Measuring whether AI search names your product: six ways the measurement lied to me

I build DOS AI (dosai.pro), an AI assistant that answers a small business's customers in WhatsApp, Instagram and Telegram and keeps the leads in a built-in CRM. Search consoles show where a page ranks. Nobody shows you what an AI assistant says when a buyer asks it for a recommendation, so I wrote a script for that. The script is under 300 lines. Getting it to tell the truth took longer than writing it. Here are the six places where it, or the things around it, gave me a wrong picture. The setup Thirty-five questions a buyer would type, in seven groups: choosing a service, a task to solve, price, agencies, our brand, Kazakh, English. Thirty-two of them do not contain our name. Each goes to a model with the web search tool switched on and an approximate location set to our city. For every answer the script records the text and the cited URLs, then counts where we appear and which sites the answer was built from. A run costs about a dollar. I have four runs now: one in mid-