AIV

The Question

If someone asks ChatGPT which accounting firm or security company to use in South Africa, does your business get mentioned at all?

Auto Alpha Advisory is built on a claim — AI is becoming the new shortlist — and I had no way to prove it for a single client. The tools that already measured this were priced in dollars and weren't asking South African questions.

What I Built

For each brand a client tracks, AIV runs a set of prompts against ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and Gemini every month, and scores how often — and where — it shows up against the competitors it names. Multi-tenant and Rand-priced, sitting next to the same audit engine that runs Auto Alpha Advisory's own scans, so a client can go from what's wrong with their site to whether the AI has even heard of it.

Under the hood: a Python worker calling all four model APIs directly, a parser that has to tell a brand being named apart from aliased or quietly absent, and one share-of-mention formula the worker and the dashboard both read from.

What I Learned

The first real run, I pointed it at Auto Alpha Advisory itself. Not one answer named it, while a competitor on its list kept turning up. The company building the AI-visibility tool was invisible to the thing it measures. It wasn't a comfortable result to publish about my own business, but it's the reason the product exists.

Status

Live at aiv.autoalphaadvisory.co.za (opens in a new tab). Its public side is the SA AI Visibility Index: the same buyer questions about estate agents, law firms and accounting firms, put to all four engines, with every prompt and the method published. The Index's second edition found that the shortlists had held since the first.

Where an engine didn't search the web before answering, AIV leaves the answer out, and it shows a share it couldn't measure as a dash rather than a zero. Nobody pays for it yet.