SolCrys FAQ - 33 questions buyers ask about how we work

How does SolCrys build prompt sets?

We build a Golden Prompt Set (GPS) for every customer category, grounded on four real-world signals: intent volume across major search and marketplace surfaces, trending questions from public community platforms, AI query volume signals, and live follow-up questions from supported surfaces where reliable. Every prompt carries projected query volume so you can prioritize what your buyers actually ask, and you can replace any GPS prompt with your own at any time - typically 40 to 50 percent of a working set ends up customer-supplied. Full methodology: Golden Prompt Set methodology.

Why doesn't SolCrys just use SEO keywords as prompts?

SEO keywords measure what people type into a search box. AI prompts are longer, more conversational, and increasingly bypass traditional search entirely (asked directly to ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, or Alexa for Shopping). Synthetic-keyword prompt sets miss the multi-clause, problem-stated questions buyers actually ask AI assistants ('I run a 50-person SaaS team and our current CRM doesn't handle our 6-month sales cycle well - what should I look at?'). Our community-grounded layer specifically closes that gap.

Are SolCrys prompts AI-generated, or sourced from real demand?

Sourced. Every prompt entering the GPS requires evidence from at least one of the four grounding sources, and we prioritize prompts evidenced by two or more sources. We don't ask an LLM to 'generate 100 questions a buyer might ask' and call it research. Synthetic SEO-only prompts are de-prioritized during selection and should not enter the tracked GPS unless they are supported by real evidence.

How often does SolCrys update the prompt set?

The tracked GPS is designed to stay stable as a measurement benchmark, so we don't rewrite it daily or in near real time. Changes are review items - raised during onboarding, at regular measurement reviews, on your request, or when the category clearly shifts (a new entrant, a pricing change, major news). Your tracked prompts don't change unless you approve the change. How a set evolves over its life: the AEO prompt set lifecycle.

Can I bring my own prompts to SolCrys?

Yes. You can replace any GPS prompt with your own at any time. We provide a suggestion panel that flags gaps in your set (for example, 'you don't have any risk/objection prompts') and recommends additions. Your custom prompts are private to your workspace and never used to update other customers' GPS templates.

How does SolCrys measure visibility, and why should I trust the data?

We run tracked prompts against supported engines and preserve the evidence behind each response: prompt, engine, capture method, available model or surface signal, timestamp, answer text, citations, and follow-up questions. Where an engine has a reliable API, adapter, SERP, or rendered-surface capture path, the capture method is tagged separately, so you always know how a response was obtained. Full methodology: Visibility Measurement methodology.

Which AI engines does SolCrys cover?

Five answer engines: ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Gemini, Perplexity, and Claude. Which of them a workspace can enable depends on the plan - Free measures ChatGPT, and the full set is available from Pro upward; the tier-by-tier map is on pricing. Retail assistants (Alexa for Shopping, Walmart Sparky, ChatGPT Shopping) are a separate retail scope: Retail AEO. We don't add or remove engines without disclosure, and we don't count a surface as covered because a provider announced it.

Can SolCrys measure a market other than the United States?

Yes. Measurement country is a per-workspace setting: one country per workspace, United States by default, changeable by an account admin. A non-default country reaches each engine through that engine's own regional channel rather than by rewriting the prompt to say 'in Germany', and the country is stamped on every run, so changing it starts a new measurement series instead of quietly bending an existing trend line. Several markets side by side means one workspace per market.

Why is SolCrys's consumer-surface capture better than just calling the API?

A consumer chat or SERP surface is not always a thin shell over a public API. It may use a different default model, enable different tools, or render follow-up suggestions and other UI details the API never returns. Google AI Overviews has no public API, so SERP capture must be tagged separately from API-based response capture.

AI engines give different answers each time. How does SolCrys handle that?

By repeated capture and rolling-window aggregation. A single snapshot is a noisy data point - engines like ChatGPT are non-deterministic by design, sampling probabilistically so the conversation feels natural. Repeated daily captures aggregated into rolling 7-day and 30-day windows separate real movement from that noise, and a single-snapshot move is labeled as a snapshot rather than reported as a trend.

My visibility score moved 12% this week - is that normal?

Often yes - and the useful question isn't "is this within range?" but "what content was published, and which citations changed?" Scores move week to week even when nothing you control has changed: engines are non-deterministic, the source landscape they draw on keeps shifting (competitors publish, media cites different sources, model versions roll, freshness windows decay), and the measurement layer is a statistical estimate, not a count. The score is the symptom; new content and citation changes are the signal. Two rules of thumb: watch the 7-day rolling average rather than the single-day number, and pull the underlying citation list before deciding whether to act. The six sources of variance and the diagnostic path: Why your AI visibility score moves.

Can I reproduce a specific data point SolCrys shows me?

Yes. Every chart drills back to the exact prompt, engine, available model or surface signal, capture method, timestamp, and captured response. Copy the prompt text, submit it on the engine yourself within a short time window, and compare substance (allowing for known engine non-determinism). If a result ever looks wrong, request the response evidence and we can show what was captured.

What happens when an engine changes its default model or its answer format?

We monitor provider announcements and model deprecations continuously, with internal alerting for default-model changes. When a configured model or surface changes materially, we update tracking as soon as the change is verified and disclose it, so you can read any discontinuity in the trend line for what it is. Model signal is stored where the engine discloses it.

Format changes get the same treatment, because they are easier to miss: in May 2026 ChatGPT moved from footnote-style citations to clickable brand names inside the answer text - enough to break a citation parser, with no model version changing. We keep the full captured answer alongside the extracted citations so a parser can be corrected and re-run against what was actually captured, rather than leaving a gap in your history.

Does SolCrys only measure, or does it help me fix what it finds?

Both - the execution half is the reason the platform exists. Measurement tells you which prompts you lose and which sources the engines cited instead. From there, a Deep Analysis per prompt explains why the answer came out that way, a Content Audit per URL shows what on the page is costing you retrievability, and the Action Hub turns a recommendation into an owned task with a verification step, so a change gets re-measured rather than assumed.

We don't push changes to your site ourselves. Every action is reviewed and released by your team, and the platform keeps it traceable from the gap that prompted it to the measurement that confirms it. More: inside the Action Hub and AEO platforms with closed-loop execution.

What is Corporate Context, and why does SolCrys ask for it?

Corporate Context is the structured record of what is true about your company - products, positioning, proof points, the facts you want an AI answer to get right. It is set once at the organization level and shared by every workspace in the account, so two workspaces can't disagree about who you are. It does two jobs: it grounds recommendations in your real capabilities rather than invented ones, and it is the reference an AI answer can be graded against. On Custom plans we maintain it for you as a managed knowledge graph: Managed Corporate Context.

What is Answer Accuracy?

It grades what AI engines say about you against your Corporate Context and flags where an answer is wrong, stale, or missing a fact you care about. Visibility asks whether you were mentioned; Answer Accuracy asks whether what was said was true. It is flag-only by design: we surface the discrepancy and the evidence, and a person decides what to correct. Available from Pro upward. Background: is AI telling the truth about your brand.

What is a Content Audit?

A per-URL read of how retrievable a page is to answer engines - structure, answerability, evidence density, schema, and the specific checks costing you points - returned as a scored report with the concrete edit behind each finding, so the fix is a task rather than an adjective. Included on every plan, with monthly quotas by tier. What the report contains: the SolCrys Content Audit report.

Can I pull SolCrys data into my own AI tools?

Yes, through our MCP server. It exposes a workspace's prompts, visibility and citation insights, Deep Analyses, Content Audit reports, Answer Accuracy detail, open actions, and governed Corporate Context pages to any MCP-capable client - Claude, an internal agent, your own tooling - so an assistant can reason over live AEO data instead of a stale spreadsheet. It returns aggregated signals and structured reasoning rather than raw AI response text. One tool writes: publishing a task back into your action queue. Included on all paid plans, with monthly call quotas by tier. Details: SolCrys MCP and skills.

Can SolCrys tie AI visibility to traffic or revenue?

Partly. SolCrys measures the answer side - whether an engine mentioned you, which sources it cited, how favorably it recommended you, and how that moves over time. It does not read your analytics: there is no GA4 or Search Console connector today, so we don't report your sessions or pipeline as SolCrys numbers. The join most teams make is on the citation URL - the pages engines actually cite are the pages to watch in your own analytics for AI-referred traffic. How to build that on your side: AEO web traffic attribution.

How do I see SolCrys data on my own brand before committing?

Two ways, both self-serve. The free AI visibility audit is a one-time read of your brand: it asks for an email, takes no credit card, and builds the prompt set from your industry's Golden Prompt Set, so the baseline is grounded in real demand rather than prompts drafted cold.

The Free plan is a real workspace on your own brand, not a demo - 10 tracked prompts, three on-demand ChatGPT checks a month, and one Deep Analysis and one Content Audit a month. Treat the audit as a baseline snapshot and Free as the workflow at small scale; trend-grade measurement is what the scheduled paid plans add.

What does SolCrys cost?

Brand plans are Free, Starter at $99 a month, Pro at $399 a month, and Custom from $2,000 a month for managed scope. Agency plans are priced per client organization - $1,499 a month for 10, $4,999 for 25. No plan meters seats. Quotas, engine coverage, and everything each tier includes are on pricing, which is canonical if it and this page ever disagree.

How long does SolCrys onboarding take?

Minutes to first results. The GPS for your category is pre-built, so a new workspace shows its first measurement within a few minutes of setup - review the prompts, confirm the engine set and measurement market, and the run starts. The rest of onboarding is tuning: swapping in your own prompts, configuring competitors, and establishing the Corporate Context that recommendations and accuracy grading are graded against. What to get right while setting up: workspace setup best practices.

How often does SolCrys re-run prompts?

It depends on the plan. The free audit is a single snapshot. On Free, ChatGPT checks run on demand rather than on a schedule - enough to see where you stand, not enough to call a trend. Paid workspaces run on a scheduled daily cadence, aggregated into rolling 7-day and 30-day windows; that is the difference between a snapshot and trend-grade measurement, and we label each as what it is.

How does SolCrys compare to other AI visibility platforms?

We publish named comparisons: side-by-side pages for Profound, Peec AI, Otterly, AirOps, HubSpot AEO, Semrush's AI visibility toolkit, and Ahrefs Brand Radar, each covering measurement scope, execution depth, pricing model, and the cases where the other tool is the better fit - how SolCrys compares. The comparisons use the same six methodology questions below, so you can run them against us and against everyone else on your list.

What questions should I ask any AEO vendor before signing?

Send these in writing and score each 0 / 1 / 2 (no answer / vague / specific): 1) Where do prompts come from - specific evidence sources, not 'AI-generated'? 2) API, SERP, or rendered-surface capture, and how is each tagged? 3) Which model or surface signals are stored, and how are material changes disclosed? 4) How is engine non-determinism handled - repeated capture, rolling windows, snapshot-vs-trend labeling? 5) Can I reproduce a specific data point with full metadata? 6) What happens when an engine changes its default?

A vendor below 8 of 12 isn't ready for production work. Score us the same way. The long form, with what a good answer sounds like: the AEO platform methodology checklist.

What's the single biggest red flag when evaluating any AEO vendor?

Any answer that boils down to 'the platform decides which model gets used' - that means data is non-reproducible, and you can't verify a result you cannot replicate. A close second: refusal to walk you from any chart to the underlying captured response. Both correlate with vendors hoping buyers won't ask harder questions.

Can I export my SolCrys data?

Yes, three ways. The workspace CSV export gives one row per prompt and engine for a run - prompt, engine, whether you were mentioned, mention count, sentiment, verdict, recommendation, position, and the full raw response text. The PDF visibility report is the shareable version for stakeholders. The MCP server is the programmatic path and reaches data the CSV doesn't carry, including citations and Content Audit detail. If a specific field or format matters to your team, ask during evaluation.

Is my data used to train models, or shared with other customers?

No. Your custom prompts stay private to your workspace and are never used to update another customer's GPS template; your Corporate Context is scoped to your organization; and we don't sell or share workspace data with other customers. The one thing to know: measuring an engine means sending prompts to that provider, whose own terms govern handling on their side - which is why the engine set is something you confirm rather than something we enable silently.

Is SolCrys's data capture compliant with engine terms of service?

We use documented access methods per engine - public-content access patterns on consumer surfaces, official APIs for the API channel, and SERP capture infrastructure for surfaces with no official API (most notably Google AI Overviews). For enterprise customers with strict compliance requirements, we provide written documentation of the access methods used per engine under NDA.