> ## Documentation Index
> Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://docs.echod.ai/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.

# How Echod works

> The building blocks behind every Echod number: projects, topics, prompts, crawls and answers.

Every metric in Echod comes from real answers that AI platforms gave to real questions. This page explains how those questions are organized, how answers are collected, and what Echod reads in each one.

## The building blocks

```mermaid theme={null}
flowchart TD
    O[Organization] --> P[Project]
    P --> T[Topics]
    T --> Q[Prompts]
    P --> R[Regions]
    P --> AP[AI platforms]
    P --> C[Competitors]
    P --> K[Product catalog]
```

| Concept | What it is |
| - | - |
| **Organization** | Your company account. It holds the subscription, the members and all projects. Everyone in the organization can see every project. |
| **Project** | One brand, on one website, in one language. Most companies need a single project; agencies and multi-brand companies create several. |
| **Topic** | A subject your buyers ask about, such as "project management software for agencies". Topics group prompts and give you a summary score per subject. |
| **Prompt** | A single question sent to AI platforms, written the way a buyer would ask it. Each prompt belongs to exactly one topic. |
| **Region** | A country. AI platforms answer differently depending on where the question comes from, so Echod asks from each region you enable. |
| **AI platform** | One of ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Google AI Overviews, Google AI Mode and Copilot. |
| **Competitor** | A brand you want to compare yourself against. Other brands that appear in answers are detected automatically too. |
| **Product catalog** | Optional. Your products, imported from a Shopify store or a file, so Echod can recognize them in shopping answers. |

## How answers are collected

Echod collects answers in **crawls**. On each crawl, every active prompt is sent to every enabled AI platform from every enabled region, and each combination produces one answer.

For example, a project with 20 active prompts, 3 AI platforms and 2 regions collects 20 x 3 x 2 = **120 answers** per crawl.

Crawls run automatically on the project's schedule. On every current plan that is once a day. You cannot trigger a crawl by hand; the [crawl status card](https://docs.echod.ai/analyze/crawls.md) on the dashboard shows when the last one finished and when the next one is due.

> [!TIP]
>
> Echod reads what the AI platforms show to a real user, from the region you selected. That is why results can differ from what you see when you ask the same question yourself: answers vary with location, time and the platform's own randomness. Look at trends over days and weeks rather than a single answer.

## What Echod reads in every answer

Each answer is called a **chat** in Echod. For every chat, Echod records:

* **Brands mentioned**: your brand, your competitors, and any other brand the answer names.
* **Position**: the order in which the brands appear. The first brand named is position 1.
* **Sentiment**: whether the wording around each brand mention is positive, neutral or negative.
* **Sources**: the web pages the AI platform used to build the answer. Pages the answer explicitly references are **citations**; pages it read but did not reference are retrieved-only sources.
* **Extras** when the platform shows them: query fan-outs (the background searches the platform ran), product cards, places, videos and sponsored results.

You can open any chat to see the full answer and everything Echod extracted from it. See [Chats](https://docs.echod.ai/analyze/chats.md).

## From answers to metrics

Echod adds up the counts from every chat in the period, platform and region you have selected, then calculates each metric from those totals. A metric for "Last 30 days" is not an average of daily percentages; it is calculated once across every answer in those 30 days.

Changes (the green and red deltas next to a number) compare the selected period with the period of the same length right before it. Reports cover up to the last 90 days, and Echod keeps enough history to compare a full 90-day window with the 90 days before it.

## What Echod does not measure

* Website traffic, clicks, conversions or sales
* Classic search engine rankings
* What an AI platform would say at this exact minute - Echod reports what it said during your crawls
* AI platforms or regions your project does not track


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