Recommendation Engine

Stop reading dashboards. Start working a queue.

Targetlytics watches every signal that decides whether AI recommends you, then hands your team a ranked list of what to do about it — with the evidence behind each one, the module that executes it, and a re-measurement after it ships.

A live queue

Ten cards from our own queue, unedited

Read on 6 September 2026. Every finding, number and date below came out of the product rather than out of a design file. The queue that morning also contained pitches aimed at usa.gov, Yelp and doi.org — those are gone, because none of them is a page anyone can be added to. One more was pulled for being wrong rather than ineligible: it reported that we serve no robots.txt, and we have served one with explicit AI-crawler rules since August. It was not swapped for a filler — every card below is a queue item that survived the same rules on its own.

Earned media
EarnedM · half a day

Four AI-visibility listicles aimed at agencies — onelittleweb.com, rankinai.io, therankmasters.com and trakkr.ai — are cited in answers to agency reporting prompts, and none of them names Targetlytics.

All four pages are already in the retrieved set for the agency white-label prompts, which is why they keep appearing in answers a buyer sees. Being absent from every one of them means the category is being described to that buyer without us in it. A listicle inclusion is a single edit on a page a model already reads, so it changes the answer far faster than a new page of our own could.

  • Citation ledger: 4 cited agency-reporting listicles, brand absent from all 4 · read 6 Aug 2026
  • Prompt runs: 29 citations across 150 runs; targetlytics.com cited 0 times · read 6 Sept 2026
4 prompts affected100% gap72% confidence
Earned media
EarnedM · half a day

seo.com's AI visibility tools roundup is cited for tool-comparison prompts and lists competitors without listing Targetlytics.

The page is a general-SEO roundup rather than a specialist one, which is why it is retrieved for the broad comparison prompts where our own pages are not. A roundup that names our competitors and not us is read by a model as a category boundary. Adding a line to it is an editor decision, not an authority-building exercise.

  • Citation ledger: seo.com cited for tool-comparison prompts; brand not mentioned on the page · read 6 Aug 2026
1 prompt affected100% gap61% confidence
Earned media
EarnedL · multi-day

HubSpot's blog is cited for the "tooling for a 100-person SaaS team" prompt cluster, where Targetlytics does not appear at all.

HubSpot is the highest-authority page cited anywhere in this cluster, and the cluster is squarely our buyer. It is also the hardest placement on this list by a wide margin: a publisher at that scale takes original data, not a pitch. This card stays in the queue at a realistic effort rather than being quietly dropped for being difficult.

  • Citation ledger: HubSpot blog cited for the 100-person-SaaS tooling cluster; brand absent · read 24 Aug 2026
  • Prompt runs: Tracked prompt, COMPARISON intent, est. volume 47/mo — second highest on the account · read 6 Sept 2026
1 prompt affected100% gap48% confidence
Page repair
OwnedM · half a day

Share of Model fell from 2.7% to 0% between 16 and 17 August and has stayed at 0% for the 20 days since; industry rank moved from 5 to 38 over the same period.

A drop this abrupt on a single day is a retrieval change, not a gradual content decay — something that used to be retrieved stopped being retrieved. Twenty days without recovery rules out day-to-day model variance. The first job is identifying which sources replaced ours in those answers, which decides whether this is a page refresh or a placement problem.

  • Daily visibility snapshots: 2.7% on 16 Aug → 0% on 17 Aug, still 0% on 6 Sep; rank 5 → 38 · read 6 Sept 2026
  • Prompt runs: 39 tracked prompts, 150 runs analysed in the period · read 6 Sept 2026
39 prompts affected100% gap88% confidence
Page repair
OwnedM · half a day

The Forensics Engine page scores as commodity content: no original data, no named examples, and no first-hand evidence a model could quote.

The page explains what citation forensics is in language a dozen other pages also use, which gives a model no reason to prefer it. Retrieval rewards the passage that carries a specific, quotable claim, and this page has none. Adding one real forensic trace — a prompt, the sources it cited, and what changed after — gives it something no competitor page has.

  • Commodity content check: Flagged P0 — highest-severity commodity finding on the account · read 17 Aug 2026
5 prompts affected90% gap80% confidence
Page repair
OwnedM · half a day

The AI Visibility Tracker page states capabilities without a single measured figure or expert attribution behind them.

Every claim on the page is a capability claim, and capability claims are exactly what a model treats as marketing rather than evidence. The prompts this page targets ask how accurately tools measure mentions — a question answered with a methodology and a number, not with a feature list. The measurement methodology already exists internally; the page does not state it.

  • Commodity content check: Flagged P1 — no first-hand proof or expert framing detected on the page · read 6 Aug 2026
  • Prompt runs: Measurement-accuracy prompt tracked, COMPARISON intent, est. volume 3/mo · read 6 Sept 2026
2 prompts affected80% gap70% confidence
Owned content
OwnedL · multi-day

The prompt asking how to establish an AI-visibility baseline and show movement within 30 days is tracked as transactional intent, and no page of ours answers it.

This is a decision-stage question: someone asking it is choosing a platform this month. The answer requires a real 30-day series with a stated methodology, which is data we already generate for every account and have never published. Publishing one turns the strongest thing we own into the page that answers the question.

  • Prompt runs: Tracked prompt, TRANSACTIONAL intent, est. volume 5/mo; no owned page cited · read 6 Sept 2026
1 prompt affected100% gap65% confidence
Owned content
OwnedL · multi-day

The authority-gap prompt cluster carries the highest tracked search volume of any transactional prompt on the account (48/mo) and returns no Targetlytics page.

The cluster asks how to find authority gaps and earn third-party mentions without low-quality link building — which is a description of Citation Outreach, written by the buyer. Nothing we have published answers it in those words. A benchmark built from real outreach outcomes across accounts would answer it with evidence rather than positioning.

  • Prompt runs: TRANSACTIONAL, est. volume 48/mo — highest of any transactional tracked prompt · read 6 Sept 2026
  • Citation ledger: No owned page cited for this cluster in 150 runs · read 6 Sept 2026
1 prompt affected100% gap68% confidence
Owned content
OwnedM · half a day

The prompt from solo consultants wanting a first AI-visibility baseline without buying an enterprise platform is tracked at 15 searches a month, and no page of ours is cited for it.

We have a free audit and no page explaining what it actually returns, so the cluster is answered by whoever did write one. This is the smallest possible buyer, which is exactly why the page is worth having: it is the entry point into the category, and the person asking it becomes the person comparing platforms six months later. A short, concrete walkthrough of a real baseline answers it.

  • Prompt runs: Tracked prompt, INFORMATIONAL intent, est. volume 15/mo · read 6 Sept 2026
  • Citation ledger: No owned page cited for this cluster in 150 runs · read 6 Sept 2026
1 prompt affected100% gap55% confidence
Social
SocialS · under 2h

A Reddit thread is cited in answers about share-of-model and citation forensics, and the discussion in it runs without any input from us.

The thread is already retrieved evidence for this cluster, so what it says is part of what models repeat back. Community threads are cited on their usefulness rather than their authority, which is why a single well-argued reply can change what gets quoted. This is a small, unglamorous job — half an hour, written as a practitioner rather than as a vendor.

  • Citation ledger: Reddit thread cited for the share-of-model and citation-forensics cluster · read 6 Aug 2026
1 prompt affected70% gap60% confidence
Executed by your team — no module runs this one
Anatomy

A recommendation you cannot audit is a to-do list

Every card names its source and the date that source was read. A card with no evidence behind it is never emitted at all — there is no fallback that invents a justification.

The finding — what was observed
Share of Model fell from 2.7% to 0% between 16 and 17 August and has stayed at 0% for the 20 days since; industry rank moved from 5 to 38 over the same period.

It never opens with a verb. “Publish a checklist and pitch it” tells you what to do without telling you what was seen, so you cannot judge whether it is worth doing. The action belongs in the button, not the headline.

The evidence — and the date it was read
Daily visibility snapshots: 2.7% on 16 Aug → 0% on 17 Aug, still 0% on 6 Sep; rank 5 → 38 · read 6 September 2026
Prompt runs: 39 tracked prompts, 150 runs analysed in the period · read 6 September 2026
The reasoning — observation, consequence, mechanism
A drop this abrupt on a single day is a retrieval change, not a gradual content decay — something that used to be retrieved stopped being retrieved. Twenty days without recovery rules out day-to-day model variance. The first job is identifying which sources replaced ours in those answers, which decides whether this is a page refresh or a placement problem.
The effort
M — half a day. Sized so the queue can be ordered by what it costs, not only by what it is worth.
The executor
Page Optimizer. Named on the card, so nobody has to work out where this gets done.
The re-measure date
Set when the work ships, then checked at 7, 14, 30 and 60 days against the frozen baseline.
Coverage

Eleven job areas, and which module executes each

Marked rows are the ones with a live card in the queue above. The rest are detectors that run on every account and had nothing to report about ours on the day this page was read — an empty row is more useful than an invented card.

Job areaWhat the card looks likeWhich module executes it
Owned contentin the queue aboveNo page answers a rising query clusterContent Creation
Page repairin the queue aboveA ranking page has been sliding for weeksPage Optimizer
AI readabilityKey content renders client-side; crawlers see nothingAI-Readiness
Earned mediain the queue aboveA cited page names competitors, not youCitation Outreach
Socialin the queue aboveA post is outperforming and has an unanswered questionSocial AI Visibility
Brand factsModels state something about you that is no longer trueHallucination Detection
CompetitiveA prompt cluster grew and you are absent from itContent / Signal to Ads
ReputationThird-party reviews are shaping your AI summaryOff-Page Watch
PaidThe gap is too slow to close organicallySignal to Ads
RevenueA gap sits on a cluster tied to open pipelineAI Revenue Attribution
Internal knowledgeAn objection recurring in lost deals has no pageContent Creation
Ranking

Ranked by pipeline, not by score movement

Most engines rank by visibility delta, because visibility is all they can see. That ranks a cluster nobody buys from above a cluster your pipeline sits on.

Targetlytics syncs HubSpot, Pipedrive, Attio and Zoho, and identifies the companies arriving from AI answers. That is what lets a prompt cluster be tied to named accounts and their open deals, so the queue can be ordered by what is at stake commercially rather than by which number moved most.

score = promptsAffected
      × revenueWeight(cluster)
      × gapSize
      × confidence
      ÷ effortCost

Before a CRM is connected

revenueWeight is 1.0 for every cluster, and the queue ranks on reach, gap and confidence against effort. That is the order the cards above are in: this account has no CRM connected, so not one of them carries a pipeline figure, and none is shown.

After

Clusters that resolve to open deals take a weight above 1.0 and the queue re-orders on the spot. A two-prompt cluster sitting on live pipeline moves above a twelve-prompt cluster that has never produced a conversation.

Closed loop

Baseline, action, re-measure

Competing engines stop at the recommendation. A card here freezes a baseline before the work starts and schedules a check afterwards, so the queue accumulates a record of what actually moved.

01

Baseline frozen at creation

When the card is written, the prompt cluster it covers is resolved and measured: mention rate across those prompts, the run count behind that rate, and the scorer version used. None of that is reconstructable later — the prompt set and the model list both move — so it is recorded the day the card appears, not the day the work ships.

02

The work ships, with the artefact joined

Completion is joined to the thing that shipped by an explicit id written by the publishing path — the page version, the outreach send, the draft. No fuzzy matching on dates or keywords, because a guessed join produces a measured result that means nothing.

03

Checkpoints at 7, 14, 30 and 60 days

Each checkpoint measures the same prompt population against the frozen baseline, and untreated clusters act as controls for the same period. A window with too few runs to resolve the predicted effect is reported as thin rather than averaged in.

No before-and-after is published here yet

The measurement ledger is running and taking checkpoints, but no intervention has yet passed the sixty-day mark with enough runs behind it to report an effect honestly. When one has, the numbers will appear on this page with the prompt set, both dates and the control clusters beside them. A page about evidence is a poor place to publish a result that is not ready.

Limits

What it will not tell you

The same principle already on Page Optimizer, where a page we cannot assess is never scored zero.

Cards are not emitted without evidence

A recommendation with no dated source behind it does not reach the queue. There is no lower-confidence tier that shows it anyway.

Unexecutable targets are filtered out, not listed

A pitch target has to publish editorial content, sit in or beside your category, and have a reachable editor. Ones that fail are dropped rather than left in to make the queue look fuller.

Search Console data runs two to three days behind

That is Google’s lag, not ours. Cards built on it show the date the data runs through, so you are never comparing a fresh signal against a stale one without knowing.

Confidence is downgraded on stale data

Evidence older than a fortnight reduces a card’s confidence, and older than a month reduces it further. The card stays, ranked lower, with its read date on it.

Where work happens

Every card names the module that executes it

The queue decides what is worth doing. These six do it.

Page Optimizer

Page repair, decay and readability recommendations execute here.

Content Creation

Owned-content and internal-knowledge recommendations execute here.

Signal to Ads

Paid-response recommendations execute here, under review and approval.

Frequently Asked Questions

Questions about the queue

By a single published formula: score = promptsAffected × revenueWeight(cluster) × gapSize × confidence ÷ effortCost. Prompts affected and gap size come from your tracked prompt runs, confidence is the detector’s own score after any staleness penalty, and effort cost is derived from the estimated hours. revenueWeight is 1.0 until a CRM is connected, at which point clusters that resolve to open pipeline start outranking clusters that do not.

No card is emitted. A recommendation has to name at least one source and the date that source was read, or it does not reach the queue — there is no fallback that fills in a plausible-looking justification. Where evidence exists but is old, the card is still shown and its confidence is reduced, with the read date on the card so you can see why.

No. Every module the queue routes to requires a human to approve the specific artefact before it ships — the page change, the outreach email, the draft, the campaign. That includes paid: campaigns are drafted with targeting and caps prefilled and then wait for review. Nothing in the queue acts on its own.

A baseline is frozen when the card is created: the prompt cluster it covers, the mention rate across that cluster, the run count behind it, and the scorer version. When the work ships, checkpoints are taken at 7, 14, 30 and 60 days against that same prompt population. A window with too few runs to resolve the predicted effect is reported as thin rather than averaged into the result.

The queue re-orders. Targetlytics syncs HubSpot, Pipedrive, Attio and Zoho and identifies the companies arriving from AI answers, so a prompt cluster can be tied to named accounts and their open deals. A cluster carrying pipeline outranks a cluster with more prompts and no commercial weight behind it. Nothing else about the cards changes — the same findings, in a different order.

An audit grades pages against a checklist and hands you the failures. This queue starts from what AI answers actually did — which sources were cited for your prompts, where your brand was absent, what moved — and it names the module that carries each item out. An audit finding is true about your site; a card here is true about your answers.

They are Targetlytics’ own queue, read on 6 September 2026 and put through the same filters every customer queue gets: the fan-out collapsed, ineligible targets dropped, priority-tier impact figures removed. Nine pitch targets that were live in this queue that morning — including usa.gov, Yelp and doi.org — are not on this page because none of them passes the eligibility gate.

Yes, and a dismissal is recorded rather than discarded. A cluster you chose to leave alone is a natural control group: it lets the effect of the work you did do be measured against comparable clusters where nothing changed.

See what your own queue says

A free audit runs your brand through the same detectors and returns the ranked list, with the evidence and the dates on every card.

Get a free visibility audit