We publish one number about your business, and this page explains where it comes from, what it can and cannot tell you, and where it is uncertain. If any of it stops being true, this page changes first.
The free check on the front page is one day. Five questions go to three assistants, fifteen answers come back over a couple of minutes, and you read every one of them. That is a sample of a single day, and the results page says so on the number itself.
The weekly check is the same five questions repeated every week for as long as you want it. That is where a rate you can lean on comes from. One day cannot tell you whether a fix worked; four weeks of days can.
We write down the questions a real customer would type when they are looking for a business like yours in your town. Not "PicksYou reviews" and not your own name: the questions someone asks when they do not know you exist yet.
Your trade and your town fill the two slots, so a photographer in Kaunas is asked about photographers in Lithuanian and never about dentists in English. The five, word for word, are:
Twenty trades are on the form, from dentists and plumbers to photographers, restaurants, gyms and driving schools, and "something else" takes the word you type and puts it in the same slot. Each language has its own five questions written by a person, not run through a translator at the moment of asking.
The exact question we sent is stored beside the answer and printed above it, so you never have to take our word for what we asked.
We ask those questions through the official APIs the assistants publish. We do not log into a consumer app and copy what it says, and we never pretend to be a person using one. Everything we get back is stored exactly as it arrived, so any number on your dashboard can be traced to the answer it came from.
The free check runs once, when you ask for it. The weekly check runs on the same day every week, and each question goes to every assistant we cover. On the higher plans each question is asked more than once, because assistants do not give the same answer twice and one reading of a noisy thing is not a measurement.
A week is an ISO week counted in UTC, so the boundary does not move when clocks change or when a server is in a different country from you.
Your appearance rate is the share of sampled answers that named your business. If we made forty checks last week and your name came up in fourteen of them, that is 14 of 40.
picked in 14 of 40 checks (plus or minus 14 points)
The "plus or minus" is the part most reports leave out, and it is the honest part. Forty checks is a sample, not a census. If we had run forty different checks the same week, the count would have come out somewhat different by luck alone. The margin says how much wobble is normal at that sample size. Ours is a Wilson interval, which is the standard way to do this for small samples; the practical thing it buys you is that it never reports a rate below zero or above one hundred, and it never claims certainty at the edges. Nought out of ten checks does not mean "never", it means "we did not see it in ten tries".
A free check is fifteen answers on one day, so the same rule gives you a smaller count with a wider margin:
picked in 4 of 14 checks (plus or minus 21 points)
Fourteen because one answer did not arrive that day. The margin is wide because fourteen answers is a thin sample, and a wide margin is what a thin sample honestly looks like.
The headline uses a rolling four week window, so one strange week does not swing your number, and a real improvement takes a few weeks to show. That cuts both ways and we would rather it did.
When a match is not obvious (a shortened name, a spelling with the accents dropped, a business whose name is two ordinary words) our matcher hands it to a person instead of deciding. Until that person confirms it, it does not count as an appearance. So the number can be behind the truth, but never ahead of it.
Nobody can give you a rank in an AI answer, and anyone who sells you one is selling a number they invented. There is no ranked list inside ChatGPT to be number three of. There is one answer, written fresh, that either mentions you or does not, and that changes between users, phones, days and phrasings.
So we count. Out of the questions we asked, how many named you. That is a fact you can check yourself by reading the stored answers, which is exactly why it is the number we publish.
So a free check today is five questions across three assistants: fifteen answers. Each one of those two that starts adds five more, this page says so before your number moves, and the older weeks stay what they were rather than being quietly recalculated.
Microsoft Copilot is not on that list. There is no API that lets us ask it properly, and we are not going to scrape a consumer app and call the result data. If that changes, we will add it and say so here.
After an answer arrives we read the business names out of it, with a second call to the same OpenAI plumbing, and store the list with the answer. That is where "AI named" on your results page comes from.
We claim nothing about those businesses beyond the plain fact that this answer named them. Not that they are better than you, not that they beat you at anything, not that they paid anyone. If your name is missing from the list, the honest reading is that this one answer did not mention you.
The answers we show you are examples of what an assistant said to us, at that moment, for that question, in that country. Assistants vary. Another person asking the same question ten minutes later can get a different answer, and they will not see the one on your screen.
That is the whole reason we sample repeatedly and report a rate with a margin instead of showing you one flattering screenshot. One answer is an anecdote. Forty answers a week, over four weeks, is something you can make a decision on.
Beside the answers we take six readings about your business. Each one is labelled on your page with where it came from: measured means we fetched it ourselves, vendor means a search data provider looked it up for us, and research means a published bar we cite rather than something we measured about you.
When a reading cannot be taken, the page says "we could not check this". That is never a pass. If you have no website, three of the six cannot run at all, and the page names which three instead of quietly scoring them as fine.
Every call we make records what it cost. One free check is about thirteen cents of vendor spend, which is why there is a daily cap on the free checker and why a full day turns into a next morning queue instead of a worse measurement.
We do that because sampling honestly is not free, and a product that quietly cuts the number of checks to save money would be reporting a worse measurement while charging the same. If we ever change how often we sample, this page says so before your dashboard does.