What is the AI Search Influence Map?
It's an interactive map of every lever that decides whether an AI engine cites your brand. Eight influence domains — Access & Crawlability, Entity & Structured Data, Content & Answers, Authority & Citations, Reputation & Community, Local & Markets, Measurement & Feedback, and Offense & Strategy — orbit a single hub, carrying 41 individual factors between them. Click any factor and the panel tells you what it is, why AI engines weigh it, and which AI Syndicate features pull it.
How do you read the map?
Node size is tooling depth — the bigger the dot, the more of the platform stands behind that factor. Color marks which domain a factor belongs to, and the dotted outer ring is the engines themselves: click one and the map dims everything except the factors that engine leans on hardest. Drag to pan, scroll to zoom, search to jump straight to any factor, feature or engine, and use the download control to export the whole map as a PNG.
Which AI engines are on the outer ring?
Twelve: ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity, Copilot, Meta AI, Grok, DeepSeek, Mistral, Siri and Alexa+. None of them weigh the same things. Gemini and AI Overviews lean on structured data, the knowledge graph and your Google surface. Perplexity wants fresh, citable third-party sources. Grok reads what is being said on X this week. Siri and Alexa+ speak a single name aloud, picked from local data and reviews. The Prompt Simulator runs one question through all of them side by side, so you can watch those differences decide the answer.
Why do AI engines cite one brand and not another?
Because an AI answer is assembled, not ranked. First their crawlers have to reach you at all — one robots.txt line or an over-eager firewall rule can erase you from a model's world without a single error showing up in your analytics, which is the layer AI Access measures. Then machines have to resolve who you are, find content shaped like the answer, and see someone credible vouching for you: the authority and citations layer. Reputation sets the tone of what gets said about you, and for anything geographic your local data has to agree with itself in every market you serve.
Where should you start?
Underneath everything else: access. Run a free AI visibility audit to see which engines can currently reach and read your site, then work outward through the map from there. If you want the discipline behind the diagram, start with generative engine optimization. And if you would rather be walked through it, take the 60-second tour — nine stops, the mission first, then one for each domain.