Product Perceptions (previously called AI Brand Perception) shows you the language and themes AI models use when they recommend your brand. Instead of only tracking whether you appear in AI responses, it surfaces why you appear and how you are being positioned, so you can align your messaging with what AI is actually saying about you.
Where do I find Product Perceptions?
Product Perceptions is in the left navigation of any Visibility Audit (formerly known as a report), under Monitor.
What am I looking at?
Gumshoe analyzes the AI responses that recommend your brand and pulls out the most common themes, attributes, and product associations from that text.
Each product or service in your Visibility Audit gets its own section showing:
- Themes: the buying criteria, features, and qualities AI associates with that product when it recommends it. These appear as gray tags, each with a count.
- Top competing products: the brands that appear most often in the same AI responses as your product (co-mentions), giving you a quick read on who AI sees as your competitive set for that product or service.
The number next to each tag and each co-mentioned competing product or service reflects how many times that element appeared across your AI responses in that Visibility Audit run. Higher counts mean AI models are consistently associating that attribute with your product.
How do I drill into the details?
Click any theme to open a panel showing the exact AI model outputs for that theme. You can see which models mentioned it, what they said, and how the language varied across responses. This is the raw evidence behind the summary, useful for auditing accuracy, spotting gaps, or identifying messaging you may want to reinforce on your site.
How do I compare products?
Click a competing product to view it alongside your corresponding product. The comparison view shows each product's full attribute list, including mention counts, so you can see where AI coverage overlaps and where it diverges.
This is useful for:
- Understanding how AI differentiates between your product lines
- Benchmarking your brand against a specific competitor
- Identifying attributes your competitor owns that you don't appear for
In the compare view, attributes that appear for both products are flagged with a comparison icon so you can quickly spot shared territory.
How is this different from Topics?
Topics (found under Topics & Prompts) are the subject areas you configure to generate AI queries. They represent the categories (subcategories of the project's product category) that your Personas care about. Product Perceptions is different: it analyzes what AI says in response to those queries. The themes you see here are extracted directly from model outputs and reflect the narrative AI is shaping around your brand, not the questions you asked.
How do I use this data?
A few practical ways to act on what you find here:
- Validate your positioning. If AI consistently highlights attributes you consider core to your brand, that is confirmation your messaging is landing. If important differentiators are missing, that is a content and visibility gap worth addressing.
- Identify unintended associations. If AI keeps pairing your brand with attributes you don't want to own, you can trace those back to the source responses and investigate what is driving them.
- Benchmark against competitors. The compare view shows where a competitor has stronger theme coverage and where you have the edge, which can inform content priorities.
- Spot co-mention patterns. The competing products shown under each section indicate which brands you are grouped with. This is the competitive set AI has effectively assigned to you, which may or may not match your own view of the landscape.