By Gregg Kell, Founder and Editor, Spotlight on Startups
We ask founders to trust that we can help their businesses show up in AI answers. That claim only means something if we can show the same discipline applied to ourselves. This post is that disclosure, published and dated, not a one line claim sitting quietly on a homepage.
What we track
We use AIclicks to monitor Spotlight on Startups’ share of voice against a set of named Orange County startup media and community competitors, including Tech Coast Venture Network, Startup Grind OC/Irvine, OC Startup Council, and SoCal Digital Marketing. Share of voice measures how often we are cited in AI answers to real prompts within our category, not simply whether a search engine indexes our pages or a crawler visits our site. A crawl confirms a bot showed up. A citation confirms we were part of the answer. This is the Monitoring layer of what we call an AI Confidence Score, one of five signals that determine how ready a business is to be cited by AI answer engines.
Our first published snapshot
As of August 14, 2026, our tracked share of voice sat at 0.4 percent, with Spotlight on Startups ranked first among five tracked competitors on the days we did register, though most days in this initial window showed 0 percent across every tracked brand, our own included. Our strongest page during this period earned 2 citations across 1 tracked prompt. We are publishing these numbers because they are the honest starting point, not because they are flattering. A platform that only discloses good numbers is not really disclosing a methodology, it is running a highlight reel.
- Alt text states the key numbers in words, so it carries some machine readable value even though the image itself doesn’t.
- Caption does two jobs at once: confirms it’s a direct, unedited screenshot, dated, which reinforces the whole credibility argument of the post, and preempts the odd 5.7 position number by explaining it’s the tool’s own calculation rather than something that looks like a typo.
Why is the number low, and what that means
A nearly zero share of voice across an entire tracked category tells us the category itself is still forming inside AI answer engines, not just that we individually have work to do. Few of the businesses we track, including the more established ones, are consistently showing up either. That is useful information in its own right. It means the founders who build a real citation presence in Orange County’s startup and small business community over the next year will be building it in mostly open territory.
A second tool, a very different number
Before we say what we are doing about any of this, here is a complication. The same week, using a different monitoring platform called Gracker, the same site showed a share of voice of 84.2 percent, a citation rate of 15.4 percent, and a visibility score of 13.7. Those numbers do not agree with the 0.4 percent share of voice we reported from AIclicks above.
We are publishing both rather than choosing the one that flatters us more. We do not yet know why the two tools produced such different results. It could be a difference in which competitors each tool tracks, a difference in how each defines share of voice, or a difference in the prompt sets each one runs. We are looking into it. What we will not do is quietly swap in the more favorable number and call it our monitoring result. We will report what we find, including if the answer is unflattering to one tool or the other, in a future update to this page.
Direct, unedited screenshot from Gracker’s Spotlight on Startups dashboard, dated August 14, 2026. We are including it alongside our AIclicks numbers above specifically because the two disagree, not because it confirms them, and we are treating the gap as something to investigate and report on rather than something to resolve by picking whichever number looks better.
What we are doing with this data
Each week we review which prompts we are being tested against and where a named competitor is winning a citation, we are not. We are using that gap list to guide new content, page updates, and outreach, the same process we recommend to the founders we work with. Alongside that, we are working through why AIclicks and Gracker produced such different share of voice numbers for the same site in the same week, and we will report what we find. We will return to this page periodically with a fresh snapshot, dated at the time of each update, so the record shows real movement over time rather than a single static claim.
Why we are publishing this at all
Most of what a small publisher or small business says about its own AI visibility is unverifiable, a sentence on a homepage that a reader has to take on faith. We would rather be judged against a dated, numbered record that gets updated in public, including on the months the number does not improve, and including when our own tools disagree with each other. That is the same standard we hold the founders we feature to when we ask them to earn a citation instead of manufacturing one.