Is AI recommending your business? Or your competitor's?
Stop guessing what AI search says about you. We run your buyer's real questions through all 5 engines (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini, and Google's real AI Mode) and record what each one actually cited, with a 3-pass confidence band on Agency because a single run of a probabilistic engine is noise, not a number you can defend. Flat from $29/mo, every price on the page. Read it like Search Console, for AI answers.
No credit card1 free checkNo account needed
Paste your domain. We test 8 sample prompts across 5 AI engines. About 10 minutes. Quality takes time.
The weekly read, live from the productsample data
Are you being recommended?
AI engines regularly recommend Fernway Coffee.
22%Strong
of 9 buyer questions had an AI answer citing you this week (typical range 0 to 49%)
Brand searches: cited on 2 of 23-pass confidence band
ChatGPT · Perplexity · Claude · Gemini · Google AI
Brands tracking with AI Radar
Early access cohort
WhyIQ + early access
Citation data sourced
Calibrated against
Princeton GEO · Profound 30M · AirOps 548K
The weekly client report
Every week ends in something you can put in front of a client.
One durable white-label link per client. A plain-language verdict, what moved, what the AI actually said verbatim, who holds the answer slots you are missing, and the plan. Your branding, your name on it, numbers frozen per week. This is the real report component with sample data, not a mock.
Brightside Digital
Search and AI visibility for growing brands
AI Search Report
Fernway Coffee
fernway.example · Week of July 5, 2026 · Prepared by Brightside Digital
This week in one paragraph
AI engines regularly recommend Fernway Coffee. This week brought 1 new AI citation win and 1 lost answer.
Is AI recommending Fernway Coffee?
AI engines regularly recommend Fernway Coffee.
22%Strong
of 9 AI answers to buyer questions cited Fernway Coffee (typical range 0 to 49%). Searches for Fernway Coffee by name are counted separately.
Brand-name searches: cited on 2 of 2.
Momentum this week
Won
ChatGPT now cites Fernway Coffee on "best specialty coffee subscription"
Lost
Perplexity stopped citing Fernway Coffee on "coffee subscription gift ideas"
New mention
Claude started naming Fernway Coffee on "freshest coffee beans delivered"
What the AI actually said
Verbatim excerpts from this week's AI answers that cited or named Fernway Coffee.
“For freshness-focused buyers, Fernway Coffee is a strong pick: beans ship within 48 hours of roasting and the subscription lets you pause or reschedule from a single dashboard.”
“Fernway Coffee reviews consistently highlight the roast-date transparency and a subscription that is easy to pause, with most complaints limited to limited decaf options.”
“Fernway Coffee's subscription starts at a mid-range price with free shipping over the monthly tier, positioning it between budget roasters and premium clubs.”
“If roast-date freshness is the priority, Fernway Coffee leads this category: every bag lists the roast date and orders ship the same week they are roasted.”
“Community threads frequently name Trade and Atlas, with Fernway Coffee coming up as a smaller roaster praised for freshness.”
“Several roasters compete on freshness; Fernway Coffee is one of the names that comes up for roast-to-door speed.”
Where Fernway Coffee shows up
All questions asked on each engine, brand-name searches included, so these counts can read higher than the buyer-question rate above.
ChatGPT
cited on 3 of 4
Perplexity
cited on 1 of 3
Google AI
cited on 0 of 1
Gemini
cited on 0 of 2
Claude
cited on 0 of 1
Who the AI cites instead
reddit.comCommunity2 answer slots
r/Coffee · won "best specialty coffee subscription"
r/pourover · won "single origin coffee roasters worth trying"
wirecutter.comCompetitor2 answer slots
won "coffee subscription gift ideas"
tradecoffee.comCompetitor1 answer slot
won "best specialty coffee subscription"
sprudge.comCompetitor1 answer slot
won "single origin coffee roasters worth trying"
What we are doing about it
Answer the top subscription threads on Reddit
reddit.com holds the answer slot on 2 of the buyer questions where Fernway is absent, and Perplexity leans heavily on community threads.
Next: Post genuinely useful answers in the two highest-traffic coffee-subscription threads this week, from a real account, without a pitch.
Pitch the gift-guide listicles that AI answers cite
wirecutter.com took over the gift-ideas answer slot this week. AI engines cite established gift guides almost exclusively for this query class.
Next: Send samples + a short pitch to the three gift-guide editors whose pages the engines cited this week.
Publish the roast-date freshness explainer
Freshness is the angle engines already cite Fernway for. A citable explainer strengthens the position the data says is winning.
Next: Draft a 1,200-word explainer with the roast-to-door timeline stat in the first paragraph.
How this is measured
6 real buyer questions were run through ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI, Gemini, Claude this week, and every cited source was recorded from the actual answers. Each question ran 3 times and the results were averaged into a confidence band, because a single run of a probabilistic engine is noise, not a number you can defend.
This report measures what AI engines actually answered during the week of July 5, 2026. It is not a prediction, and AI answers can change between scans. Off-page changes typically take 4 to 8 weeks to appear in AI answers.
You optimised your site for Google. Buyers stopped asking Google.
01
AI is recommending your competitors. Often.
ChatGPT and Perplexity recommend tools in your category every day. Some of those answers name you. Most name someone else. Goodie's 2025 B2B SaaS panel found 80.9% of cited slots go to third-party sources (Reddit, G2, review sites, listicles) rather than the brand pages themselves.
02
Single-shot tools present noise as signal.
AI answers are probabilistic, not deterministic. Ask the same prompt twice, get two different answers. Tools that run a prompt once treat that noise as a verdict. We run multiple passes on Agency and average them, so the number on your dashboard is a confidence band, not a coin flip.
03
The gap compounds, then decays.
Brand mentions correlate with AI citation at r=0.664 (Ahrefs 2026, 75,000 brands), the strongest single predictor, and AirOps' 548,000-page study shows AI citations have a 3-month half-life. Every week a buyer asks ChatGPT and your competitor gets named, that competitor compounds. Stop measuring and the slot is gone before you notice.
§03 · The power view reads like Search Console
Plain language up front. Search Console depth one click away.
Every week opens with a plain answer: is AI recommending this brand, what changed, and what to do next. When you want the raw numbers, the Explore view is modeled on the report you already read every week: a Performance tab with metric cards, a weekly chart, and dimension slices, plus a Coverage tab that explains exactly why each prompt is or is not cited, the way page indexing explains your URLs.
The differences are the point. Search Console passively logs your real Google traffic. AI Radar actively runs your buyer prompts against five AI engines every week, then reads back exactly what each engine cited. We measure citation the way the engines produce it: ask the engine the real question, record the real answer. Same reading skills, same method the engine uses, new surface.
Search ConsoleWhyIQ AI Radar
ClicksCitationsReal AI answers that cited your domain. We read what the engine actually cited, not a prediction.
ImpressionsAI answers checkedEvery prompt x engine answer we measure each week.
CTRCitation rateCitations divided by answers checked.
PositionAvg cite positionWhere you sit in the answer's source list. #1 gets the trust.
Plus the parts GSC cannot give you: who wins the answer slot when you do not, and how the answer frames you when you do.
§04 · How it works
Set it up once. Deep scan every week. Email when it lands.
Start with the free check on 8 sample prompts to see your snapshot. SMB tracks 30 buyer-intent prompts weekly. Agency tracks 40 per client domain, split across brand-defense and category queries. These are the questions your buyers actually ask AI engines, not generic SEO keywords.
44.2%
of AI citations come from the first 30% of body text
AirOps, 548K-page study
2Step 02 of 03
We run a deep scan every week
Five engines. ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini, and Google's real AI Mode (English queries today). We send your real buyer prompts to each engine and read back exactly what it cited, the same retrieve-and-cite step the engines run to build an answer. No scrape, no proxy, no guess. Agency runs each prompt 3 times and averages, so the cited rate is a confidence band instead of single-shot noise. On Agency that is 40 prompts x 5 engines x 3 passes = 600 AI queries per client every week. Deep scans take time. That is the point.
46.7%
of Perplexity's citations come from Reddit threads
5W AI Platform Citation Source Index 2026
3Step 03 of 03
Email lands. Trend builds.
When the scan finishes we email you the digest with the engine and competitor that moved this week. Your dashboard reads like Search Console for AI answers and stacks week over week so you see drift, not a one-shot verdict. Zero rows when we cannot measure, never hallucinated zeroes.
r=0.664
correlation between brand mentions and AI citation, the strongest single predictor
Ahrefs 2026, 75,000 brands
§05 · Why this matters
Three reasons not to wait. Each one is measurable.
Citations decay. Weekly is the floor.
AirOps studied 548,000 pages and found AI citations have a 3-month half-life. The page ChatGPT recommends in May is recommended half as often by August. Quarterly tracking is too slow to react. Weekly is the minimum cadence that catches the decline before the slot is gone.
AirOps, 548,000-page citation study (2025)
One prompt is one sample. We run multiple.
AI answers are probabilistic. Ask ChatGPT the same question twice, get two different answers. Brand mentions correlate with AI citation at r=0.664 across 75,000 brands (Ahrefs 2026), the strongest single predictor, so the underlying signal is real, but each single read of a prompt sits inside meaningful variance. AI Radar SMB tracks 30 prompts across 5 engines weekly. Agency runs every prompt × engine three times weekly and averages, so the dashboard shows a confidence band instead of single-shot noise.
Ahrefs 2026 (75,000 brands) · Multi-pass methodology on Agency
Every gap comes with a next action.
AI Radar pairs every uncited prompt with a deterministic suggestion: pursue this G2 listing, rewrite this first paragraph, audit this Reddit thread. The fixes route to the AI Citability Playbook for execution context.
Suggestion engine · 4 rule categories · Linked to the AI Citability Playbook
AI Radar answers whether AI is sending buyers to your page. The WhyIQ Scanner answers why those buyers don't convert once they arrive. Run both on the same domain to close the loop.
If your question isn’t here, the team replies during US/EU business hours. Get in touch.
What is WhyIQ AI Radar?
WhyIQ AI Radar is an AI search visibility tool (answer engine optimization / generative engine optimization) and AI citation monitor. We test the buyer-intent prompts your audience asks ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini, and Google AI every week, and we record exactly when each engine cites your domain, when it cites a competitor instead, and which third-party sources (Reddit, review sites, listicles) take the slot. You get a Citation Score, a per-engine grid, a competitor leaderboard, and a ranked list of fixes. Free first check, no account required.
How is this different from Google Search Console?
Search Console passively logs your real Google search traffic: clicks, impressions, CTR, and position. WhyIQ AI Radar gives you the same four-metric report for AI answers, where no traffic report exists. Citations (AI answers that cite you), AI answers checked, citation rate, and average cite position, sliceable by prompt, page, engine, buyer stage, and source. Because AI engines publish no equivalent of Search Console, AI Radar actively runs your buyer-intent prompts against ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini, and Google AI every week and records what each engine actually answered. The two are complements: GSC tells you how Google search treats you, AI Radar tells you how AI answers treat you.
How is this different from the scanner's AI Citability score?
The scanner's AI Citability Index is a structural readiness score. It audits your page for the on-page signals (FAQ schema, statistical density, named author byline, crawler access) that predict citation. WhyIQ AI Radar is the measured outcome. It records actual citations from real AI engines responding to real buyer prompts. The scanner tells you if your page is ready to be cited. AI Radar tells you if it actually is, by which engines, and for which prompts.
Which AI engines do you check?
Five engines on every check: ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini, and Google AI. These are the mainstream consumer-facing AI search surfaces that drive measurable referral traffic today. The Agency tier adds Grok and Microsoft Copilot once their measurement pricing stabilises. Each engine runs your 8 sample prompts (or 30, on SMB and above) and we record the full ordered list of sources cited per answer, then collapse it into a per-engine citation rate so you can see which engines are working for you and which are not.
How does AI Radar's pricing compare to Profound, Otterly, and Peec?
AI Radar bundles all 5 mainstream engines at $29/mo on SMB, billed monthly, with every price published. The funded competitors gate engines or gate pricing at the floor (figures verified against their public pricing pages, 17 July 2026). Otterly is $29/mo for 4 engines (ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity, Copilot) with 15 prompts, and Gemini, Google AI Mode, and Claude billed as per-engine add-ons from $9 to $439/mo depending on plan; the next tier is $189/mo. Peec AI's brand tiers cover 3 AI models on a credit-allocation system, and its agency tiers are demo-gated with no public price. Profound is $99/mo billed yearly for 50 prompts on ChatGPT only with no data export; its $399/mo tier reaches 3 engines, and Claude and Gemini sit in its custom-priced Enterprise tier. AI Radar's wedge is flat-engine pricing with monthly billing: 5 engines included at every tier, no add-ons, no demo call. The Agency tier upgrade is rigor (3-pass confidence band) and client domains rather than more engines.
How often does AI Radar refresh?
The free check is one-time. The SMB tier ($29/mo) checks 30 prompts weekly with a single read per engine. The Agency tier ($149/mo) runs the same weekly cadence across 5 client domains and 40 prompts each, but adds a 3-pass confidence band on every check (each prompt × engine is queried 3 times and averaged), the only honest answer to the category's noisy single-shot tools. Citations are not stable. AirOps' 548,000-page study found AI citations have a 3-month half-life, so weekly tracking is the minimum useful cadence, and the trend, not the snapshot, is the signal you act on.
When do I get results, and how do I see what changed?
Every weekly scan is deep by design. SMB runs 30 prompts x 5 engines = 150 AI queries every week. Agency runs 40 prompts x 5 engines x 3 passes = 600 AI queries per client every week, then averages the 3 passes into a confidence band. The run takes hours, not seconds, because depth at that scale is the trade. The moment it lands we email you a digest that names the top engine and the competitor that moved most week over week. Your dashboard stacks every weekly run, so the headline number is not the cited rate this week, it is the cited rate this week versus last week versus the week before. That is the actual product. The free hero check is just the first snapshot.
Can I put the results in front of a client?
Yes, that is the Agency tier's centerpiece. Every weekly scan produces a white-label client report: a plain-language verdict on whether AI recommends the brand, what moved that week, verbatim excerpts of what the AI actually said, the competing sources, and the action plan, with your agency's branding on it. You publish it once to one durable link; new weeks publish to the same link automatically and past weeks stay archived inside it, with each published week's numbers frozen. See a full sample with fictional data at whyiq.ai/rr/demo.
How reliable is the cited-rate number on the dashboard?
Depends on the tier. AI engines are probabilistic, not deterministic. Run the same prompt twice and you can get two different answers. Most tools in this category run each prompt once per check and report the result as a verdict. That presents noise as signal. The SMB tier ($29/mo) follows the category norm with one read per prompt × engine per week. The Agency tier ($149/mo) runs each prompt × engine three times every week and averages, so the dashboard shows 'cited 2 of 3 passes' instead of a single yes-or-no. If your team is making investment decisions off this data, Agency is the honest read; SMB is the cost-effective one.
Why one free check per visitor?
Two reasons. The first is cost: every check fires across 5 AI engines and we pay each engine per query, so unlimited free checks would burn the unit economics that make the SMB tier sustainable at $29. The second is product: a one-time check shows you the snapshot, but the actual product is the weekly trend. Once you've seen the snapshot, the SMB tier covers up to 30 prompts on a 7-day Stripe refund window. Sign up for free to save your result and get notified when Radar ships product updates.
What happens to my domain data?
Your free check is ephemeral. We run the 8 prompts, return the result, and the check expires from our active store after 30 days unless you save it via signup. On paid tiers we store your prompts, your tracked domains, your competitor list, and the per-engine citation history so you can see week-over-week trend. We never share or sell your data, and we never use your tracked prompts to train models. If you cancel a paid tier, your tenant goes archived for 60 days (so you can resume) and is permanently deleted after.
Can I cancel anytime?
Yes. SMB and Agency are month-to-month, cancel from your billing dashboard or via the Stripe customer portal link in your account. Cancellation takes effect at the end of your current billing period, so you keep what you paid for until then. If something is not working and you cancel within 7 days of a paid checkout, email [email protected] for a full refund.
Find out who AI recommends in your category.
Five engines, deep weekly scans, emailed when they land. Flat from $29/mo. Agency runs 40 prompts x 5 engines x 3 passes per client every week and averages the passes into a confidence band, so the data is not single-shot noise. Start with one free check. The first answer is whether you should be worrying.