A rank you can't see is a rank that doesn't exist
You can hold position three for your money keyword and still be absent from the answer a buyer reads. When someone types "who should I use for X in Y" into ChatGPT, they get a short list of names and a couple of links. There is no page two. You are either on that list or you are not in the consideration set at all.
That is a binary outcome, and it is measurable. It just isn't measurable with a rank tracker.
What we actually run
You give us a domain and, optionally, the market you sell into. We read your homepage and sitemap and work out your category and offerings. Then we write buyer questions that deliberately do not mention your brand, because that's how buyers ask, and put them through a search-grounded engine so the answers come back with real citations.
For each answer we record whether you were named, where in the answer, which competitors were named, and which of their URLs were cited.
The part that tells you what to change
Knowing you're absent is only half of it. When a competitor is cited and you aren't, we pull their cited page and your nearest equivalent and compare the signals that let an engine trust and quote a page: structured data coverage, brand identity and sameAs, author and date signals, numeric specificity, and how much of the page is boilerplate shared with the rest of their site.
The output is a short list of concrete differences, not a score with no explanation.
How often to check
Weekly is enough for most businesses. Answers move when the engines' search layer re-crawls, when you ship changes, and when competitors do. A single check is a snapshot; four checks are a trend. We keep the history so you can see whether the work you shipped actually changed the answer.