Track Your Brand's AI Search Performance
Discover whether AI assistants mention your brand when users search for products in your category. This workflow generates SEO keywords from your site, turns them into high-intent prompts, runs web research, checks for brand mentions, and snapshots the results to Google Sheets.
Last updated
February 12, 2026
Connectors used
Tags
Video Tutorial
Key Takeaways
- Measures brand visibility in AI-generated answers - checks whether your brand appears when AI responds to buying-intent prompts
- Runs on a schedule - daily trigger so you can track mention trends over time
- Tracks you and competitors side by side - define a list of brands and compare mention rates across the same prompts
- Customizable - use your own Needle collection, brand list, and Google Sheet
What This Workflow Does
This workflow extracts SEO keywords from pages in your Needle collection, converts them into high-intent prompts, runs web research for each prompt, checks whether your brand (and competitors) are mentioned in the results, and writes a snapshot to Google Sheets.
Use cases:
- Track whether AI assistants mention your brand for relevant search queries
- Compare your brand's visibility against competitors over time
- Identify content gaps where competitors appear but you don't
How It Works
| Step | What Happens |
|---|---|
| 1. Scheduled trigger | Runs daily (configurable) |
| 2. Load collection pages | Loops through files in your Needle collection |
| 3. Extract SEO keywords | AI reads each page and extracts keywords you can realistically rank for |
| 4. Deduplicate keywords | Code node removes duplicate keywords across pages |
| 5. Generate prompts | AI converts keywords into 25 high-intent prompts (with current year where relevant) |
| 6. Web research per prompt | AI runs web search and browsing to generate a response for each prompt |
| 7. Pair prompts with brands | Code node creates a test for each prompt-brand combination |
| 8. Detect brand mentions | AI checks whether each brand appears in the response |
| 9. Calculate mention rates | Code node computes mention percentage per brand |
| 10. Save to Google Sheets | AI appends a row with the results so you can track trends |
Setup Instructions
- Click "Use template" on this page
- Put the pages you want to evaluate into a Needle Collection
- Set the
brandsworkflow variable to your brand and competitors (e.g.["YourBrand", "Competitor1", "Competitor2"]) - Duplicate the Google Sheet template and replace the Spreadsheet ID in the Google Sheets step with your copy
- Connect Google Sheets integration
Customization
| What You Can Change | How |
|---|---|
| Brands to track | Update the brands workflow variable |
| Number of prompts | Edit the prompt generation AI node (default is 25) |
| Schedule | Change the cron expression in the scheduled trigger node |
| Keyword source | Point the collection to different pages or a different Needle collection |
| Google Sheet | Replace the Spreadsheet ID in the final AI node |
How to Interpret Results
- Higher mention rate means your brand shows up in the sources that AI/web research pulls from (reviews, comparisons, directories, "best X" lists)
- Low or zero mentions may indicate a content or distribution gap - you might rank on Google but not appear in pages that AI systems cite
- Competitor-only mentions often means you need more third-party coverage (partner pages, marketplaces, review sites) for those buying-intent topics
FAQ
Q: Does this measure "AI SEO" directly? A: It's not a single universal score, but for the prompts you care about, it measures whether your brand appears in AI-generated answers and tracks changes over time.
Q: Why are results different day to day? A: Web research results can shift as pages are updated, different sources are retrieved, and responses vary slightly. That's why the workflow writes each run to a sheet so you can look at trends rather than a single run.
Q: What brands should I track? A: Your own brand (plus common spelling variants), 3-10 direct competitors, and optionally any category marketplaces or directories you want to appear on.
Q: Can I run this manually instead of on a schedule? A: Yes. Replace the scheduled trigger with a manual trigger, or simply run the workflow manually from the dashboard at any time.
Want to showcase your own workflows?
Become a Needle workflow partner and turn your expertise into recurring revenue.
