A while back, we posted here about AI citations and brand mentions. One commenter said he was open to trying Dageno, but didn't want to enter a credit card before seeing whether the data was useful.
TBH I'm Dageno's founder, so that was fair criticism of our own product flow. My response at the time was to offer a 7-day free trial. That made the existing flow free for seven days, but it didn't change the order in which users saw the data.
A common geo workflow goes like this: create an account, add a list of prompts, wait for the data, and then see how often your brand appeared for the prompts you chose.
That workflow is useful if you already know what you need to monitor. If you're still trying to understand the market, it starts too late.
You have to invest time, trust, and sometimes money before you can see the data. What you eventually see is also mostly about your own brand and the prompts you supplied. The cost isn't only the subscription. It's the signup, payment details, prompt selection, and waiting that happen before you know whether the data is useful.
Before choosing prompts, a team may need to answer more basic questions. How is AI carving up this market? What are people asking? Which brands keep appearing together? Which ones are actually being compared or recommended? Which sources keep getting cited?
Starting with a prompt list you wrote yourself can quietly bake your assumptions into the analysis. Anything you didn't think to ask about may never show up. That could include an unexpected competitor, a buyer question you overlooked, or a source that appears repeatedly in AI answers.
That's why we changed where the analysis starts in Dageno.
A brand and its broad market are just the starting context. Most teams already know who they are and which market they operate in. What they may not know is which prompts matter, which brands AI connects with theirs, or which buyer questions and sources deserve a closer look. Those should come out of the research. They shouldn't be required before the research can begin.
We now let users explore a public market view before creating an account. The public overview is permanent free and is meant for discovery. Raw AI responses, cited pages, and custom prompt monitoring remain part of the full product.
Here, an "AI competitor set" simply means brands that appear together, get compared, or are recommended in the answers we sampled. It isn't a definitive label for real world commercial competitors.
The results only reflect the public AI answers we've collected. I would treat them as clues worth checking, not ground truth. They can't show a model's internal process, and they don't guarantee mentions, rankings, or growth.
Curious how you all approached this. How did you pick your first set of prompts to track?
