Core concepts
The few ideas behind every number in Spotlit, in plain words.
What you'll get from this page
- Understand what a scan actually does.
- Tell a mention, a citation, a visit and a lead apart.
- Know why results move a little from run to run.
How a scan works
A scan asks AI the questions your buyers ask, then reads every answer. For each question, Spotlit searches the live web, its AI model writes an answer from the pages it found, and we check which brands the answer names and which pages it used.
- 1
Question
A buying question such as “best email tool for small shops”.
- 2
Live web search
The engine searches the web for that question, leaning to your chosen country.
- 3
Answer
Our AI model writes an answer from those pages, in your chosen language.
- 4
Reading
We note which brands it named, in what order, and which pages it cited.
The building blocks
Prompt
A buyer question we ask AI. Each brand has up to 10, plus one about the brand itself. Outcome: The same questions every scan, so results compare.
Answer
What the AI wrote for one prompt in one scan. You can open and read every one. Outcome: You see what a buyer would read.
Mention
The answer names your brand somewhere in its text. Outcome: Counts toward your visibility rate.
Position
Your place when the answer lists brands. #1 means named first. Outcome: Lower is better.
Source
A web page the answer was built from (also called a citation). Outcome: Shows which sites shape the answer.
Gap
A cited site that isn't yours or a rival's and doesn't mention you yet. Outcome: A place worth getting listed.
Mention, citation, visit and lead are different
Being named in an AI answer is not the same as being linked, and neither is a visit or a sale. Spotlit measures the first two only.
| Term | What it means | Does Spotlit measure it? |
|---|---|---|
| Mention | The answer names your brand. | Yes |
| Citation | The answer used a page as a source. | Yes |
| Visit | Someone clicked through to your site. | No |
| Lead | That visitor became a prospect or customer. | No |
Answers vary from run to run
Ask AI the same question twice and you can get different brands in a different order. So we don't show one precise “AI rank”. We show rates over many answers, and we ask a few questions several times in each scan to measure the spread.
One brand at a time
Every page in the app shows one brand, picked in the brand switcher in the sidebar. Mixing brands would turn numbers into noise. Agencies can track many brands and switch between them. See Brands, agencies and clients.
See also
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