I ran 6 well-known SaaS and DTC brands through ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude to see how often the assistants actually recommend them

Last week I got curious about something. When a buyer asks ChatGPT "best [category] tool" or "[category] alternatives," whose name comes back? So I picked 6 brands I'd call well-known and ran each one through 18 buyer-intent prompts across ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude. The score was simple: what percent of those answers actually named the brand.

The spread surprised me. One brand I assumed everyone knew scored 0 out of 18. Zero. Meanwhile its closest competitor showed up in roughly 78% of the same answers. Another well-funded one hit 6%, while the category leader sat at 100%. Two landed mid-pack around 22-28%. The strongest of the six reached 78%, and even then a bigger rival still owned the top spot.

Here's what stuck with me. The gap almost never tracked product quality. It tracked which sources the models had learned to cite: comparison roundups, Reddit threads, docs, third-party "best of" lists. The brands writing those pages won. The ones relying on their own marketing site lost.

A lot of buyers now ask an AI for a shortlist before they ever Google you or land on your homepage. If the model never says your name, you're cut before anyone reads your copy. Worth checking your own category, even just by hand in one chat window.

I built a free checker for this if it's useful: piposlab.com/ai-visibility. Curious whether anyone else has measured this.

Alejandro