The four stages
1
Prompts
Your project maintains a list of tracked prompts: real buyer questions grouped by topic and, optionally, by persona and region. Prompts are generated during onboarding, added from the curated library, or drafted with the AI assistant in the Prompts console.
2
Runs
On a schedule, Prefer executes a tracking run: one full pass that sends every enabled prompt to every enabled engine. You can also trigger a run manually from the top bar with Run tracking now.
3
Extraction
For each answer, Prefer stores the full text, extracts every brand mentioned, records every cited URL, and computes sentiment. Your brand, your competitors, the cited sources, and the position you appear in are all normalized so they can be aggregated.
4
Scoring and actions
Prefer rolls the extracted signals into Visibility Score, Share of Voice, Citation Share, Avg Position, and Sentiment, per engine and blended. Gaps between your performance and the leader’s feed the Action Center as ranked, evidence-backed work items.
Runs vs the free audit
Free audit
A single one-time pass. About 30 prompts across 3 engines. Produces a report and a starter action plan. Always free.
Ongoing tracking
Repeats on a schedule on every paid plan, across all five engines and your plan’s prompt count. Feeds trends, deltas, alerts, and the Action Center.
How deltas work
Every metric card shows a delta labelled “vs previous run”, not “vs yesterday”. A run is the unit of time in Prefer, because engines can shift between hours and daily aggregation would hide those movements. If you run tracking twice in one day, you will see two deltas.Where each number comes from
Next
Metrics
Full definitions and how each metric is computed.
Engines
Which engines Prefer measures and what your plan includes.