Frequently asked questions
Short answers first; the rest of the docs go deeper.
▸What does Suede Signal actually check?
26 deterministic checks across five lanes: whether AI crawlers (GPTBot, ClaudeBot, Claude-Web, PerplexityBot, Google-Extended, CCBot) can read your site, whether llms.txt exists, metadata and Open Graph quality, JSON-LD structured data, passage-level citability, and trust signals like about pages and freshness markup.
▸Why does AI visibility matter?
A growing share of product discovery now starts in ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews instead of a search results page. If the engines can't read your site, or can't find a citable passage on it, you don't exist in the answer.
▸Is my data stored?
No. Every audit runs read-only against your public pages at request time and nothing is saved server-side. Your scan history lives only in your own browser's localStorage.
▸How is this different from an SEO audit?
Classic SEO optimizes for ranked links. AI visibility optimizes for being quoted in an answer: crawler permissions, entity schema, question-shaped headings, and direct extractable passages. Some checks overlap; the intent doesn't.
▸Does a high score guarantee AI engines will cite me?
No, and be suspicious of any tool that promises that. The audit checks the durable fundamentals that make citation possible: readability by crawlers, verifiable identity, and extractable passages. Engines weigh many other signals, including third-party mentions, and their behavior changes.
▸Why does my score differ from what I see in a browser?
The auditor reads the HTML your server returns, like a crawler does. Content rendered only by client-side JavaScript, geo-gated pages, and bot walls all change what the auditor (and real AI crawlers) can see.
▸Can I compare against competitors?
Yes. Add up to two competitor URLs on the home page and you get a lane-by-lane comparison table showing exactly where you lead and where you're losing the answer.
▸Does the audit crawl my whole site?
No, it audits the exact URL you submit plus the origin's robots.txt and llms.txt. Run separate audits for your homepage and key landing pages.
▸Is there an API?
Yes. POST /api/audit runs the full audit and GET /api/mentions runs a community mention scan. Both are free, unauthenticated, and documented on the API reference page.
▸What is Mention Watch?
A scan of Reddit and Hacker News for live threads about your brand or topic, ranked by impact, with a disclosure-first reply draft you edit and post yourself. Nothing is posted on your behalf.
▸Can I automate Mention Watch instead of doing it by hand?
Yes. Suede Agent Studio, our visual agent builder, runs the same scan-draft-approve loop on a schedule across Reddit, X, LinkedIn, and Discord, drafting in your brand voice and queueing every reply for your approval before anything posts.
▸How often should I re-audit?
After every change you ship from the fix list, and roughly monthly otherwise. Scans from the same browser keep a local history, so you'll see the score trend between runs.
Something missing? Check the scoring methodology or email hello@suedeai.ai.