Skip to content

Weekly

Check each week whether AI search answers mention your brand

Each week your key buyer questions are put to Perplexity, and your sheet records whether your brand was mentioned, how, and which sources were cited.

Runs
Weekly
Apps
Google Sheets, Perplexity
AI
Optional
Access
Perplexity key; Sheets read+write

Send this to your assistant

Create a ClickRuntime automation: every Monday, ask Perplexity each buyer question in my Questions tab, record in my Visibility sheet whether Northwind is mentioned, the sentiment and the cited sources, and email me a short summary.

Paste it into your assistant. It tells you what it will send or change before it runs live.

First time? Adding ClickRuntime to your assistant takes about two minutes.

Why use it

Why teams use this automation

More buyers now ask AI search tools which product to choose instead of scrolling through search results. If your brand is not in those answers, you are invisible at the moment of decision, and nothing in your usual analytics shows it.

Marketing teams, founders and SEO specialists use it to track their presence in AI answers week by week and to see which sources the answers rely on.

What you get out of it

  • See what buyers see

    You get the actual answers to the questions your customers ask.

  • A trend, not a snapshot

    Weekly rows show whether your visibility is improving after content or PR work.

  • Know which sources matter

    Cited pages show where to earn mentions or improve your own content.

  • Competitors in context

    Answers often name alternatives, which shows who you are being compared with.

How it works

What happens, step by step

  1. Every Monday, ClickRuntime reads your list of buyer questions from the sheet.

  2. Each question is asked to Perplexity, and the answer and cited sources are collected.

  3. It checks whether your brand is mentioned, and AI labels how it is described.

  4. One row per question is added to your sheet, and you get a short summary by email.

Before it runs live

  • Connect your Google Sheets account and pick the spreadsheets it may use
  • Connect Perplexity

What you get

RunsWeekly
Check each week whether AI search answers mention your brandtoday, 9:00Succeeded
Email · Weekly visibilityNorthwind mentioned in 7 of 15 answers yes · positive · best invoicing tool for freelancers

Build your own

Need it to work differently?

This template is a starting point. Copy the prompt and change it, or describe a different automation from scratch, with your own conditions, more apps or an AI step. Your assistant writes it, tests it and runs it on ClickRuntime.
  • Your own rules

    Conditions, thresholds, filters and exceptions, written the way you'd explain them to a colleague.

  • Any number of apps

    One automation can read from one app and update several others. Over 248 apps are ready, and anything with an API works too.

  • AI where it helps

    Summaries, classification, extraction and drafts use ClickRuntime's built-in AI, with no extra key.

  • On a schedule or on each event

    Runs as often as every 5 minutes, or the moment an app sends an event, and keeps track of what it already handled.

Changes you can ask for

  • Run it at a different time, more or less often, or only on weekdays
  • Change what the AI looks for, or how it writes the result
  • Add another app, for example also send it to Slack
  • Combine it with other Google Sheets and Perplexity steps into one automation

Under the hood

The code that runs this automation

This is the Python script that runs each time the automation starts. Your AI assistant writes it for you when you send the prompt, and you allow each step in your assistant. To change how the automation works, describe the change to your assistant and it updates the script for you. For every function it can use, see the script reference.
track_brand_visibility_in_ai_search_answers.pyexample
from datetime import date
from google.oauth2.credentials import Credentials
from googleapiclient.discovery import build
from clickruntime import on_trigger, credentials, http, notify, ai

SHEET_ID, BRAND = "your-spreadsheet-id", "Northwind"

def sonar(prompt):
    r = http.post("https://api.perplexity.ai/chat/completions", headers={"Authorization": f"Bearer {credentials.secret('PERPLEXITY_API_KEY')}"},
                  json={"model": "sonar", "messages": [{"role": "user", "content": prompt}]}, timeout=90).json()
    return r["choices"][0]["message"]["content"], [s["url"] for s in r.get("search_results", [])]

@on_trigger
def run(event):
    sheets = build("sheets", "v4", credentials=Credentials(credentials.connection("google", "work")),
                   cache_discovery=False).spreadsheets().values()
    questions = [r[0] for r in sheets.get(spreadsheetId=SHEET_ID, range="Questions!A2:A").execute().get("values", []) if r]
    rows = []
    for q in questions:
        answer, links = sonar(q)
        mentioned = BRAND.lower() in answer.lower()
        mood = ai.generate(f"How does this answer describe {BRAND}? One word: positive, neutral or negative.\n{answer[:3000]}",
                           max_output_tokens=5).text.strip().lower() if mentioned else "not mentioned"
        rows.append([date.today().isoformat(), q, "yes" if mentioned else "no", mood, "\n".join(links[:5])])
    sheets.append(spreadsheetId=SHEET_ID, range="Visibility!A:E", valueInputOption="RAW", body={"values": rows}).execute()
    hits = sum(r[2] == "yes" for r in rows)
    notify.email_me(f"{BRAND} mentioned in {hits} of {len(rows)} answers", "\n".join(f"{r[2]:>3} · {r[3]} · {r[1]}" for r in rows))
    return {"mentioned": hits, "questions": len(rows)}

FAQ

Common questions

How many questions should I track?
Ten to twenty questions that a real buyer would ask, such as best invoicing tool for freelancers. Each question uses one Perplexity request per week.
How is sentiment decided?
Mentions are labelled positive, neutral or negative based on how the answer describes your brand. Rows without a mention are marked not mentioned.
Do answers change week to week?
Yes, sometimes a lot. That is why the weekly history matters more than any single answer.
What permissions does it need?
Perplexity key; Sheets read+write. Nothing else in your accounts is used.
Does it need AI?
No, but you can ask for an AI step (for example a summary). It then uses ClickRuntime's built-in AI allowance.
How many runs does it use?
One run each time it runs (weekly). Checks that find nothing to do and stop right away aren't counted.
Can I change how it works?
Yes. Describe the change to your AI assistant, for example a different schedule, channel or filter. It updates the automation, tests it and tells you what changed.

Set up “Check each week whether AI search answers mention your brand” from your assistant

Copy the prompt above, or connect your assistant first. Free plan, no credit card.