Our Signature Program
A weekly research study,
run on your market.
Every week, we re-ask your buyers’ questions across ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and Perplexity — phrased the way real buyers ask them. Then we turn the results into recommendations, with the evidence attached. This is the one thing we sell.
Book a Citation Readout → Try the free steps firstWhat the study includes
Everything below is included at every size. One program — the only thing that changes between tiers is how much measurement you get.
Weekly measurement, four engines
Your market’s prompt set — built with our ICP-framing process and tracked in buyer-realistic phrasings — re-asked every week across ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and Perplexity.
Validated plays
Single-feature recommendations that survived statistical testing in your market’s data — effect size, sample size, and confidence tier attached, including what to avoid.
Content recipes
Feature combinations that beat their best single ingredient, cross-validated before an analyst releases them — with the exact pages on your site to apply them to.
Weekly re-verification
Every released recommendation is re-tested against fresh data weekly. If a pattern decays, we retire it and tell you. No stale advice, ever.
Off-page target list
The source sites AI engines actually read in your vertical — review platforms, analysts, trade press — so outreach goes where citations come from.
The monthly brief
What changed in your market’s citations, what to do about it, and the evidence behind both — in plain words, ready to forward.
How the study works.
Everyone tracks citations. We track why they persist — and that requires a different kind of measurement: longitudinal, statistical, and specific to your market.
1 · Map the questions
We build your prompt set with our ICP-framing protocol: we infer your buyer personas and write every question in three variants — generic, persona-prefixed, and persona-rewritten — because differently-phrased versions of the same question can share as little as 0% of their citations. Generic prompt lists measure a market that isn’t yours.
2 · Measure weekly, four engines
Every week your questions run on ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and Gemini, and we record every source each engine cites — URL-level, not just domains. Week over week, that builds the one dataset snapshots can’t: which citations survive.
3 · Find what makes citations last
We statistically compare the pages that keep their citations against the ones that lose them — sample sizes, effect sizes, confidence tiers, cross-validation. What survives testing becomes a play or a recipe; what doesn’t, you never see.
4 · Deliver, then re-verify
Plays, recipes, target pages, and the monthly brief land in your Playbook — and every released recommendation is re-tested weekly against fresh data. If a pattern decays, we retire it and tell you. No stale advice, ever.
Everyone tracks citations. We track why they persist.
Most AEO platforms answer a binary question: are you being cited? That's useful, but it's a snapshot. It tells you what happened, not why—and not what to do about it.
Our research is built around a different question: what content characteristics predict whether a citation persists or decays over time? Answering that requires longitudinal data, structural analysis, and statistical rigor—not a single crawl.
We track the questions your buyers actually ask AI
Every research program starts with a prompt set—typically 100+ questions per vertical, covering the full buyer journey:
"What is [concept]?"
Questions from buyers just entering the market. These prompts test whether AI engines recognize your brand as a foundational source in your space.
"How does X differ from Y?"
Questions from buyers building a shortlist. These prompts reveal whether AI engines trust your explanations over your competitors' content.
"X vs. Y" and "best [category]"
Prompts from buyers evaluating options. High commercial intent. These are the citations that directly influence purchase decisions.
"Is [product] worth it for [use case]?"
Prompts from buyers ready to commit. Being cited here means being part of the final consideration set—the last mile before purchase.
Where the prompts come from
Most AEO tools let you type in prompts and hope they're the right ones. The Prompt Index is our proprietary process for building a verified, data-backed prompt set unique to your vertical and your buyers. It draws from five sources:
Community Intelligence
We mine buyer questions from Reddit (r/cybersecurity, r/marketing, r/SaaS), G2 reviews, PeerSpot discussions, and AnswerThePublic. These capture how real buyers phrase questions in their own language—not marketing jargon, not RFP language.
Search Console Data
We connect your Google Search Console to identify the queries your buyers are already searching. Research shows 77% of Google page-1 queries also appear in AI engine responses for the same topic. Your existing search data is one of the best predictors of AI prompts.
Team & Customer Polling
We ask 3–5 people on your team and your customers to share their recent AI search history for your product category. Even 50 real queries from actual buyers are more valuable than 1,000 guesses. These surface the exact phrasing and intent that no external tool can capture.
Sales Conversations
Your sales calls contain the exact questions buyers ask before purchasing. We analyze transcripts from Gong, Chorus, or call notes to extract every product and category question. These are the highest-intent prompts—the ones that directly influence deals.
AI Search Volume Data
We cross-reference every candidate prompt against AI search volume data to validate that real people are actually asking these questions. Prompts that nobody searches for don't make the index—regardless of how good they sound on paper.
Every prompt is run in three variants—because a generic question and a buyer’s real question return almost nothing in common.
The 5-source Prompt Index gives us the right questions. But how a buyer actually phrases the question matters as much as the question itself. We tested this directly. The result was sharp enough that it changed how we run every engagement.
In a 45-call smoke test across cybersecurity questions, we ran each prompt three ways: generic (the bare question), persona-prefixed (with a one-line buyer-role prefix), and persona-rewritten (the question phrased the way a real healthcare-CISO would type it). On average, generic and persona-rewritten variants of the same underlying question shared 0% of their citations. Two parallel universes of sources for the same buyer intent.
This finding is why every prompt in your Index is tracked in all three variants every week. Generic-prompt monitoring (what Profound, Stacker, and BrightEdge ship by default) measures a different citation graph than the one your buyers actually encounter in their own sessions. Tracking only the generic phrasing means optimizing toward sources your buyer will never see.
The full finding, with its evidence, is published in The Glassbox Report →
Operational implication: Your monthly performance read reports citations across all three variant types per prompt, not pooled. You and your client can see where you appear in the generic citation universe AND in the persona-aware one—and where the gap is.
What we collect, every week, across every engine
Prompt execution
Every week, we run 100+ prompts across three major AI engines. We capture the full response, including every source cited, its position in the answer, and the context in which it appears.
Source analysis
For every URL cited in every response, we scrape and analyze the page across 50+ structural and contextual features: content length, heading structure, schema markup, entity density, definitiveness, recency, and more.
Persistence tracking
We track the same prompts, on the same engines, week after week—measuring which URLs continue to appear, which drop off, and which new sources replace them. This is the longitudinal layer that makes our data unique.
Competitive mapping
We track which brands co-appear in the same AI responses and how citation share shifts over time. This reveals who you're actually competing against for AI visibility.
Engine behavior profiling
Each AI engine has distinct citation preferences. ChatGPT favors consensus sources. Perplexity leans on real-time content. We profile each engine separately so nothing gets missed.
Content feature scoring
Every cited URL receives a feature score across all tracked dimensions. Over time, we identify which features consistently predict citation persistence in your vertical—and which are noise.
From raw data to citation contributors
Raw citation data tells you what happened. Our analysis layer tells you why. We call the output citation contributors—the specific content attributes that statistically correlate with citation persistence in a given vertical.
Feature extraction
Every cited URL is analyzed across 50+ structural and contextual features. Some are obvious (word count, schema markup). Others are specific to how AI engines process content and are part of our proprietary research.
Correlation analysis
We compare the features of URLs that persist in citations against those that decay. Over weeks and months of longitudinal data, statistical patterns emerge—certain content characteristics consistently predict persistence, and they vary by vertical.
Playbook generation
The citation contributors become prescriptive recommendations: what to publish, how to structure it, which gaps to fill. These aren't generic best practices—they're specific to your prompts, your vertical, and your competitive landscape, backed by your data.
Four deliverables. Each one earns its place in the engagement.
Below the research engine sits the work product. Every study includes four deliverables — the minimum coherent research engagement. Below this set, the work doesn't compound; above it, complexity outpaces our ability to deliver well.
DELIVERABLE 01
Your domain's citation report
Weekly. Which of your pages were cited, on which engines, for which queries, with what persistence rate. Per-engine breakdown. Your raw data is yours.
DELIVERABLE 02
Prioritized recommendations queue
Monthly. The specific pages and articles most worth updating right now, ranked by expected citation impact. Each recommendation cites the underlying research finding and shows the data behind the call.
DELIVERABLE 03
Competitive citation surveillance
Weekly tracking + alerts. Five named competitors' citation share in your category. When their share moves — up or down — you get the specific pages driving it. Real-time enough to react before a shift compounds.
DELIVERABLE 04
Your custom playbook
Quarterly. A strategic synthesis of what works for your domain, vertical, and buyers — refined over a full quarter of citation data so each version's recommendations have earned their place. By month four, your first version. By month twelve, a proprietary research asset no competitor can replicate.
Read the full playbook spec below ↓Generic AEO advice expires. Your playbook compounds.
Every AEO guide on the internet gives you the same advice: add schema, use answer-first structure, keep content fresh. That's fine as a starting point. But it doesn't tell you which tactics actually move the needle in your vertical, for your prompts, against your competitors. The Playbook does.
Data-backed, not opinion-based
Every recommendation traces back to statistical findings from your longitudinal citation data. We don't guess what works—we measure it.
Specific to your vertical
What drives citation persistence in cybersecurity is different from martech. Your playbook reflects the patterns that matter in your market, not generic best practices.
Always current
Quarterly deep-dives feed new findings into the playbook. Tactics get validated, refined, or deprecated based on fresh data. You always have an up-to-date SOP.
Priced in credits. No surprise bills, ever.
From $299/mo — every plan includes the full program, and credits only meter the measurement. Run out and measurement pauses; it never bills past your plan.
Running this for clients?
It compounds — clients in the same industry share a research pool, and briefs are white-label ready. Book a Citation Readout and we’ll walk through the agency details.
Start free. Pay when the evidence convinces you.
The free prompt set and live citation check show you exactly what the study would measure — before you spend a dollar. Your market’s data can’t start collecting retroactively, and whoever starts first owns the moat.
Get your free prompt set → Book a Citation Readout →