AI Beacon/Prompt diagnosis
The answer named them. Now find out why.
A missing mention is an outcome, not an explanation. AI Beacon traces the answer back through the sources it cited, the pages of yours it reached, what those pages actually answer and whether they are attributable to you, then names the one change most likely to alter the next answer.
Supplied the shortlist and the ordering of it.
Supplied the framing of the comparison, including the criteria used.
Shaped the caveats in the answer without appearing as a source.
Reached, but the page describes capabilities rather than answering the question asked.
What is prompt diagnosis?
Prompt diagnosis is the analysis of a single AI answer to establish why it named the brands it named. It records which sources the answer drew on, how your own pages were treated, and which specific gap explains your absence, so that the response is a change you can make rather than a general instruction to publish more content.
Key facts
- Monitoring reports the outcome of an answer. Diagnosis explains how the outcome was produced
- An AI answer typically rests on a handful of sources, so which sources were used matters more than in search
- A source can be consulted without being cited, and the distinction changes what you should do next
- Absence usually traces to one of four causes: not crawlable, not found, not relevant enough, or not attributable to your brand
- You cannot edit an answer. You can change the material the next answer is assembled from
- Answers vary between runs, so a single answer is evidence and a pattern across runs is a finding
Last reviewed 24 August 2026 by the SEORCE team.
"You were not mentioned" is not a finding.
It is a score. Acting on it means guessing at a cause, publishing something, waiting weeks, and seeing whether the number moved. That is an expensive way to test a hypothesis.
The same score, four different causes
Being absent because a crawler is blocked and being absent because your page does not answer the question look identical in a dashboard, and need opposite responses.
Publishing more is not a strategy
Without a cause, the default advice is always to write another article. Sometimes the fix is a robots rule or a schema field, and no amount of writing will help.
You cannot tell success from noise
Answers vary run to run. Without knowing what changed and why, an improvement and a coincidence look the same.
From one answer to one change.
Diagnosis works backwards from a specific answer to the specific thing that would alter it.
The full response, the platform, the question as asked, and which brands were named in what order. Kept as evidence rather than as a score, so it can be compared with the next run.
Which pages the answer drew on, which were cited to the reader, and which appear to have informed it without being credited. Those are different situations calling for different responses.
The page on your site that should have been used. Sometimes there is a strong one and it was ignored. Sometimes there is not one at all, which is itself the answer.
Whether the page can be crawled by that platform, whether it exists in a form the platform can retrieve, whether it answers the question directly, and whether it is clearly attributable to your brand.
One specific thing: a robots rule, a missing comparison page, an answer buried six paragraphs down, an entity that cannot be resolved. Not a content calendar.
The same question, asked again after the change, against the recorded original. This is the only way to distinguish a fix from a coincidence.
Three ways a visibility report wastes a quarter, and what replaces each one.
The report says “not mentioned” and the meeting ends there
A score with no cause turns straight into a guess. The team publishes another article, waits a month, and still cannot say whether it helped.
The sources behind the answer, listed in order
Diagnosis opens a single answer and shows every page that fed it, ranked by how much each one shaped the result.
Your page was reached, read and ignored
Crawlers got in, the content is there, and the model still went elsewhere. Nothing in a visibility score explains that.
Cited and consulted, told apart
Some sources are shown to the reader. Others shape the answer without ever being credited. Both matter, and only one of them appears in a citation list.
Four different failures look identical from outside
Unreadable, missing, indirect, unattributable. The same score for all four, four different fixes, and picking the wrong one costs a quarter.
The cause named for each absence
Diagnosis tests each of the four in turn and reports which one applies to this question, on this platform, in this run.
A cause is not something you guess. It is something you correlate.
Diagnosis is only possible because four separate readings arrive at the same time. Take any one away and the answer becomes an opinion.
The answer cited four sources. None of them were yours.
Your best candidate page returns 200, but the crawler was refused.
The page covers the topic without ever answering the question.
That query drives impressions and almost no clicks.
The page that should have been cited was reachable to Google and refused to the AI crawlers, and even once unblocked it answers around the question rather than answering it. Both faults have to clear before the next run can change.
Cited is not the same as consulted.
Most tools count citations, because citations are the part shown to the reader. But an answer is often shaped by material it never credits, and confusing the two leads to the wrong conclusion about your own pages.
Shown to the reader as a source
The link a person can click. Visible, countable, and the metric every tool reports.
- Drives referral traffic you can see in analytics
- Carries visible credit for the claim being made
- Being cited is the outcome most teams are optimising for
Used to form the answer, not credited
Material that shaped what was said without appearing in the source list. It sends no traffic and shows up in no citation count.
- Your page can be doing the work while a competitor gets the credit
- A citation count of zero can coexist with real influence on the answer
- The fix here is attribution and clarity, not more content
The practical difference: if your page is consulted but never cited, writing more pages will not help. If it is neither, that is a content or crawlability problem. Same dashboard number, opposite response.
Almost every absence is one of these.
It could not be read
- The crawler for that platform is blocked in your robots file
- The content only exists after JavaScript runs
- A noindex directive is set in a response header nobody has looked at
- Cheapest to fix, and the most commonly overlooked
It does not exist
- No page on your site addresses that question
- The question is a comparison and you have never published one
- The answer lives in a PDF, a video or a gated asset
- The genuine content gap, and less common than assumed
It does not answer directly
- The page covers the topic but never states the answer plainly
- The answer is buried below several paragraphs of context
- Nothing in the page is quotable as a self-contained sentence
- Usually an editing problem, not a writing problem
It cannot be attributed to you
- The page answers well, and nothing connects it unambiguously to your brand
- Your organisation is not identifiable as an entity, so the credit goes elsewhere
- Common where a company name collides with others across industries or countries
- You can check this part yourself, free and without an account, using the entity markup checker