Question 1

How do I show up in AI search — ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude, Grok, DeepSeek?

Accepted Answer

The Ranking Factory checks how AI engines answer questions about your market and finds where they name competitors instead of you. Then it builds the missing evidence — clear answers, comparisons, useful tools, worked examples — publishes it, and re-measures on later runs whether you start getting named — which can take weeks, and which no tool controls. Results depend on your market and competition; no tool can promise citations or timescales.

Question 2

Is this SEO, or something new?

Accepted Answer

Both. Traditional SEO works to rank your pages in a list of links. This is the newer "entity" or "AI-search" approach — sometimes called GEO — which works to make AI and Google understand your business well enough to include it in their answers. The Ranking Factory does the second, on top of the classic Google indexing it has always done.

Question 3

Do you touch my website?

Accepted Answer

Never without you connecting it. By default everything is built off-site — inside Google's own properties (Drive, Cloud, Blogger, Business Profile) and your other connected channels — and your site is not modified. If you do connect a CMS like WordPress, we can publish gap-closing pages onto your own domain, which is the stronger placement: content on your own site carries more weight than anything hosted elsewhere. Either way, some fixes are on your site and only you can make them — we write them up and hand them over rather than pretending we can do it for you.

Question 4

Where does the content you build actually end up?

Accepted Answer

Each subject gets several objects — a guide, a specification, a checklist, a data table, a deck — published to Google properties where they are individually indexable. Those then become ONE page on your own domain, because they are all about the same search and two pages of yours competing for it helps nobody. That page is assembled from what was already written rather than generated a second time, so it costs nothing extra and is not a reworded duplicate. The Evidence Engine lists any subject where the evidence exists and that page has not been made, and publishes it in a click — including a backlog we found across live accounts, where 493 of 505 subjects had evidence published and no page on the customer's own site. It will not offer a subject your own site already answers.

Question 5

Is it safe and white-hat for client work?

Accepted Answer

Yes. No PBNs, no spam, no shortcuts. Every action is reversible, logged in your Timeline, and built inside Google-verified properties — so it's safe to run across all your clients.

Question 6

What is the Evidence Engine?

Accepted Answer

It's the part that does the ongoing work: it finds where AI and search engines are missing you, builds the evidence they look for, publishes it, and then checks whether you start getting named — on a schedule, without you lifting a finger.

Question 7

How much of this is automatic — what do I actually have to do?

Accepted Answer

Almost all of it runs on its own. You add your business and connect a Google account once; from then on the Evidence Engine finds your gaps, builds and publishes the missing evidence, and re-checks your visibility on a schedule — you just watch it work from your dashboard, with a link to everything it publishes. The only things it can't do for you are edits to your own website (it flags those with a ready-to-apply fix) and prefer your own keyword plan (you can hand it a list of keywords to cover instead of, or alongside, the gaps it finds).

Question 8

Will this get me cited on Reddit, Wikipedia or review sites?

Accepted Answer

Not directly, and be wary of anything that claims otherwise. Most AI citations come from third-party sources — Reddit threads, Wikipedia, review platforms, industry press — and no tool can honestly manufacture those. What this does is make you the kind of business those answers can draw on: structured, evidenced, crawlable, with clear answers published where AI can read them. We show you which sources AI is actually citing for your market so you can go and earn a place in them. We will not post to Reddit or edit Wikipedia on your behalf — both prohibit it.

Question 9

Why did my visibility change when I haven't done anything?

Accepted Answer

Because AI answers are not deterministic — ask the same question twice and you can get different businesses named. That is a property of the engines, not a fault in the measurement. It is why we report rates with a confidence range and the sample size behind them, why we treat trends across runs as the signal rather than any single run, and why adding a new engine starts a fresh trend line instead of quietly changing your history. If you want to see how much an answer moves, you can ask each prompt 3 or 5 times in one run: we then report stability — whether repeats agreed — separately from the rate itself, and list the exact prompts that changed their answer.

Question 10

Do I need my own AI key, and what does it cost?

Accepted Answer

Yes, for the parts that ask the AI engines about you — those run on your key and spend your credit, which is why we never run them without you choosing to. Gemini has a free tier that works fine to start. The site audits need no key at all: they read your site directly, so you can see real findings before spending anything. Each engine you add is another engine you can see into, not a more accurate reading of the same one.

Question 11

What can't you fix for me?

Accepted Answer

Anything that lives on your own website and needs a developer. The most common are content that only appears after JavaScript runs (Google renders it, most AI crawlers don't, so they see an empty page) and a CDN blocking AI crawlers even though your robots.txt allows them. We detect both and tell you exactly what to change — we just don't pretend there's a button for it. Everything we hand you is labelled: we fix it, paste this, or needs a developer.

Question 12

How accurate are the numbers?

Accepted Answer

As accurate as the sample allows, and we show you the sample. Every rate carries a 95% confidence range and the number of prompt-and-engine pairs behind it; a wide range means few samples, not a poor result. You can ask each prompt three or five times and we report stability separately from the rate, and list the questions whose answer changed. Every figure says which engine API it was measured on — that is not the same as Google AI Overviews or the ChatGPT app, and we do not claim it is. Anything we could not measure is shown as unmeasured, never as a zero. The whole method is written up at /how-we-measure, including what the numbers do not claim.

Question 13

Does it publish without asking me?

Accepted Answer

By default, yes — that is the point of an engine — and it tells you exactly what went out, item by item, with links, in the weekly report and on the project page. If you would rather approve first, turn on "review before publishing" in Settings: every page written for your own site then waits for you, and you are told the moment one is waiting. The Docs, Sheets and decks that go to your Google Drive are supporting signals and are not held. Either way nothing is published without grounding in your real content, no unsourced superlative survives the claim check, and nothing is announced until we have checked a stranger can open the link.

Question 14

Which AI engines does it measure?

Accepted Answer

ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude, Grok and DeepSeek — whichever you connect, using your own keys. Where an engine can search the web as it answers (Gemini with Google Search grounding, Perplexity, OpenAI's search tool on a GPT-5, GPT-4.1 or GPT-4o model, and Claude with Anthropic's web search tool) we say so and report what it read; where it can only answer from training, the result is labelled as such. Adding an engine widens the picture; it does not sharpen it, because precision comes from more prompts per engine, and we tell you that before you add one.

Question 15

How quickly will I see results?

Accepted Answer

Evidence starts publishing from your first run, and you can watch your Entity Health and Timeline right away. How fast that turns into citations or rankings depends on your market and competition — we show you exactly what's happening as it happens, and we don't promise positions or timescales no tool can control.

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