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AI answer tracking: read why a competitor was recommended

Before you can get recommended by ChatGPT, Claude and Google AI, you need to read what they say now. We keep the full text of every answer, with its citations, the brands it named in order and the conditions it was collected under, from your first day onwards. Each one shows why a rival was recommended and what the engine read to get there.

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Kept together

What an AI answer tracker keeps from every answer

Four things, kept together, because any one of them alone is hard to interpret, and every other number in the AI mention tracking platform is built from them. The read-only API returns them as one record, in the fields shown here.

  • The full text

    As returned, not summarised. The wording is the evidence and paraphrasing it destroys the thing you came for.

    answer

  • Every citation

    The pages the answer drew on, in the order the engine gave them, joined to each answer.

    citations

  • Every brand named

    Yours and everyone else's, with where in the answer each one appeared.

    mentions

  • The conditions

    Engine, model, market and the moment of collection, so two answers can be compared fairly.

    enginelocation_codecollected_at

The thing nobody else advertises

Charts are a summary. This is the source.

We went through every feature page our four biggest competitors publish. Between them they advertise around forty things, and not one of them is keeping the answers. They show you dashboards. That is a reasonable product decision, and it means their numbers arrive without their evidence: you are asked to believe the aggregate. Here every rate in AI visibility tracking opens onto the answers that produced it, so you can disagree with a sentiment rating and tell us we are wrong.

Nothing paraphrased.
The answer as returned. A summary of the evidence is not evidence.
Per prompt, per engine.
The latest answer from every engine for each prompt, and each prompt's full history, newest first.
From day one.
Kept from your first run. History cannot be bought later, only started earlier.

The other half of the data

AI answer monitoring: the answers that leave you out

Most tools quietly bias toward the answers that mention you. That is the wrong half of the data. An answer that names three competitors and not you is a complete description of how the assistant understands your category: which problem it thinks the question is about, which vendors it considers obvious, and what language it uses to separate them. It tells you what to write and who to be compared against. An answer that already names you tells you rather less.

So absent answers are kept in full and are as easy to read as the rest. Together with the pages each one cited, from AI citation tracking, they turn an AI share of voice number into a list of specific things to do, and when the picture changes, AI brand monitoring tells you rather than leaving it to the next quarterly review.

Absent answers stored too,
and not filtered out of the interface to make a chart look better.
Conditions recorded.
Engine, model, market and time, so a comparison between two answers is a fair one.
No retention cliff.
Answers are not aged out of your workspace to save us storage.

How AI answer tracking holds up when you check it

If something here is unclear, ask us before you sign up rather than after.

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What exactly does RankHound keep?
The full text of every answer an assistant gave, the engine and model that produced it, the moment it was collected, the market it was asked from, every brand named in it, and every page it cited. Not a summary, not a snippet, not a sentiment label with the evidence thrown away.
Why does keeping answers matter?
Because every other number is an aggregate of them, and an aggregate you cannot open is a claim you have to take on trust. When a competitor is recommended instead of you, the useful question is what the answer actually said and what it read first, and you can only ask that if somebody kept it. The answer is where you learn what to change to get recommended next time.
How do I find a particular answer?
By prompt. The Answers screen opens on the latest answer from each engine for every prompt you track, with a dot for whether it named you, cited you without naming you or left you out, and each prompt's full history is one click away, newest first. Through the API you can filter by engine and page through every answer we have stored.
How far back does it go?
To your first day and no further. Nobody can retrieve what an assistant said before you started measuring, and we will not pretend to. That is also the strongest argument for starting sooner rather than at the point you need the history.
Do you keep answers where I was not mentioned?
Yes, and those are frequently the more useful ones. An answer that named three competitors and not you tells you precisely what the assistant thinks the category is, and which framing you are missing. Discarding it because your name is absent would throw away the diagnosis.
Can I get the answers out?
Yes. They are readable in the interface, and the same records come back from the read-only API, the CLI and the MCP server, all three included on every plan, with a key you mint yourself in seconds. GET /answers returns each stored answer with its mentions and citations, so any number we report can be traced back to the sentences that produced it.

Related reading

The rest of what we measure

Six more, all on every plan.

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Read the answers that named a rival

Add your brand and your prompts, and the first answers are readable in full within minutes, with every brand and source they named.

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On every plan

  • Every answer stored in full, with its citations.
  • Every rate shown with the number of checks behind it.
  • Cited-but-not-named reported as its own state.