Hoo citation tracker

AI citation tracking

1. Read profile: keywords.targets (the query set), competitors, site url, and the optional citations: {engines: [...]} key (see Engine set below).
2. For each query (cap 20 per run; rotate through the set across runs), ask each engine in the engine set that is actually reachable from this session. Sources in order of preference: an authorized AI-search connector or WebSearch with engine-targeted queries; plain WebSearch otherwise. Never scrape engines through automation that violates their ToS.
3. Record per query: engine | our domain mentioned? | cited (linked)? | position (only when cited - the ordinal below) | sentiment (only when mentioned - the label plus its evidence quote, below) | competitors mentioned | answer summary (<=30 words).
4. Metrics: mention rate, citation rate, share of voice vs competitors (mentions of us / mentions of anyone tracked).
5. Persist to runs/YYYYMMDD-citations/ + append one signal line with the headline movement vs the previous run (diff the last runs/ folder).
6. New citation appearing or disappearing on a money query -> P1 signal.
7. When runs/<date>-ai-baseline/REPORT.md exists in the brain (written by /organic-os:setup's AI-visibility baseline step), compare this run's headline numbers against it and report movement, not just this run's absolutes - see Baseline comparison below for what movement now covers.

Position within the answer

When the brand IS cited, record where it sits in the answer. One of four ordinal values, best to worst:

• lead-answer - the answer's opening or primary recommendation is built on the brand; a reader who stops after the first paragraph has seen it.
• supporting-mention - the brand is named with substance in the body of the answer, as one of the inputs the answer actually uses.
• listed-among-others - the brand appears only inside a list or comparison of alternatives, with nothing said about it specifically.
• footnote-link - the brand appears only as a cited source link; the answer text itself never names it.

An uncited mention gets no position value - position describes where a citation sits, and recording one without a citation would overstate the result.

Sentiment of the mention

When the brand is mentioned, judge the sentiment of that mention from the answer text: positive, neutral, or mixed-negative. Every sentiment label MUST carry the exact quoted phrase from the answer that justifies it - never a bare label without the quote. The quote is the evidence and the check: anyone reading the report can re-judge the call from the same words. If no phrase in the answer supports a judgment either way, the label is neutral with the brand's surrounding sentence as the quote.

Baseline comparison and movement

The per-query table in this run's REPORT.md carries the position and sentiment columns from step 3. The baseline REPORT.md format extends the same way, additively: new baselines written from now on include both columns; old baselines without them compare on presence only, and the movement section states that plainly ("baseline predates position/sentiment fields - movement reported on presence only").

Movement reporting covers three layers, deepest available first:

• Presence: cited or not, mentioned or not, vs the baseline or the previous run.
• Position: when both runs have position values, report the shift by name - "cited, and moved from listed-among-others to lead answer".
• Sentiment: when both runs have sentiment values and the label changed, report it with the new evidence quote attached - "sentiment shifted from neutral to mixed-negative; quote attached".

Honesty rules

• This method samples, it does not measure. A run covers the queries it checked on the engines it could reach, nothing more - never let a report imply broader coverage than that.
• Every REPORT.md lists which engines were actually reachable from the session that ran it, and which configured engines were not.
• Sentiment is a judgment call and is labeled as such in the report; the recorded quote is the check on that judgment.
• Position and sentiment are recorded only from answer text actually read this run - never inferred, never carried forward from a previous run.

Engine set (BYO, no tiers)

The default engine set, canonical here (see docs/INFORMATION-MAP.md in the repo): ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, Gemini, Microsoft Copilot.

The set is profile-configurable via the additive citations: {engines: [...]} key in site-profile.yaml (absence means the default set; schema_version stays 1 - documented in site-repo-contract.md). Each listed engine is checked only if it is reachable from the session running the tracker - an unreachable engine is listed as unreachable in the report, never silently skipped and never guessed at. Users add engines the same way: one more list entry, checked through the same connector-or-WebSearch path under the same ToS rule. No tiers, no per-engine pricing - commercial AI-visibility tools sell extra engines, per-answer position, and sentiment as paid add-on tiers; here they are the same skill reading the user's own reachable surfaces, inside ADR-0006's no-scraping rule (docs/adr/0006 in the repo).