r/seogaps

Building in public a bit here. We track how often brands

show up in ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI answers.

Three decisions caused the most pushback from early users.

Curious if others have thought about this.

We only measure weekly. On purpose.

Early users wanted daily tracking. We said no.

Here's why: AI visibility doesn't move day-to-day.

What actually drives whether ChatGPT recommends you

is your content, citations, mentions, G2/Reddit reviews,

structured data. That stuff moves in weeks or months,

not overnight.

So if you measure Monday vs Tuesday, any difference

in your score is noise, not signal. The engine just

rolled the dice differently. Not because you improved.

Not because you got worse.

Daily tracking is expensive and misleading.

Weekly is a real signal.

Question: do you think weekly is enough?

Or would you want daily even knowing it's mostly noise?

We run each question 3 times and report a rate, not a yes/no.

AI engines are non-deterministic. Ask ChatGPT the exact

same question 3 times and you'll get 3 different answers,

often with different brands mentioned.

So "did you appear?" from a single scan is basically a coin flip.

We run each prompt 3 times and report: mentioned in 2 out of 3,

so 67% probability. That's a real estimate. A single answer is not.

Question: how do other AI tracking tools handle this?

Do they measure once and call it done?

Because that seems like a pretty broken metric to me.

We split prompts into layers and branded questions

don't count toward your main score.

Not all prompts are equal.

Buyer-intent, so "best issue tracker for dev teams",

is where you actually want to appear. Around 55% of scans.

Category questions like "how do small teams manage sprints"

cast a wider net, still unbranded.

Competitor-anchored prompts like "alternatives to Jira"

catch people who are actively shopping the competition.

And then branded prompts like "what is Linear?"

test whether AI actually knows you correctly.

The key decision: branded prompts are excluded

from your headline score.

Why? Because if the question already names you,

of course you'll appear. It would inflate your number

by 15 to 20 points artificially.

So branded questions get their own section:

does AI know you accurately? Not: how visible are you?

Question: does this split make sense to you?

Would you want branded included in the main score

or does that feel like gaming the metric?

Genuinely curious what people think. Especially if you've

tried to track AI visibility yourself and ran into

similar problems or solved them differently.

What's your take?

I received an interesting question from one of the B2B SaaS brands I help with AI SEO.

"G2 is trying to sell us a package of content based on comparisons. We rank pretty high on a few of these metrics.

If we license the content, we can use those numbers on our site, which they say can boost our AEO scores.

It costs about $3,700 from now until December. Is it worth it or not?"

https://preview.redd.it/n2jx36bay68h1.png?width=2922&format=png&auto=webp&s=c53c980eda9ad3f46bd3171e7de17949a5dc548e

It's interesting how accurately G2 has found its value for brands in relation to the new, growing demand:

1/ Listicles, [brand] alternatives, and [brand] vs [brand] are too popular now.

2/ For many big brands, the goal is not to be visible (they are already visible); the goal is to be recommended as the best option.

But how profitable is this offer?

On the one hand, AI chats love tables, comparisons, and numbers.

On the other hand, AI chats rarely care about the authority of the source and the date of the last update of such a table.

This means that any competitor or third-party website can create the same table, building these numbers based on their fantasy, and without mentioning any sources from where they got them. And LLM can choose to cite this fantasy table instead of the tables from G2.

And here it is important what will happen after December, if the brand stops paying for these comparison tables:

1/ Can a brand leave this embed widget on the website? I assume no.

2/ Can a brand leave this data but not as an embedded widget, but as its own table, just copying the data and showing it without updates? This is more likely, and then you can try it if there are a lot of interesting insights on different competitors.

However, if you have to pay for it every quarter or year to keep the content on the site, it is definitely a bad deal. It is better to spend this money on regular link insertions on pages that have already been cited a lot.

Do you agree?