Every metric in FixAEO is counted from one thing: an AI answer.
An AI answer is one engine’s response to one of your tracked prompts, on one day, in one region. FixAEO stores the full text, then reads it to work out whether you were named, how you were described, and which competitors showed up. Your dashboard and Citations are summaries of these answers.
How many answers do you get?
One per prompt, per engine, per region, per day. Scanning the same prompt twice in a day replaces that day’s answer rather than adding a second one.
A brand with 10 prompts on a six-engine plan produces up to 60 answers on a scan day. How often that happens depends on your plan — see Plans and limits.
This is a sample, not a survey. One answer per engine per day is a single draw from a system that gives different people different answers. Two customers asking your exact prompt the same afternoon can get different results. Read the trend across days, not one answer.
Where do you read them?
Open your brand page and go to the Mentions tab. Each row shows:
- the engine that answered
- the sentiment FixAEO classified
- the date
- the prompt that produced it
- a short excerpt
- a source link, when the answer carried one
Longer rows get a Show full response button that opens the whole answer in place. The feed runs newest first and is scoped to your brand’s region, so the count agrees with the Visibility Score above it. Filter by sentiment, or export to CSV.
An excerpt starts where your brand is first named, not at the top of the answer, so you land on the sentence that matters. Show full response gets you the rest.
Only answers that named your brand become rows. Answers where you were absent still count — they’re the denominator of your Visibility Score. A short Mentions list next to a low score isn’t a bug. It’s the same fact stated twice. What does FixAEO pull out of an answer?
FixAEO reads each answer for four things:
- Was your brand named? By name or by domain. A close alias counts. An unrelated brand with a similar name doesn’t.
- Sentiment, judged only from your brand’s point of view. Positive means recommended favorably. Negative means criticized or dismissed. Neutral means listed without endorsement.
- Which competitors were named.
- Sentiment for each competitor, on the same scale.
Only real brands count as competitors. Publishers, forums, social platforms, and listicle titles don’t, which is why “Best CRM Tools 2025” never lands in your competitor set. Tracking competitors covers the ones that do.
If your brand wasn’t named at all, sentiment is recorded as neutral. That’s why a brand with almost no visibility still shows a large neutral bar. Read it next to the mention count, not on its own — Sentiment covers this in full.
Why does the same prompt give different answers?
Four reasons, and all of them are normal.
The models aren’t deterministic. Ask twice, get two phrasings, sometimes two different recommendations.
Each engine retrieves differently. Perplexity and AI Overviews search the live web for almost everything. Others lean on what’s already in the model. Same question, different evidence, different answer. Sources shows what each engine actually pulled.
Region changes the answer. The same prompt run for the US and for Germany can name entirely different brands. That’s why FixAEO asks you to pick a country at setup and localizes every query to it.
The web moved. A new comparison post, a Reddit thread, a competitor’s launch — any of it changes tomorrow’s answer.
When a number moves, don’t start from the chart. Open the Mentions tab and read three or four answers from the engine that moved. The cause is usually right there in the text: a new competitor listed, a changed framing, a source that stopped being cited.
