Taking Action on Your Data

Data is only valuable when it drives action. Surfacd gives you the visibility — here’s how to turn those insights into results.

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Understanding Your Starting Point

Before taking action, establish your baseline:

1. Check your Dashboard — what’s your overall visibility score?
2. Review Rankings — where do you sit relative to competitors?
3. Read your Mentions — how is AI describing your brand?
4. Analyse Sources — which websites are being cited?

This baseline becomes your benchmark for measuring the impact of everything you do next.

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Improving Your Visibility Score

Your visibility score represents how often your brand appears in AI responses. Here are the most effective ways to improve it.

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Create Authoritative Content

AI platforms prioritise content that is:

• Comprehensive — covers topics in depth rather than surface-level
• Authoritative — published on respected, well-established domains
• Publicly accessible — not behind paywalls or login walls
• Well-structured — uses clear headings, lists, and data that AI can easily parse

Action: Identify topics where your visibility is low (sort prompts by visibility, ascending) and create detailed, expert-level content addressing those questions on your website.

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Target the Sources AI Cites

The Sources report reveals which websites AI platforms reference. These are the publications and pages that directly influence AI recommendations. Action:

1. Go to Sources → By Domain to identify the most-cited publications in your industry
2. Cross-reference with your brand’s presence — are you featured on these sites?
3. Prioritise PR, guest content, and partnerships with highly-cited sources
4. Focus on publications where competitors appear but you don’t

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Address Inaccurate Information

AI sometimes surfaces outdated or incorrect information about brands. Action:

1. Review your Mentions for any inaccurate descriptions, outdated pricing, or incorrect product details
2. Update the primary source of this information (your website, Wikipedia, key review sites)
3. Monitor over subsequent runs to confirm corrections have propagated

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Competitive Intelligence

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Identify Competitor Strengths

Use Rankings and the Competitor Visibility Chart to understand where competitors outperform you. Action:

1. Enable the Competitor Visibility Chart on the Rankings page
2. Filter by different Tags to find specific topics where competitors lead
3. Read competitor Mentions to understand what AI says about them that it doesn’t say about you
4. Analyse their cited Sources — are they featured in publications you’re missing?

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Spot Emerging Competitors

AI responses surface brands you may not have considered as competitors. Action:

1. Review Rankings regularly for new brands appearing in your space
2. Mark emerging threats as Competitors to track their trajectory
3. Use the Matrix Analysis to compare their performance across services, countries, and topics

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Platform-Specific Strategies

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Differences Across Platforms

The Matrix Analysis with Brand × Service reveals how your visibility varies across AI platforms. Action:

• Strong on one platform, weak on another? Investigate the sources each platform cites — they may be drawing from different content
• Consistently low everywhere? Focus on foundational content and authority building
• Declining on a specific platform? Check if that platform has changed its approach — review what sources it now prefers

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Regional Differences

If you monitor prompts across countries, use Brand × Country in Matrix Analysis. Action:

• Identify markets where localised content could boost visibility
• Prioritise regional publications and media in underperforming markets
• Ensure product information is accurate and up-to-date for each region

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Tracking Your Progress

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Set Up a Review Cadence

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Measuring Impact

AI visibility improvements take time. Content strategy, PR efforts, and brand building typically show results over weeks and months, not days. Track these metrics over time:

• Visibility score — is it trending upward?
• Rank position — are you climbing the rankings?
• Mention sentiment — is the tone improving?
• Source citations — are you appearing in more cited publications?
• Position distribution — are you being mentioned earlier in responses?

Use Exporting Data to create regular snapshots for stakeholder reports.

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Reporting to Stakeholders

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Building a Narrative

Surfacd data tells a powerful story for leadership and stakeholders:

1. The landscape — “AI platforms now generate brand recommendations. Here’s how we compare.”
2. Our position — “We rank #X overall, with strengths in [topic] and gaps in [topic].”
3. The opportunity — “By targeting [specific sources/topics], we can improve our visibility.”
4. The progress — “Since we started, our visibility has moved from X% to Y%.”

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Useful Exports

• Rankings export with competitors only — clean competitive positioning overview
• Matrix export (Brand × Tag) — shows strengths and weaknesses by topic
• Sources export by domain — target list for PR and content efforts
• Mentions export — qualitative evidence of how AI describes your brand

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Quick Wins