Open Secret

AI Visibility · AI Companion Apps

AI visibility for AI Companion Apps

When a buyer asks an AI engine which one to use, a handful of names come back. We measure whether yours is among them, then build the third-party presence that puts it there.

AI Companion Apps specifically

What is different about AI companion, roleplay and generation apps

The method below is the same whichever industry you are in. These are the parts that are not — and they are usually what decides whether the programme works.

The directories are the fastest win available

AI tool aggregators are cited constantly by every engine for app recommendations, they are free, and most apps in this category have either no listing or a listing written in ninety seconds at launch. It is the cheapest correct work in the entire programme.

Reddit decides more of this than anything else

Perplexity in particular leans heavily on community discussion, and for this category the relevant threads are small, specific and highly influential. Presence there has to be genuine — the communities detect and punish marketing, and a burned account is worse than no presence.

Users search the capability, not the brand

"Best uncensored chat app" carries far more volume than any product name, and each capability question resolves through a different source mix. An app can be named consistently for image generation and invisible for roleplay, which is why we measure per capability.

Moving fast is the whole advantage

This category is eighteen months old and the engines have almost no established answer to inherit. Being the named default now is achievable in a way it will not be once the market consolidates.

The method

How ai visibility works, in any category

01

The engines will not describe your product, but they will recommend it

Every major assistant declines explicit content. None of them decline the commercial question underneath it — which processor handles high-risk billing, which age-verification vendor to shortlist, which brand makes the better product. Those answers are being generated today, for your category, with someone named in them. The refusal everyone notices has distracted the whole industry from the recommendation nobody is measuring.

02

The work is almost entirely off your own domain

Brands are around six times more likely to be cited through third-party sources than through their own site. In restricted categories the gap is wider still, because the engines lean harder on sources they consider independent when the subject is sensitive. Roundups, comparison pages, community discussion, review platforms and directory profiles decide this. A site redesign moves none of it.

03

Four engines, four different source mixes

ChatGPT resolves heavily through Bing and licensed publisher content. Gemini and AI Overviews weight what Google has indexed and what it trusts. Perplexity leans unusually hard on community discussion, which is why Reddit threads decide more of this category than anyone expects. Copilot draws on Bing plus editorial. A programme optimising one surface will report healthy numbers while three others quietly fail.

04

Entity resolution comes before anything else

Engines have to be able to tell that your company is one company — the legal name, the trading name, the product name and the domain all resolving to a single node rather than four unrelated stubs. In this industry that is routinely broken, because operators use different names across directories, media and their own footer for perfectly sensible commercial reasons. It is unglamorous, and it is frequently the single change that moves a score.

05

A score that compounds

Each month we re-run your prompt set across all four engines and report the score, the per-engine breakdown, your share of voice against named competitors, and the citation source behind every mention. The number moves and you can see what moved it. Where an engine declines a prompt entirely we report that separately, because a refused prompt is a different problem from one a competitor won.

Category specifics

What this looks like for ai companion apps

The method does not change between industries. The questions buyers actually ask, the sources the engines trust, and the rules you have to advertise inside all do.

Prompts we run for this category

  • best companion apps app
  • roleplay and chat apps compared
  • alternatives to the most popular image generation app
  • best uncensored voice and audio app reddit

Rules this category advertises inside

  • App store content policies — restrictions differ between iOS and Android
  • Payment processor rules for the category
  • Age assurance obligations in an increasing number of markets
  • Platform advertising policies largely prohibit the category

Citation layer

Where the engines look for a AI companion app

Each engine resolves a local recommendation through a different set of sources. These are the ones that decide whether a AI companion app gets named — and most of them are not your website.

  1. All engines AI tool directories — Futurepedia, There's An AI For That
  2. Perplexity Reddit communities
  3. ChatGPT / Copilot Roundup and comparison articles
  4. All engines Product Hunt and launch platforms
  5. Gemini / AI Overviews App store listings and metadata
  6. Gemini YouTube and video reviews
  7. All engines SoftwareApplication schema on your domain

Scope

What the engagement covers

Specifics rather than adjectives — and an equally specific list of what it does not cover, because unclear scope is the most common cause of a bad first quarter.

Included

  • Baseline across ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Copilot — 50 prompts, three runs each
  • Prompt set built from how your users actually phrase the decision
  • Citation source map — which sources each engine drew on, per answer
  • Entity audit: legal name, trading name, product and domain resolving to one node
  • Organisation, Product and Review schema across the site
  • Roundup and comparison-page placement programme
  • Review-platform presence and velocity where one exists for your category
  • Community and forum presence in the places the engines actually read
  • robots.txt and AI-crawler access audit on the live domain
  • Monthly scorecard with per-engine breakdown and refused-prompt reporting

Not included

  • Guaranteed placement in any AI answer — no platform publishes source selection, and anyone promising it is overselling
  • Buying or incentivising reviews in any form
  • Astroturfed community posts or sockpuppet accounts
  • Producing, editing, generating or distributing explicit content of any kind
  • Any work that would have us publish or transmit the material itself

What to expect, when

Timeline

  1. Week 1 Baseline measured, refused prompts separated from lost ones
  2. Weeks 1–3 Entity and schema work shipped, crawler access confirmed
  3. Weeks 3–12 Roundup, comparison and community presence built
  4. Month 2+ Monthly re-measurement — the score starts moving

6 questions

Common questions

Do AI engines even answer questions about this industry?

They decline explicit content and they answer the commercial questions around it. Which payment processor, which age-verification vendor, which brand, which app — all of those return named recommendations today. The baseline measures which of your prompts return a list at all before it measures whether you are on it, and we report both numbers separately.

How long before the score moves?

Entity and schema corrections can register within two to four weeks. Roundup placement and community presence compound over three to six months. We report monthly either way, so progress is visible before it is complete.

Can you guarantee we get recommended?

No, and treat anyone who does with suspicion. No platform publishes how it selects sources. We work from measured output and correlations documented across the field, we report honestly, and we re-baseline the source map quarterly because these systems change without notice.

How is this different from SEO?

Traditional SEO gets a page ranked. This gets a company named. The inputs barely overlap — most of the work sits in third-party sources, community and editorial rather than on your site.

What happens if the number goes down?

We report it and explain what changed. These systems shift underneath everyone, and community content in particular gets weighted differently quarter to quarter. A report that only ever contains good news is not a report.

Will you handle our content?

No. We do not produce, edit, generate, upload or distribute explicit material, and that exclusion is written into every contract. We work on positioning, acquisition, measurement and the third-party presence that drives it. This is a firm line, not a negotiating position.

Also for ai companion apps

Start with the number.

Before any retainer, we run fifty prompts across four engines and show you exactly where you stand against the operators being named instead.

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