Buying a tool to track how often AI mentions your brand is buying a scale and calling it a diet. Most B2B companies barely appear in the questions their own buyers ask an AI, so the tool mostly charges you to watch yourself lose.
The confusion is understandable. A dashboard that reports your share of AI answers feels like action. It has a number, the number moves, and watching a number move is satisfying. But the number moving is the entire job, and no dashboard does that part.
Think about what the tool actually measures. It samples a set of prompts, checks which answers name you, and returns a percentage. That percentage is a symptom. It tells you the result of work you have or have not done. It does not tell you which claim to publish, on which page, in which format a model will happily quote. It reports the weather. It does not change it.
Here is the concrete version. Say you sell onboarding software. You buy the tool, and it tells you that you show up in 6% of the prompts your buyers ask. Now what? The tool has no next step for you. Knowing you are at 6% does not move you to 30%. The move is unglamorous: pick the ten questions that matter, write the specific, quotable answer to each, and get it into the places the models actually read.
So what should you pay for instead?
Pay to move the number, not to stare at it. The work is being present, with a specific claim, in the sources models cite, repeated until you are the answer they repeat back. That is a distribution job, not a monitoring subscription.
A scoreboard has its place once you are on the field. If you are already publishing, already being cited, and want to see whether this week's work paid off, a tracker is a reasonable feedback loop. The mistake is buying the scoreboard first and treating the purchase as the strategy. If ChatGPT does not name your brand today, a tool confirming that changes nothing on its own.
One honest test before you spend. Ask whoever is selling you the tool what you should do the day after it tells you that you are invisible. If the answer is another product, another module, or a shrug, you are buying the scale and paying monthly to weigh yourself.
Would you rather pay for the scoreboard, or for the points?
Alex Mureșan does go-to-market distribution for founders who'd rather be right early than safe and late. Get in touch →