The four questions

Every screen in Vercatus answers one of four questions. This page follows them in order, with the site chosen in the site switcher at the top of the navigation.

1. How visible am I?

Open Overview. It leads with your Answer Share: of the AI answers on your topics, the share that name or cite you. It is shown with its range, for example “18% · 15–21”, and with the change against the previous 28 days. A change inside the range reads “no clear change”. One sentence says it plainly, in this form: “Of the AI answers on your topics, 18% name or cite you. Fabrikam appears in 41%.” (The figures here are illustrative.)

Below the lede:

Leaderboard: you and the brands the answers recommend most, on one scale, each with its range. Pin a competitor to keep it there, or hide a brand that is not one.
Topics: your share, the leader and the gap on each topic, sorted so the largest demand and the widest gap come first. Each row carries its strongest reason in a second line.
Engines: your share and the leader on each answer engine.
Moves: clear gains and losses, yours first, then competitors overtaking you.
Next plays: the three plays worth most right now.

While the poll is still filling, the Overview says how many answers it has so far and that ranges narrow as answers arrive. It never shows a zero as a result. Answer Share explains what counts.

2. Why does AI pick my competitors?

Open a topic from Topics, or a competitor from Competitors. Each has a full page. The Why section leads with the reasons as plain sentences, strongest first, then one tab per lens:

Sources: the third-party pages the engines read for this topic, the brands each one names, and the pages that name a competitor and not you.
Search: the searches the engines ran to answer, and whether you and the leader are in the top results of the index each engine reads.
Memory: what the engines say without searching, and which brands they name from memory.

Briefs, under Competitors, adds what each engine says about you when asked directly. It is shown as the engine’s view, not as the cause. Why describes the lenses.

3. What should I change?

Open Plays. Each play is one change, ranked by expected gain against effort:

Off the site: get named on a page engines read, get onto a review platform they cite, make the brand unmistakable, correct a fact an engine gets wrong.
On your pages: rank for a search the engines run, write the page a topic is missing, fix a page.
Foundations: site-wide hygiene from the site audit.

A play opens to its evidence, its expected gain with the basis for it, the steps, a draft you edit and send, and the acceptance check that tells you it shipped. Plays and Working a play cover them.

4. Did it work?

Open Results. It leads with Answer Share since you started, against the leader. Then every shipped play with its verdict: Won, Lost ground, No effect, Inconclusive or Too early, with a grade from A to D for how strong the evidence is. Then the wins, the plays waiting for a read, and the outcomes your connected data can show: visits from AI assistants, assistant fetches and Search Console’s AI impressions.

Each verdict compares your Answer Share on the play’s topics with the topics you left alone, over the same days. It is read on day 14, 30 and 45 after the change became visible to the engines, and the day-45 verdict is final. Verdicts has the rules, and Results the screen.

Underneath: Learn

Intelligence shows what Vercatus has learned across sites: which kinds of play win on which engine, how much AI demand your market’s topics have, and which engine changes touched your topics. Its learning also sets the expected gain on every play. See Vercatus Intelligence.