People search “ChatGPT mentions” after a competitor’s name showed up and theirs did not. The panic is the same in both languages. The object usually is not.
ChatGPT mentions vs citations. A mention is your name, brand, or idea appearing in the answer. A citation is a source the reader can open and check. Mixing them is how a vanity search looks like a win, and how a real miss gets the wrong fix.
The test is one click. If nothing opens onto the claim with your name on it, the answer mentioned you and cited someone else.
The mix-up, not the diagnosis
Why ChatGPT does not name you already splits named, linked but unnamed, and used without attribution. Log those three columns there. This page only answers the query that treats a name-drop as a win.
A fourth miss is still yours: you tested a memory chat. Training recall is not Search. If the reply has no sources, you tested the wrong product. “Why did it name my competitor?” is then a Search test you have not run.
What a mention cannot do
A mention cannot be audited by a third party. A mention cannot be a footnote in a manuscript. A mention cannot replace a row in an evidence ledger: there is no source to grade and nothing that would retire it.
CITATION, on this site, is stricter on purpose: discoverable, attributed, answer-shaped, evidenced, and actually used. A name-drop fails attributed and evidenced. How to get cited by ChatGPT is the work that makes a URL stealable. This page stops you from celebrating the wrong event.
What this page is not
It is not a ranking. OpenAI does not publish a ChatGPT citation league table you can buy. It is not a prompt pack for “mention my brand.” It is not the robots.txt lesson.
The Findability Engine is in production and not for sale. You do not need the hardcover to refuse a dashboard that counts mentions as citations.
Write the three columns. Run Search, not memory. If the competitor has a link and a name and you have neither, you do not have a mentions problem. You have a page that cannot be stolen.