How To Audit Whether AI Recommends Your Brand
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Where to Get Real Language Four sources, all of which you already own. Sales call notes, where prospects describe their problem before anyone corrects their terminology. Support tickets, where customers describe things going wrong in their own words.
Vague answers about digital PR are a warning sign. Good answers are concrete: they have read your baseline source list, they know which platforms allow corrections, they have a view on which comparison articles are worth approaching, and they will tell you which ones are out of reach.
What analytics cannot tell you is how often you were named without a click, which in this channel is most of the time. A recommendation that a buyer acts on three weeks later leaves no trace in any report you own. This is why the manual prompt set is not optional, and why nobody should be asked to justify this work on referral traffic alone.
Weight toward the commercial tiers. Roughly a third on buying intent, a quarter on evaluation, a quarter on problem framing and the remainder split between definitional and branded is a reasonable starting distribution.
What can legitimately be committed to is process: the prompt set will be run on a schedule, the raw answers will be kept, specific technical fixes will be made by a date, a defined number of third party listings will be corrected. Commitments about inputs are honest. Commitments about outputs are not.
One test of whether a prompt set is any good is to run it and see whether the answers surprise you. A set that returns exactly what you expected is usually measuring your own assumptions, because the questions were written from them. Surprises indicate the prompts reached beyond the company's internal picture of its market, which is the entire purpose.
Save the document and the date. In three months you will run the same ten prompts again, and the comparison is the only thing that will tell you whether anything you did in between mattered. ai visibility agency
Read the Source List Before the Prose Where citations are shown, list every domain and count how often each appears. This is the single most useful output of the whole exercise, and most people skip it because the prose is more interesting.
The prompt set is the instrument, and almost every weak measurement programme in this field has a weak prompt set at the bottom of it. Get this wrong and everything downstream measures the wrong thing with great precision.
The Mistake Almost Everyone Makes Prompt sets written by marketing teams use marketing language. They contain the category name the company uses internally, the segment labels from the positioning document, and the phrasing from the website.
Include the Awkward Ones Two categories get left out for uncomfortable reasons and are among the most informative. First, prompts naming your competitors directly, which show whether you appear as an alternative to them.
This channel is currently less correlated with budget than any other in marketing, and that will not last. The advantages available to a small business today exist because the field is young, the incumbents are slow, and several of the things that matter cannot be bought quickly.
Report frequency rather than presence. Being named in one run out of five is a genuinely different situation from being named in five out of five, and a report that collapses both to mentioned has thrown away the useful part.
One structural decision saves a lot of trouble later. Keep the raw answers in plain text files named by date, assistant and run number, rather than pasting them into a document that gets reformatted. Six months in you will want to search across every run for the first appearance of a competitor or a source, and a folder of plain files supports that while a slide deck does not.
The lesson generalises to any brand whose name is short, generic or ambiguous. The correction is not clever, it is repetitive: pick one written form, use it everywhere, and pair it with a descriptive phrase so that a mention alone is never the only clue about what it refers to.
Review the whole set annually rather than continuously. Markets shift, product lines change and language moves, but an instrument revised every month is not an instrument. It is a series of unrelated measurements that happen to share a spreadsheet. ai visibility agency
Control the Session Conditions Personalisation quietly corrupts this. Run from a signed out session, or a fresh session with memory and history disabled, and do not use an account that has been researching your own company all week.
Ask one final question before signing: what would you tell me if this is not working after six months? The answer reveals whether they have thought about failure, and an agency that has not thought about failure will not recognise it. ai visibility agency
Second, prompts that presuppose a weakness: is this company expensive, are they slow, are they suitable for small clients. The answers reveal what the system believes about your reputation, and where the belief is wrong it points at a specific source you can correct.