TL;DR — When someone asks an AI "what's the best running-shoe brand?", that answer is the new shelf placement. There are good tools to track that on ChatGPT/Perplexity/Gemini. There are almost none for the Chinese engines — DeepSeek, Qwen, Kimi, GLM — where 900M+ people now ask instead of searching. I built one that does both in a single run. Try it on Apify.
The shelf moved into the answer
Search is being replaced by answers. People don't scroll ten blue links anymore — they ask an assistant and take the brands it names. So the question every brand now has to answer is no longer "where do I rank on Google?" but "do the AI engines even mention me — and how?"
That discipline has a name now: GEO (Generative Engine Optimization). The tooling is real and growing fast. But there's a hole in it.
The blind spot: the Chinese engines
Every GEO/AI-visibility tool I could find covers the Western engines — ChatGPT, Gemini, and friends. Almost none cover the Chinese ones: DeepSeek, Qwen/Tongyi, Kimi/Moonshot, GLM/Zhipu, where hundreds of millions of people now ask product questions, and where AI already drives a big chunk of product discovery.
If you sell into China — or your competitors do — that's the part of your AI visibility you literally cannot see today. That gap is the whole reason I built this.
What it measures
Give it your brand, the questions your customers actually ask, and the competitors you care about. For every prompt × engine it returns:
- Mentioned? — is your brand named in the answer at all
- Sentiment — positive / neutral / negative + a −1…1 score (English and Chinese lexicon)
- Rank — where you sit vs the competitors you listed
- Share of voice — you vs rivals in that specific answer
- Cited sources — the URLs the engine surfaced (for search-enabled engines)
- Answer snippet — the evidence behind the score
One record per brand × prompt × engine. Export JSON/CSV/Excel or pull it into your BI.
A monitor, not a one-off
A single snapshot of "does DeepSeek mention me" is nearly worthless, because AI answers are volatile — they move week to week. The value is the trend: did you just drop out of Qwen's answer? did a competitor overtake you on DeepSeek this week?
Turn on delta mode and put it on a schedule, and each run returns only what changed since last time — so a quiet week costs almost nothing and a real shift surfaces the moment it happens.
Example output
{
"brand": "Nike",
"engine": "deepseek",
"prompt": "What are the best running shoe brands?",
"mentioned": true,
"sentiment": "positive",
"sentimentScore": 0.5,
"rank": 2,
"competitorsMentioned": ["Adidas", "Li-Ning"],
"shareOfVoice": 0.333,
"answerSnippet": "For running shoes, the most recommended brands are Adidas, Nike and Li-Ning..."
}
How to run it
- Set brand and a handful of prompts (the questions your customers ask).
- Pick engines and add your own API key for each in
apiKeys— pure pay-as-you-go, no subscription. (Run it with no key and you get a free labeled sample so you can see the output shape first.) - Add competitorBrands, turn on deltaMode, attach a Schedule → a hands-off weekly visibility feed.
Pricing is pay-per-event: $0.25 per visibility check (1 brand × 1 prompt × 1 engine), small add-ons for delta + competitors. You pay your own LLM usage on your own keys. Far below the $270–$2,000/mo enterprise GEO platforms — and the only one that sees the Chinese engines.
→ AI Brand Visibility Monitor on Apify
If you track brand visibility across AI search, which engines/prompts would you most want covered next (Doubao? ERNIE?)? Tell me in the comments and I'll likely ship it.
Top comments (0)