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SourceNode compared with the alternatives
Three ways businesses try to control what AI says about them: an AI visibility tool, an SEO agency with an AI add-on, or doing it in-house. What each one does, when it is the right choice, and where SourceNode fits.
SourceNode compared with an AI visibility tool
An AI visibility tool (Peec, Profound, Semrush’s AI toolkit and others) runs prompts across the engines and reports who was named, how often and with what sentiment. It is a measurement product. It tells you what the models said this week. It does not change what they say next week, because nothing in the tool touches the sources the answers are built from.
SourceNode includes that measurement: we run your customers’ questions daily across ChatGPT, Gemini, Google AI Overviews and the others and report share of voice, visibility and position by engine. The difference is what happens after the report. Our team corrects your pages and data, publishes the answers your customers ask for, earns the directories, reviews and press the engines cite, and matches the visits that follow to leads and revenue. The dashboard is an input to the work, not the product.
When a tool is the right choice: you have an in-house team with time to act on the data every week, you want to track many brands or markets cheaply, or you are an agency reselling monitoring. When SourceNode is the right choice: you want the number to move and someone accountable for moving it, you sell something where a customer asks AI before they buy, and you want the result reported in customers, not mentions.
SourceNode compared with an SEO agency
An SEO agency earns rankings on Google’s result pages: technical health, content, links. Good agencies have added an AI search service, usually content written in question-and-answer form plus some directory work. The method is still built around pages ranking for keywords, and the reporting is still traffic.
AI engines do not rank pages. Each one retrieves a small set of sources it trusts for the question and names the businesses those sources agree on. In our tracking of New York car accident questions, ChatGPT built its answers from state and court websites and legal directories, Gemini from law firm websites, and Google AI Overviews from YouTube and social profiles. The same firm held 55% share of voice on ChatGPT and 21% on AI Overviews. None of that is visible in a rankings report, and most of it is not fixed by publishing more pages.
SourceNode works on all of the sources, measures by engine, and reports in share of voice and attributed revenue rather than positions and sessions. We do not replace an SEO agency: we hand them the page changes, we coordinate directory work rather than duplicate it, and we do not do technical SEO, link building or paid search. If your problem is Google rankings, hire the SEO agency. If your problem is that AI answers do not name you, or name you wrongly, that is ours.
SourceNode compared with doing it in-house
A marketing lead can run twenty prompts in ChatGPT on a Friday and learn a lot. What they cannot do is run 111 of them every day on three engines, record which source each claim came from, fix forty directory listings, keep the website’s facts in sync with them, and reconcile AI referrals with intake every month. That is a daily job with a method, and it is the one we do.
In-house is the right choice when you have a dedicated person, a monitoring tool and a quarter to learn. SourceNode is the right choice when you want the first report in a month, the method published, and a result you can hold someone to.
What SourceNode does not do
Website redesigns and development. Technical SEO and link building. Paid search and social advertising. Social media management. Guaranteed placement in any engine, which nobody can honestly sell. We work alongside the agencies that do these things, and we are glad to be introduced to yours.
How to check any of this yourself
Ask each provider for a prompt-level audit of your market before you sign, for tracking by engine rather than a blended score, for the work they do on sources other than your own content, for how AI referrals are matched to customers, and for a named, dated result with the baseline and the competitor set. Ours is William Mattar Law Offices: 4.6% to 47.2% share of voice in three months against 13 tracked firms, documented on the results page, with the method and the limits.