from other people's pages; the fix is content on your own domain that answers the question directly. Absent means the engine has no page it trusts for that question. In both cases the engines are telling you which page to write.
Is there a tool that checks this automatically?
Yes. PositionBird runs the manual method on a schedule: it asks ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude and Google your tracked questions through their official APIs, two samples each, scores whether you are named and cited, tracks share of voice against named competitors, and shows which sources the engines cite so you can earn a place on them. It also checks the facts engines state about you against a fact sheet you control, and flags a contradiction when it persists across two scans. The free scan at positionbird.io/free-shopping-scan needs no account; paid plans start at $19 a month for 25 tracked questions, and PositionBird Growth is included in StatusBird's Suite plan at $79 a month.
Why does it matter whether ChatGPT recommends my store?
Because a growing share of buying questions never reach a search results page. The shopper asks, gets three brands, and clicks one. If you are not one of the three you were never considered. The visits that do arrive are easy to miss in Shopify's reports, which have no AI channel; this guide shows where to find them by referrer domain.
FAQ
How do I know if ChatGPT recommends my store?
Ask it your shoppers' buying questions in a fresh chat with web search on, three times each, and record whether it names you, cites your site, or names a competitor instead. Or run PositionBird's free scan, which asks five engines for you.
Can I see ChatGPT traffic in Shopify?
Not as a channel. Shopify files AI visits as ordinary referrals. Add the Referrer site dimension to the Sessions by referrer report and look for chatgpt.com, perplexity.ai, gemini.google.com and claude.ai.
Why does ChatGPT recommend my competitor and not me?
Usually because the engine found a page it trusts that answers the shopper's question and names your competitor: a roundup, a review site, a forum thread or the competitor's own page. The fix is to publish the page that answers the question on your own domain and to be present on the third-party pages the engine already cites.
Is there a free way to check across several AI engines at once?
PositionBird's free shopping scan asks ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude and Google three buying questions about your store, with no account, and shows what each one said.