ChatGPT Writes Brands Into Its Own Search Before It Searches

I came across some genuinely interesting research from Suganthan Mohanadasan about how ChatGPT searches for products and companies. I had to test it myself. And if you care about AI visibility, GEO, or getting your company recommended by ChatGPT, this is something you should probably test on your own brand too.

When you ask ChatGPT something like, what are the best AI note-taking tools, you might assume ChatGPT first searches the web, looks at the available companies, and then decides which ones are worth mentioning. But that is not always what happens.

ChatGPT can name brands before it searches

Suganthan found that ChatGPT can write brands into its own search query before it has searched the web. He asked ChatGPT for the best AI note-taking apps. The initial search query already contained several companies: Granola, Notion AI, Otter, Fireflies, Fathom, Mem, and Limitless. None of those brands were mentioned in his original question. The names were already there before the web search happened.

That means there can be a decision happening before retrieval even begins. ChatGPT is not always discovering brands from the search results. Sometimes it is already carrying a shortlist in its head before it looks at anything.

The important distinction

There are really two different problems here.

Does ChatGPT know your brand? If ChatGPT already associates your brand with a category, it may include you when it constructs the search it performs.

Can your website win once ChatGPT searches? Even if your site gets crawled, that does not mean ChatGPT will cite or recommend you.

Those are completely different problems. This is why saying my website is indexed and ChatGPT can access it does not tell you very much. You might be perfectly retrievable while still being almost invisible in the final answer.

What the research found

In his analysis of hundreds of searches, Suganthan separated brands that were already named in ChatGPT's own query from brands that were only discovered after the search. The difference was enormous in his dataset. Brands that appeared in ChatGPT's own query were mentioned far more frequently than brands that were simply retrieved later. He calculated roughly 68.9% versus 2.1%.

That is a huge difference. But there is an important caveat. He was very clear that these numbers came from his own ChatGPT account and a relatively limited sample, so they should be treated as directional rather than universal.

So I tested it myself

I wanted to see if I could reproduce what Suganthan found, so I ran the test myself. I was not signed in to ChatGPT, and I used my own category rather than copying his examples. I asked what is the best AI search optimization tool. ChatGPT searched before giving me that answer. Its first search was best AI search optimization tools GEO answer engine optimization 2026. Then it followed up with AI search optimization tools Profound Scrunch Otterly AI Peec AI.

Notice what happened. I did not mention Profound, Scrunch, Otterly AI, or Peec AI in my question. ChatGPT put those companies into its own search. It means the question is not only does ChatGPT mention my company. It is also which companies does ChatGPT already consider when it searches for my category. Those are two very different questions.

Try this on your own brand

You should try this yourself. Ask ChatGPT a question your customers would actually ask. Do not mention any companies. Then open DevTools, go to Network, then Conversation, and look for search_model_queries. You might find that your competitors are already being included before ChatGPT has even looked at their websites. Your competitors are already in ChatGPT's brain. And maybe you are not.

What this means for GEO

This is where I think we need to look at AI SEO differently. A lot of AI visibility discussions focus on getting crawled, being indexed, technical SEO, structured data, content optimization, and citations. All of those still matter. But there is another question: does the model already associate your brand with the category? Because if ChatGPT never considers you as a candidate, having a technically perfect website does not necessarily solve the problem.

And honestly, becoming one of the brands ChatGPT automatically thinks of can be pretty hard. You can have an amazing page. You can have perfect schema. You can have fast hosting. You can be indexed everywhere. And still not make that initial shortlist.

So sometimes, instead of trying to become the default brand ChatGPT thinks of, it might be smarter to create content that can win the search ChatGPT is already making. For example, my test generated AI search optimization tools Profound Scrunch Otterly AI Peec AI. If I were competing in this space, I would create the best possible content for searches like that.

The hard part is keeping track of all this

This is also why I have been building Bloomiro. You can track your AI visibility across the prompts that actually matter to your business, see which competitors show up, monitor changes over time, and find opportunities to improve. You do not have to manually run every prompt yourself. Instead you can run it automatically on a schedule. You can also connect Bloomiro through MCP to tools like Claude, Cursor, and other AI assistants, so you can work with your AI visibility data directly from the workflow you already use instead of constantly jumping between tools.

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