How to check if ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity cite your brand in India

More Indians are asking AI assistants the questions they used to type into Google. "Best CRM for a small business in India," "kaunsa protein powder sabse accha hai," "affordable EV for city driving". The assistant answers directly, names a few brands, and links a few sources. If your brand is one of them, you win attention before the user ever clicks. If it is not, you are invisible, no matter how well you rank on Google.

So the first question every Indian brand should ask is simple: when my customers ask AI, do I show up? Here is how to check, and what the answer means.

1. Ask the engines the way your customers do

Open ChatGPT, Google Gemini and Perplexity, and ask the real questions your customers ask, in the language they use. Two rules:

• Use buying-intent questions, not your brand name. "Best [your category] in India" tells you far more than "Is [your brand] any good." If you have to name yourself for the engine to mention you, you are not really visible.
• Test English and Hindi/Hinglish. Indians search in both. A brand cited in English answers can be completely absent in Hindi ones, and the reverse.

Note whether the answer (a) names your brand at all, and (b) links your website as a source. Those are two different things: an engine can recommend a brand without linking its website, and link a page without recommending the brand by name.

2. Check more than one engine

This matters more than people expect. Our own research and the published literature agree on one point: the engines cite almost completely different sources. The same brand can be visible on Gemini and nearly invisible on Perplexity. Checking only ChatGPT tells you a third of the story. In India, do not forget Google's AI Overviews, where many people now meet AI answers without ever leaving the search page.

3. Ask the same question more than once

AI answers are not fixed. Ask "best running shoes in India" three times and you will often get three slightly different lists. A single check is a coin flip, not a measurement. To know your real visibility you have to ask repeatedly and look at how often you appear, not whether you appeared once.

4. Read the result honestly

If you are barely cited, that is normal, and it is not your fault. Citation in AI answers is driven mostly by authority, brand mentions across the web, and recency, all of which take months to build, not a schema tweak you can do this afternoon. Anyone promising to get you "recommended by AI, guaranteed" is selling a certainty the evidence does not support. The honest path is to measure where you stand, see who is being cited instead of you, and test changes to find out whether they actually move your numbers.

Why doing this by hand breaks down

You can do all of the above manually for a few queries. But to measure your real visibility you would need dozens of questions, in English and Hindi, across three or four engines, several times each, tracked over weeks as the engines change. That is hundreds of checks. It is exactly the kind of repetitive measurement software should do.

That is what we built Citedar for, specifically for Indian brands: it asks ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity your category's questions in English and Hindi, measures how often you are cited, shows which competitors are recommended instead of you, and tells you how far behind the leaders you are.

If you want to see where your brand actually stands, get a free audit. And if you want the evidence behind all of this, read what actually drives AI citations.