Every category gets a
different answer.
Ask an assistant to recommend project management software and it answers from review sites. Ask it for running shoes and it answers from forums and video. Ask it for a lawyer and it answers from directories. Same product, three different games.
Solutions
One product,
three different games.
The mechanics of AI search are the same everywhere. What changes by category is where the answer comes from, and that changes what you have to do about it.
An AI assistant does not hold an opinion about your brand. It assembles one, at the moment of the question, from whatever it can read. That is why two brands with equally good websites can get completely different answers: the difference is not the site, it is what the rest of the web says about them.
Across the 149,912 citations in our published study of AI search, only 2.9% pointed at a brand's own domain. The other 97% were somewhere else, and where exactly that somewhere else is turns out to be strongly category-dependent. Software questions lean on review platforms and comparison roundups. Consumer product questions lean on retailer pages, forum threads and video. Questions about professional services lean on directories and local press, which is why a law firm with an excellent website can still be invisible.
The consequence is practical. The same finding produces a different next step in each category: an ecommerce brand fixes product pages and goes after review coverage; a SaaS company works on comparison content and third-party listings; a firm claims and completes directory profiles. Measuring the same way everywhere is correct. Acting the same way everywhere is not.
Ranqo measures the answer rather than the ranking. It runs the unbranded questions your category actually gets asked against 6 AI platforms on a weekly cycle, records whether you were named, where you placed among the brands mentioned, how the answer described you and exactly which pages it cited. Then it turns that into fixes ranked by impact, and re-measures each one against later runs so you learn whether shipping it changed anything.
The pages above go through that from each seat: Brands, Agencies and SEO & GEO Professionals. Whatever your category, the free report runs the same questions for your brand and emails you where you stand.
Not on the list?
It still works.
These are the categories with a page written for them so far. Ranqo tracks any brand in any category, and the setup is the same either way: your name and your domain.