ChatGPT's own data beats tools that guess at it
OpenAI's Business Hub sees actual questions people ask, while most paid trackers run made-up ones.
If you have paid for a tool that tells you how often ChatGPT mentions your business, the numbers may be based on guesses rather than real conversations.
Glenn Gabe shared an article arguing that OpenAI's new Business Hub has one big edge over the companies selling AI visibility tracking. Business Hub, which we covered earlier, shows brands how they show up inside ChatGPT. The article says it "has access to real usage data, not just simulated prompts." The same piece says most of the big players in generative engine optimization, or GEO, which is the business of getting your brand named in AI answers, "rely largely on simulated prompts and sampled AI responses, not actual user queries and AI responses."
rely largely on simulated prompts and sampled AI responses, not actual user queries and AI responses
What simulated prompts actually means
A simulated prompt is a question the tool makes up and asks the chatbot itself, then records whether your name appeared. It is a sample, not a count. If the tool asks "best plumber in Leeds" a hundred times, that tells you what ChatGPT says to that exact wording. It does not tell you what real customers typed, how many of them there were, or whether anyone asked about plumbers at all.
Business Hub is working from what people actually asked ChatGPT. That is a different kind of number, and the article Gabe shared frames it as direct competition for the vendors charging for the guessed version.
The catch
Business Hub only covers ChatGPT. The article is clear on that limit. If you want any sense of how you appear in Google's AI answers, Perplexity, Copilot or anything else, Business Hub will not show you, and the third party tools are still the main option there even with the sampling problem.
What to do
If you are paying for an AI visibility tool, ask the vendor one question. Are these numbers from real user queries, or from prompts your system generates? If the answer is the second one, treat the chart as a rough signal rather than a traffic report, and weigh that against what you are paying.
If you are not paying for anything, there is nothing to do here. Business Hub is OpenAI's own product and it is free to check your own ChatGPT numbers there. That is a reasonable place to start before buying a tool to estimate the same thing.
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