Why assistants matter now
People increasingly ask ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini or Copilot which app fits a specific need. If your app is absent from those answers, a competitor can occupy that consideration set.
The tracked-prompt panel
Build a fixed panel of prompts representing your buyer's language across capability, competitive, compliance, price and geography intents. Run the same panel monthly across named assistants. The result is Share of Recommendation: the proportion of prompts in which your app is named.
The audit surface
The first audit surfaces the gap: which assistants recommend you, on which prompts and beside which competitors. Competitors that appear repeatedly but are absent from existing dashboards become part of the roadmap.
Evidence engineering
Assistants cite evidence: reviews, listings, articles, category rankings, and public claims. We engineer evidence into the sources they read, the app description, review-theme distribution, third-party listicles, comparison pages, press mentions. This is not link-building; it's citation engineering.
Third-party citation strategy
Assistants weight sources: Wirecutter, The Verge, category-specialist blogs, aggregator pages, comparison sites. We map which sources each assistant favours in your category, then run editorial outreach targeting those sources with legitimate stories, not paid placements.
Metadata rewritten for machines
Descriptions become training data. Capability-first phrasing, entity-clean naming, feature language machines can lift verbatim. See our Apple AI Tags guide for the field-level detail; the same principles apply to how large language models parse your listing.
The monthly ship cadence
Panel run. Gap analysis. Two-week ship of description + review-theme adjustments + one editorial placement. Re-run panel next month. Compound.
How we defend the number
Share of Recommendation is a defensible metric because the panel is fixed, the sampling is public, and the assistants are named. Boards accept it when the methodology is transparent. We include the raw panel outputs in every monthly report, no black box.