What BotSay measures
BotSay is a service for marketing teams that tracks how often AI search engines mention them. Each week it puts your questions to six AI engines, reads the answers and shows on This week how often your brand came up and what changed.
What does BotSay measure? #
BotSay measures whether AI answers name your brand, which other brands they name, which links they give and how favourably they describe you.
Each week it puts your questions to ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude, Google AI Overviews and Google AI Mode. All six are on for every paying workspace, so there is no subset to choose, and Which AI engines BotSay asks says what each one is.
One weekly measurement is called a reading: your whole set of questions, asked once on every engine. Every reading uses the same questions, so two readings compare like with like.
Which five measures does BotSay report? #
BotSay reports five measures, always in this order: Mention rate, Share of voice, Average rank, Your pages cited and Sentiment.
- Mention rate. Of the answers read, the share that named you.
- Share of voice. Of every brand mention in those answers, the share that was you.
- Average rank. When you are named, how early. Lower is better.
- Your pages cited. Of every link the answers cited, the share that pointed at your sites.
- Sentiment. How favourably you are described, from 0 to 100. It is a model's estimate, not a person's reading.
If Tessera has a Mention rate of 32%, then 32 of every 100 answers read named Tessera. What the five measures mean gives the full definitions and worked examples.
What are the five places in the app? #
The side menu has five places: This week, Work, Standing, Evidence and Setup.
- This week (the reading): the lead figure, whether anything changed since the last reading, and where you stand against rivals. What the This week page shows goes through it from top to bottom.
- Work (what to do next): suggested pages to write, in tabs named To do, Waiting for you, Doing, Done and Not for us.
- Standing (you against rivals): tabs named Against rivals, Over time, By engine, By theme and Gained and lost.
- Evidence (answers and sources): What they said shows the answers and What they cited shows the links.
- Setup (questions, brands, people): your questions, brands and sites, how readings are scheduled and how we measure. Engines, People and Billing are for admins only.
Is BotSay a rank tracker? #
BotSay reads what an AI engine says in its answer, while a rank tracker reports where a web page sits in search results.
BotSay records whether the engine named you, whom it named beside you and which links it gave. The nearest thing to a rank is Average rank, which says how early your brand is named within an answer when you are named at all. It is not a page position.
Does BotSay read the AI apps people use? #
BotSay reads each engine's own service, or licensed search data for the two Google engines.
BotSay never signs in to a consumer chat screen and copies what it shows. An engine's own service can behave slightly differently from the everyday app, so read the figures as a guide to how you show up in AI search, not as a copy of what one person sees on one screen. Because every reading asks the same questions in the same way, the change from one reading to the next is a fair comparison.
Does BotSay write content? #
BotSay suggests the pages worth writing, and you write and publish them.
Work lists those suggestions. When a page in Doing goes live, choose Mark published and give the date. BotSay then shows a result from the first reading after that date.
How often does BotSay read? #
Every week, across all your questions and all six engines.
The two Google engines answer about a day after the others, so a week is complete the day after the reading. When readings happen has the schedule, and When your first numbers arrive explains what to expect from your first reading.
Tessera, Novaly, Pinefield, Kestrel Pay and Orbita are invented brands, used here as examples.