AI Beacon/Prompt coverage
Being visible is not enough. Be visible when the decision is made. A brand can look strong across AI answers while disappearing from the handful of questions that actually build a shortlist. AI Beacon maps every tracked question to the stage of the journey it belongs to.
Prompt coverage is a map of the questions buyers in your category ask AI assistants, showing which of them name your brand and which do not. It is grouped by buyer intent rather than by keyword volume, because a brand can be present in nearly every question that does not lead to a purchase and absent from every one that does.
Last reviewed 24 August 2026 by the SEORCE team.
They describe a situation and ask what to do about it. The question carries context a keyword never did, and that context is what decides which brands get named.
Team size, budget, existing stack, industry. Each constraint narrows the answer, and a page that ignores them does not get selected.
These questions are asked inside private sessions. No keyword tool reports them, so a coverage map has to be built from how buyers actually talk.
The first question opens the topic. The third narrows to a shortlist. Most brands have never considered what the third question is.
Coverage measured as one number hides the pattern that matters. Split by stage, the shape of the problem is usually obvious immediately.
Easy to be named for, because the answer draws on general explanations rather than on specific brands. Being present here is worth having and rarely worth celebrating.
“what is generative engine optimisation”The answer produces a shortlist. Being absent here removes you from the decision before it starts, and no later stage can recover it.
“tools for tracking brand mentions in chatgpt”The highest-value stage and the most commonly neglected. Buyers ask assistants to compare precisely because they want a position rather than a list, and the brand with a substantive published comparison usually supplies the framing.
“x vs y for a small marketing team”Specific and sceptical. Pricing, contracts, migration, whether it works with what they already run. Answered from whatever exists publicly, which is a problem if your pricing page says "contact us".
“is x worth the money for a team of ten”The common shape: strong at awareness, adequate at consideration, thin at comparison, absent at decision. It usually reflects what a content team found easy to write rather than what buyers needed.
They describe a situation, attach three constraints, and then ask two follow-ups that change the answer entirely.
Coverage is built from full natural questions with their constraints intact, not from keyword stems with a volume figure beside them.
Strong at awareness and absent at decision averages out to something that looks acceptable on a slide and is not.
Every tracked question is placed somewhere on the path from first curiosity to final choice, and scored there.
Some are unclaimed and valuable. Some are held by a rival with years of authority behind them. They are not the same piece of work.
Each gap is weighed on the value of its intent stage and on who currently holds the seat.
Coverage tells you which questions you miss. The crawl and the content read tell you whether you missed them because nothing exists, or because what exists cannot be used.
You are absent from every comparison question in the category.
Two of the three pages that would answer them are blocked.
The third answers a related question, not this one.
You already rank for those terms in organic search.
Two thirds of this gap is not a content gap at all. The pages exist, they rank, and the engines cannot read them. Commissioning new content here would have paid twice for something you already own.
A coverage map that flags every absence as an opportunity is a to-do list nobody will finish. The value is in knowing which absences matter.
Comparison questions are asked constantly and answered from whatever comparisons exist publicly. Most companies publish none about their own category, so the framing comes from a competitor's page, an affiliate roundup, or a forum thread from three years ago.
A page claiming you win on everything reads as marketing and is treated accordingly. One naming where a competitor is the better choice tends to be trusted, and quoted.
"Best tool for X" is contested by everyone. "Best tool for X when you already use Y and have a team of four" is answerable, and almost nobody has answered it.
Publishing nothing about your competitors does not keep you out of the comparison. It only means you had no say in how it was framed.
Map your category's questions and find out where you are present, where a competitor is, and where nobody is.