How we measure

1. The questions

When you add your business, Snout writes about 15 questions a real customer might ask, based on your category and town. For a dental clinic in Romford that might be “best Invisalign clinic in Romford” or “emergency dentist near Romford open Saturday”. You can edit, delete or add questions up to your plan's limit. We never change your questions after that, so every week is measured against the same set.

2. The engines

Each question is asked to ChatGPT (OpenAI), Perplexity and Gemini (Google) through their official APIs, with web search turned on, so the answers reflect what each assistant finds on the web that week. Google's AI Overviews are not covered yet.

3. The schedule

Checks run early every Monday morning, UK time, and your email summary arrives the same morning. If an engine does not respond, the check is retried twice. If it still fails, it is marked as failed on your dashboard and left out of that week's score rather than counted as a miss. A failed check is never hidden.

4. Reading the answers

Every answer goes through two separate steps:

1. Answer. We store the assistant's full answer and every source it cites.
2. Extraction. A second, separate model call reads the answer and lists every business it names, in order, and every URL it cites. This step is never told which business we are looking for, so it cannot be nudged towards finding you.

We then look for your business in that list. Matching ignores capitals, common endings such as Ltd, Limited, Practice and Clinic, and your town name, and allows small spelling differences. We don't search the answer text for your name directly, because that misses answers that name you slightly differently. One known limit: if you trade under a noticeably different name, the match can miss it.

5. The Visibility Score

Your Visibility Score is the share of your questions where at least one of the three assistants named you, as a whole number from 0 to 100. If you were named for 6 of your 15 questions, your score is 40. There is one formula, used for every score Snout shows.

6. Sources and the fix list

Every website an assistant cites is recorded, so you can see which domains it trusts for your category and town, and which of them mention competitors but not you. The fix list is worked out from your latest run using three fixed rules:

• Directories and review sites the assistants cite where your business has no presence.
• Questions where no engine names you, grouped by theme.
• Competitors named in 5 or more answers where you are named in none.

7. Your history

Each weekly run is saved exactly as it happened and never edited afterwards. AI answers change from week to week, so the trend over several runs tells you more than any single week.

What the free scan checks

The free scan on the homepage asks 3 of these questions to one engine (Perplexity) and shows whether you are named and who is. A paid plan runs the full set across all three engines every week. See pricing.