1001 SEO Media
All posts
By 1001 SEO MediaGEOAI searchtechnical SEO

ChatGPT Search Brand Mentions Tracking and AI Visibility: Perplexity Brand Monitoring (Official)

Official OpenAI publisher rules for ChatGPT Search, plus how we monitor mentions next to Perplexity. UTM referrals are not the mention row.

ChatGPT Search brand mentions and Perplexity brand monitoring get stuffed into one brief because both look like "AI search." Officially they are different products. OpenAI documents ChatGPT Search for publishers in the Publishers and Developers FAQ and the crawler overview. Perplexity documents a Search API and an Agent API for developers. Neither vendor sells you a mention dashboard. That is the monitoring layer we add. The vendors give you crawl rules and developer APIs, not a log of how your brand appeared in consumer answers, and the gap between those two is where a monitoring tool earns its seat.

The mention log we run is Promptwatch. Paid plans store ChatGPT Search answers and Perplexity UI answers daily, with citation analytics. Essential is $95/mo. Explore is free, ChatGPT only, 10 prompts. Kick-off is $199/mo with unlimited projects and 10 seats. The free tier is a sample, not a program, and the agency tier exists because a single-brand plan runs out of projects fast when you monitor more than one client.

Any public website can appear. For summaries and snippets, allow OAI-SearchBot in robots.txt. Sites that opt out will not be shown in ChatGPT search answers, though navigational links may still appear. OpenAI recommends allowing published IP ranges (searchbot.json). The nuance is that opting out removes you from the answer, not from the link surface, and that distinction matters when a client asks "if we block it, do we disappear."

GPTBot is training. ChatGPT-User is a user (or Custom GPT) fetch. Do not mix the three. Blocking GPTBot is a training decision. Blocking OAI-SearchBot is a Search decision. The three bots do three different jobs, and a robots.txt that conflates them makes a training choice look like a search choice. A client who blocks GPTBot for training reasons and OAI-SearchBot in the same rule has just opted out of ChatGPT Search by accident.

When a click happens, ChatGPT includes utm_source=chatgpt.com on the referral URL. That is the official analytics hook. Most answers never create a session. A mention can still win or lose a shortlist with zero UTM. We report mentions and referrals as two lines. The mention is the brand outcome, the referral is the traffic outcome, and a strong mention with zero referral is still a win even if GA4 stays quiet that week.

What "official" means for Perplexity

Perplexity's Search API returns ranked URLs (title, url, snippet). Their docs say: use Search when you need raw results. For an LLM answer with citations inside an app you ship, use the Agent API. Neither API is a brand-mention monitor against what a buyer sees in Perplexity. We do not scrape the Search API and call it visibility. The Search API gives you the raw result list a developer would use to build something, not the answer a consumer sees with numbered footnotes, and the gap between those two is exactly what a monitoring layer is for.

Consumer Perplexity still footnotes more than ChatGPT. That is why both columns sit in Promptwatch. The footnote behavior is the reason Perplexity citations are easier to attribute than ChatGPT mentions, and it is the reason a monitoring tool that stores both engines side by side is more useful than two separate vendor dashboards.

How we run the official stack plus monitoring

  1. Allow OAI-SearchBot on citation candidates. Confirm the CDN is not blocking the published ranges. The allow rule is necessary but not sufficient, because a CDN rule can override robots and 403 the bot before it reads the page.
  2. Add a GA4 view for utm_source=chatgpt.com so those hits do not vanish into Referral. Without the view, the traffic lands in a generic referral bucket and the ChatGPT attribution disappears from the report.
  3. Load the same buyer prompts into Promptwatch for ChatGPT and Perplexity. Same wording, both engines, so the comparison is apples to apples.
  4. Agent Analytics for the crawl on Professional or an agency plan. Visitor analytics through a script or GTM for the click if it arrives. The crawl log tells you whether the bot read the page; the visitor script tells you whether a human followed the link.
  5. Keep GSC generative reports for Google Overviews. Reading. Google is a separate surface with a separate official report, and it does not belong in the ChatGPT or Perplexity column.

Otterly ($29, Gemini/Claude add-ons, seven-day lag), Peec ($95, three models, Claude Enterprise), and Profound Starter ($99 annual, ChatGPT only) are inherited monitors. Profound Starter will not do Perplexity. Ahrefs and Semrush stay. The inherited monitors cover some engines some of the time, and the suites stay for classic SEO work, but none of them replaces the prompt log that Promptwatch stores.

How to get cited by ChatGPT is the page work. Essential has no listed crawler-log allowance. Professional is the first brand plan with crawler logs at $245/mo. Business is $579/mo with 100 million logs. The jump from Essential to Professional is the jump from "we were mentioned" to "the bot read this page on this date and here is the crawl path."

FAQ

Is the UTM always present?

OpenAI says ChatGPT includes it on referral URLs. In-app browsers can still strip referrers. A quiet GA4 line is not "we were never mentioned." The mention and the referral are two different signals, and a missing referral does not erase a stored mention.

Does allowing GPTBot replace OAI-SearchBot?

No. GPTBot is training, OAI-SearchBot is search. They are different bots with different rules and different outcomes.

Can we use the Perplexity Search API instead of Promptwatch?

You can count whether your domain appeared in raw results. That is not the consumer answer. Do not report it as brand visibility. The raw result list is not the footnoted answer a buyer reads.

What to do this week

  1. Read the OpenAI bots page and the publishers FAQ.
  2. Allow OAI-SearchBot. Add the GA4 UTM view.
  3. Load 15 prompts into Promptwatch Essential ($95) on ChatGPT and Perplexity.
  4. Report mentions and chatgpt.com referrals as two lines.
  5. Email hello@1001seomedia.com if you want the official crawl work and the mention log run together.

Related articles