How we capture AI visibility data
This methodology powers the hub-and-spoke landing pages, dashboards, and research drops across chatobserver.com. Share it with legal, procurement, or PR teams that need to understand our controls.
Prompt orchestration
Prompts run through approved, consumer-ready interfaces (ChatGPT web, Perplexity Copilot, Gemini Advanced, Google AI Overviews/AI Mode experiments). Teams pick cadences ranging from hourly to weekly. Every execution records prompt text, persona notes, cadence, and workspace owner.
Assistant guardrails
We respect each assistant’s terms of service and robots guidance. Chatobserver does not attempt to bypass rate limits or simulate logged-in states that violate policy. When assistants publish official APIs (e.g., OpenAI’s GPTs API), we use those endpoints.
Geo & device context
Requests note device type (desktop, mobile), geo, and language. This is essential for AIO/AIM monitoring where rollouts differ per market. Geo metadata is stored alongside prompts for audit purposes.
Storage & retention
Answer payloads, metadata, and cached HTML/image snapshots are stored in regionally redundant storage with encryption at rest. Customers can set retention periods per workspace or request redactions.
Normalization pipeline
Raw assistant responses pass through parsers that extract mentions, citations, and sentiment labels. Citations map to domains and content types (owned, earned, partner). We maintain transformer versions per assistant so you can trace any anomaly.
Audit trail
Every execution receives a unique ID with timestamp, workspace, triggering user, assistant, and result sync status. Automations log downstream actions (alerts, exports, sheet syncs) to keep compliance teams informed.
Safeguards we enforce
- We only crawl surfaces we are explicitly allowed to access (no headless scraping of paywalled assistants).
- Respect robots directives for programmatic SERP checks and throttle requests with randomized delay windows.
- LLMs.txt directives are honored where assistants declare them; we include them in our advisory workflows even if support is unofficial.
- Opt-out controls let customers suppress sensitive prompts from any shared dataset or export.
Need deeper detail?
Email support@chatobserver.com for a signed methodology summary, DPIA references, or joint-security questionnaire.