# Answered - AI Brand Visibility Platform (Full Documentation)
# https://tryanswered.com
# Contact: spencer@tryanswered.com

## About Answered

Answered is the leading AEO (Answer Engine Optimization) platform purpose-built for the AI era. As AI-powered search and answer engines like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, and Google AI Overview increasingly shape how consumers discover and evaluate brands, Answered gives marketing teams the tools to monitor, measure, and improve their brand's presence in AI-generated responses.

Traditional SEO tools track rankings on search engine results pages. Answered tracks something fundamentally different: how AI models understand, represent, and recommend your brand when users ask questions directly to AI assistants.

## Detailed Feature Descriptions

### AEO Visibility Score
The AEO Visibility Score is a proprietary metric (0-100) that quantifies how visible your brand is across AI platforms. The score is calculated by analyzing multiple signals including mention frequency, citation accuracy, sentiment, positioning within responses, and whether your brand is recommended as a solution. Scores are broken down by platform (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Google AI Overview) and by query category, allowing teams to identify exactly where their brand is strong and where it needs improvement. Scores update with each scan cycle, and historical trends are tracked over time so you can measure the impact of your optimization efforts.

### Citation Tracking
Answered continuously monitors AI platforms for mentions of your brand, products, and key personnel. Each citation is captured with full context including the query that triggered it, the AI platform that generated the response, whether your brand was mentioned positively or negatively, whether a link to your website was included, and where in the response your brand appeared relative to competitors. The citation dashboard provides real-time alerts, historical trends, and exportable reports for stakeholder presentations.

### Competitor Analysis
Compare your AI visibility directly against up to 5 competitors. The competitor analysis module runs the same queries across the same AI platforms for each competitor, generating side-by-side visibility scores, citation counts, and sentiment comparisons. This reveals competitive gaps and opportunities — for example, you might discover that a competitor is consistently cited for a product category where your brand is absent from AI responses entirely.

### AEO Article Writer
The AEO Article Writer generates content specifically optimized for AI citation. Unlike traditional SEO content that targets keyword rankings, AEO-optimized content is structured to be easily parsed, understood, and cited by large language models. The writer produces content with clear factual claims, proper entity markup, authoritative sourcing, and the structured formats that AI models prefer when selecting content to reference in their responses.

### AI Presence Kit
The AI Presence Kit automatically generates and maintains the technical files that help AI crawlers understand your brand. This includes llms.txt files (the emerging standard for providing brand context to AI models), structured data markup (JSON-LD), optimized robots.txt configurations that welcome AI crawlers, and brand context documents that provide AI models with accurate, up-to-date information about your products, services, and positioning.

## How AEO Differs from Traditional SEO

Traditional SEO focuses on optimizing web pages to rank higher in search engine results pages (SERPs). The goal is to appear in the top 10 blue links when someone searches on Google or Bing. The metrics that matter are keyword rankings, organic traffic, click-through rates, and domain authority.

AEO (Answer Engine Optimization) addresses a fundamentally different challenge. When users ask ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Google AI Overview a question, they receive a synthesized answer — not a list of links. The AI model draws on its training data and, in some cases, real-time web retrieval to construct a response. Your brand either appears in that response or it doesn't. There is no "page 2" — you are either part of the answer or you are invisible.

Key differences include:
- **Rankings vs. Mentions**: SEO measures where you rank. AEO measures whether you are mentioned at all, and in what context.
- **Keywords vs. Queries**: SEO targets specific keywords. AEO must account for the infinite ways users phrase questions to AI assistants.
- **Links vs. Citations**: SEO drives clicks to your website. AEO ensures your brand is cited, recommended, and accurately represented in AI responses.
- **On-Page vs. Entity Optimization**: SEO optimizes page elements (title tags, headers, content). AEO optimizes how AI models understand your brand as an entity — its attributes, relationships, and authority.
- **Crawlers vs. Training Data**: SEO focuses on search engine crawlers indexing your pages. AEO also considers how your content enters AI training data and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) pipelines.

Both SEO and AEO are important. They are complementary strategies, not replacements for each other. Strong SEO creates the web presence that AI models draw from, while AEO ensures that presence translates into accurate AI representation.

## Common Questions About AI Visibility

### Why does AI visibility matter?
A growing share of product research and brand discovery happens through AI assistants. When someone asks ChatGPT "What is the best project management tool?" or Perplexity "Compare CRM platforms for small businesses," the AI response directly shapes purchasing decisions — often without the user ever visiting a search engine or clicking a link. Brands that are absent from these responses lose visibility they cannot recover through traditional channels.

### How often are AI responses updated?
It depends on the platform. ChatGPT responses are influenced by training data (updated periodically) and, with browsing enabled, real-time web content. Perplexity performs real-time web searches for every query. Google AI Overview draws on Google's search index. Answered monitors all of these platforms on configurable scan schedules so you always have current data.

### Can I control what AI models say about my brand?
You cannot directly control AI responses, but you can influence them. By ensuring your website provides clear, structured, authoritative content — and by using tools like llms.txt to give AI models accurate brand context — you increase the likelihood of accurate, favorable representation. Answered tracks the impact of these efforts over time.

### How is the visibility score calculated?
The AEO Visibility Score factors in mention frequency (how often your brand appears in relevant AI responses), citation accuracy (whether the information presented about your brand is correct), sentiment (positive, neutral, or negative framing), positioning (whether you are mentioned first, as the top recommendation, or as an afterthought), and link inclusion (whether the AI response includes a link to your website).

### What AI platforms does Answered monitor?
Answered currently monitors ChatGPT (OpenAI), Perplexity, Claude (Anthropic), and Google AI Overview. Support for additional platforms is added as the AI search landscape evolves.

## Integration Capabilities

Answered provides several integration options for teams that want to incorporate AI visibility data into their existing workflows:

- **REST API**: Available on Enterprise plans, the Answered API provides programmatic access to visibility scores, citation data, competitor analysis, and scan results. Use it to build custom dashboards, automate reporting, or feed AI visibility data into your existing analytics stack.
- **Webhook Notifications**: Configure webhooks to receive real-time alerts when significant changes occur — such as a drop in visibility score, a new competitor citation, or a negative sentiment detection.
- **CSV/PDF Export**: All dashboards and reports can be exported in CSV format for data analysis or PDF format for stakeholder presentations.
- **White-Label Reporting**: Agency plan customers can generate branded reports with their own logo and color scheme for client delivery.

## Pricing

- **Starter** ($49/month): 1 domain, 50 tracked queries, Perplexity monitoring, daily scans, competitor tracking, and the AEO Article Writer.
- **Pro** ($199/month): 3 domains, 200 tracked queries, all 4 AI platforms, daily scans, competitor tracking, the AEO Article Writer, AI Presence Kit, and report exports.
- **Agency** ($499/month): 10 domains, 500 tracked queries, all 4 AI platforms, daily scans, competitor tracking, the AEO Article Writer, AI Presence Kit, white-label reports, and a dedicated CSM.
- **Enterprise** (Custom): Unlimited domains and queries, API access, dedicated account manager, custom integrations, SLA, SSO/SAML authentication.

## Technical Details

- **Website**: https://tryanswered.com
- **Platform Type**: SaaS web application (browser-based, no installation required)
- **API**: REST API with JSON responses, OAuth2 authentication (Enterprise plans)
- **Security**: SOC 2 compliant infrastructure, data encrypted at rest and in transit, GDPR-ready
- **Uptime**: 99.9% SLA on Enterprise plans