How we measure
Specific data. Every Monday.
Most agencies report on traffic and rank. We report on citations. Below is the actual format every client gets.
Sample weekly digest · Slack format
ANTE
Monday 9:01 AM · #ante-acme
Citation report · Week of May 5
Total citations across 5 engines: 14 → 17 (+3 this week)
▸ New citations this week
· ChatGPT · "best dev analytics tool for series B" → cited Acme position 2
· Perplexity · "alternatives to Mixpanel" → cited Acme
· AI Overviews · "product analytics for engineering teams" → Acme in source list
▸ Lost citations
· Gemini · "session replay tools" → Acme dropped (was position 3, now uncited). Investigating.
▸ This week's work
· Schema deployed on /pricing and /comparison pages (PR #142, merged)
· Listicle pitch sent to G2 category roundup (response pending)
· Listicle inclusion landed: "Top 12 product analytics tools 2026" (Mind the Product)
Full report + screenshots in Drive · Reply with questions
Sample for illustration. Real digests use actual client data, query screenshots, and citation source URLs.
What gets measured
Citations, not vanity.
Citation count, per engine.
Five engines (ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini, Google AI Overviews) × 30+ priority queries. Counted weekly. Screenshot of every citation.
Query-level wins and losses.
Each query tracked individually. We tell you which queries we won this week, which we lost, and which we have not won yet.
Position within the answer.
Whether you are cited first, third, or buried. Position matters because position determines clickthrough.
Source attribution.
Where the AI engine pulled the citation from. Your site, a listicle, Reddit, G2, somewhere else. Tells us what to double down on.
Listicle pitch pipeline.
Every pitch tracked from sent → response → published → indexed. We show the funnel weekly so you see the work.
Schema and llms.txt health.
Validation status of your structured data. We catch breakage before AI engines do.
What we will not report on
Vanity metrics we have stopped using.
- ×Keyword rankings as a primary metric. AI search does not work like Google's blue links. Rankings without citations are noise.
- ×Domain Authority / Domain Rating. Vendor metrics. Not what AI engines read.
- ×Backlinks count. Reported only as a leading indicator if relevant. The lever is brand mentions and listicle inclusions, not raw link count.
- ×"Estimated AI traffic." Made-up number. We report cited / not cited per query, with screenshots.
See your own digest