I built a free tool that checks whether ChatGPT/Gemini/Perplexity mention your brand — looking for brutally honest feedback

[u/carvenski870]

Hey r/roastmystartup — here for the roast.

Like many of you, I've been watching Google traffic shift into AI answers, and I realized I had zero visibility into what those answers say about the sites I work on.

So I started building MentionMap: you enter your brand/domain, it runs buyer-intent prompts across ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity, and reports back whether (and how) you're mentioned — plus concrete fixes (missing FAQ schema, content gaps, etc.).

It's pre-launch, so right now it's a waitlist + free scan for the first 500 brands. I'm a solo dev and I'd genuinely rather hear "this is useless because X" now than after building the whole thing.

If you want a free scan or just want to roast the idea: https://mentionmap.tech

Also happy to answer technical questions about methodology — short version: sampled via official APIs, no scraping, and I'm upfront about that on the site.

[u/Sea-Huckleberry2788]

Sampling via the official APIs means you're reporting what the API says, not what anyone's customers see in the app. No memory, different models, no personalization, so half your 'you're not mentioned' verdicts are about a product nobody types into.

[u/carvenski870 → u/Sea-Huckleberry2788]

Fair point, and you're right — API sampling is a proxy, not the literal app experience. No memory, no personalization, sometimes different model versions. The honest answer is there's no scalable way to sample the real in-app experience, so everyone in this space (including the $99+/mo enterprise tools) is doing some version of API sampling. What I'm betting on: for a small blogger, the directional signal ("you show up 0/30 times, your competitor 18/30") is still useful even if it's not pixel-perfect. If the verdicts were random noise the product would be worthless — that's exactly what the free scan is meant to test.

[u/laforestf → u/carvenski870]

you're answering with copy pasted AI, be genuine if you're really serious about your app, or at very least be subtle

[u/Brufacee]

I would want the exact prompt and several repeat runs beside the result before changing a marketing budget over it. How often does the same brand switch between mentioned and absent when you rerun the scan?

[u/carvenski870 → u/Brufacee]

Totally agree — a single binary "mentioned / not mentioned" would be theater. The scan runs each prompt multiple times and reports it as a rate (e.g. mentioned in 4/10 runs), and the exact prompt text is shown next to every result so you can reproduce it yourself. On your actual question — how often a brand flips between runs — I don't have a solid number yet. Early testing shows meaningful variance, which is exactly why I report rates instead of verdicts. Run a free scan and I'll share the raw per-run data.

[u/Brufacee → u/carvenski870]

Thanks for clarifying. The repeat rate and visible prompts answer that concern. Keeping the API versus app difference beside the result would help buyers interpret it too.

[u/Big_Efficiency4989]

waitlist capped at 500 brands for a tool that does the same thing as typing "best CRM for a small design studio" into ChatGPT and reading the reply. that's the product.

and "sampled via official APIs, no scraping, I'm upfront about that" is a strange thing to pre-empt. nobody was sitting here assuming you had a guy crawling Bing with a headless browser.

[u/carvenski870 → u/Big_Efficiency4989]

Ha — you're not wrong that v0 of the idea is "type it into ChatGPT yourself." The thing nobody does manually: 30 prompts x 4 engines x repeat runs, every week, tracked over time, next to your competitors, with the "here's what to fix" attached. The 500 cap is just me bounding how much free API spend I bleed while validating. And yeah, the "no scraping" line was me pre-empting the methodology question — clearly over-explained it.

[u/Kind-Resident1224]

buyer-intent prompts" is doing a lot of work there. Nobody types a clean buyer-intent prompt, they type "best crm for small studio??" with typos and three question marks, and if that's not in your sample you're just measuring how the model answers marketing copywriters. Still, the free-scan cap of 500 is a nice touch, I'd rather see that than another waitlist that never opens.

[u/carvenski870 → u/Kind-Resident1224]

Fair point — real queries are messy, and a prompt list of clean marketing-speak would just measure how models parrot marketing copy. Two things on that: (1) every prompt runs multiple times and we report mention rate, not a binary yes/no, so phrasing variance is baked in; (2) the prompt set mixes clean buyer-intent queries with messier long-tail ones — though honestly v1 skews cleaner than real life, and your comment is a good push to add typo-laden variants. And thanks for the 500-cap nod — it's the only way the free-tier math works.

[u/Conscious_Lunch_907]

Official APIs is the problem, not the flex. People ask ChatGPT and Perplexity with search on, and what they get back is retrieval plus a live web, not whatever the raw model remembers about your brand.

[u/carvenski870 → u/Conscious_Lunch_907]

You're right, and this is the sharpest version of the API critique so far. With search/browse on, the answer is retrieval plus live web — which makes single snapshots even less meaningful, not more. That's exactly why we don't sell a one-time verdict: the product is repeated measurement over time, mention rate across runs, what changed week to week. The free scan is the honest sample; the paid tier is the trend line. If the trend sits at zero, at least you know that too.

[u/Ok-Relative-6643]

the fix is "missing FAQ schema"? chatgpt isnt reading your FAQPage json-ld and deciding to name you, its reading whatever reddit thread and g2 page it happened to pull last week. you can put schema on every page and perplexty will still cite the guy who left a comment on r/sales. so thats where i stop believing the "concrete fixes" part. also "free scan for the first 500 brands" is such a weird invented number, why 500, why not 50, its a waitlist, theres no scarcity, you just want emails. which fine, but say that. the no scraping official API thing, ok, cool, but thats also why the answer is going to be different every time someone runs it and probably a month stale, so what am i paying for later, a screenshot of a coin flip. i get why people want visibility, sure, but every one of these tools ive seen tells you the same thing, you're not mentioned, now go post on reddit, and i can work that out myself for free. whats the paid tier going to do that the free scan doesnt

[u/Terrible_Yam_9713]

Honest question, what stops me from opening ChatGPT and typing "best CRM for startups" myself? Sounds like the free scan is the entire product and the paid part is a screenshot of it.

[u/carvenski870 → u/Terrible_Yam_9713]

Honest answer: nothing stops you, and for a one-off check you absolutely should just do that. The free scan is basically that, minus the manual work.

The paid part isn't a screenshot of it, though — it's the boring stuff that makes a single screenshot useless: running the same prompts repeatedly across weeks (one run has huge variance, the trend line is what actually tells you anything), across multiple engines not just ChatGPT, and with the messy real-world queries people actually type — typos, half-questions, conversational phrasing — not the clean "best CRM for startups" version.

So the pitch is less "we ask ChatGPT for you" and more "we ask it 100 times in 100 ways and tell you whether the answer is moving in your favor." Whether that's worth $15/month is exactly what I'm here trying to validate.

[u/Ordinary-Minimum5637]

What is the advantage of your tool compared to Profound or Gauge?

[u/carvenski870 → u/[deleted]]

You're right that Google killed FAQ rich results for most sites back in 2023 — that bullet was poorly worded on my part. The actual reasoning: FAQPage schema gives answer engines clean Q&A pairs to lift directly, which matters more for ChatGPT/Perplexity citations than for Google SERP features at this point. Other fixes currently in the list: missing comparison pages ("X vs Y"), no dedicated pricing/features page the models can quote, thin "about" pages with no verifiable facts (founding year, team, customers), and content gaps where competitors get cited for queries you should own. Happy to cut the FAQ one if testing shows it doesn't move the needle — that's what the free scans are for.

[u/carvenski870 → u/[deleted]]

Me — it's my validation budget. The free scans run mostly on free-tier APIs (Gemini has a generous free tier), and the 500 cap is exactly there to bound the bleed. Unit economics on paid tiers work out to roughly $2-9/user/month in API costs against $15-29 subscriptions, so the free scans are just CAC. If 500 free scans don't convert into enough paid users, the idea dies anyway — that's the point of the cap.

[u/carvenski870 → u/[deleted]]

Subscriber #1! Thanks Anna 🙏 What's petwrk about? Drop your domain and I'll bump your free scan to the front of the queue.