Frequently asked questions

Quick answers to the questions customers ask most. For deeper coverage, follow the links in each answer.

Setup and basics

How long until I see useful data?

You see your first snapshot within 60 seconds of saving a prompt and clicking Run now. Useful trend data — enough to make decisions from — takes 2-4 weeks on daily cadence (Growth and Agency) and 6-8 weeks on weekly cadence (Starter). One snapshot is a data point. Trends are the product.

Do I need to install anything on my website?

No. BD GEO Tracker doesn't touch your site. We send prompts to AI engines and parse their answers. There's no script, no DNS change, no tag manager setup. The tool is fully external.

How many prompts should I start with?

Three is fine. Five is better if you have the slots. Read Writing good prompts before you write more than two — the quality of your prompts matters more than the count.

Can I track competitors I don't compete with directly?

Yes. Some customers track adjacent or aspirational brands as references — "if X gets cited 80% of the time, that's the ceiling for this prompt." Just be aware that share-of-voice calculations include every named competitor, so adding loosely-related brands dilutes your share number.

Can I track my own brand against itself across regions?

Not directly. The tool treats one brand as one entity. If you have regional brand variations (different names in different markets), the cleanest pattern is to use separate brand slots — but that requires Growth or Agency tier to have multiple brand slots.

Billing

What's the difference between monthly and annual?

Annual costs 10× the monthly rate, so you save two months. Otherwise functionally identical. See Account management for switching between them.

How does the 14-day refund work?

Email support@bdgeotracker.com within 14 days of your first purchase, include your license key, and we refund in full within 3 business days. No questions required, but feedback is welcome.

What happens if my credit card fails?

You get an email immediately. We retry the charge 24 hours, 72 hours, and 7 days later. If all retries fail, the subscription pauses and the app moves to read-only at that point. You can update the card from getbdshield.com/my-account/payment-methods and the subscription resumes.

Can I get an invoice for accounting?

Every charge generates a PDF invoice automatically. You can download every past invoice from getbdshield.com/my-account/orders. For invoices with custom fields (PO number, registered business address, VAT ID), email support@bdgeotracker.com and we'll regenerate.

Do you support purchase orders or net-30 terms?

Not for Starter or Growth. For Agency annual subscriptions, contact sales@bdgeotracker.com to set up invoice-based billing. Minimum order $1,000.

Is the price the same in every country?

Yes. Prices are in USD across all countries. Your card issuer handles the currency conversion. We don't currently offer purchasing-power-parity pricing.

Technical limits

What's the max prompt length?

There's no character limit on the prompt text itself. The engines will accept anything you give them. But the engines themselves will start to behave oddly above 500 characters in a single user message — they treat very long prompts as instructions rather than questions. Keep your prompts short and natural and you'll be fine.

Can I run my own custom AI engine?

No. The four engines are fixed (ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity). They're the engines with meaningful end-user traffic. Adding a fifth requires significant work on our side; we'll do it when a new engine reaches material market share.

How fresh is the engine data?

Each engine has its own training cutoff and its own retrieval behavior. ChatGPT and Claude lean heavily on training data with refreshes every few months. Gemini and Perplexity supplement with live retrieval, so they reflect current pages faster. See Understanding the engines for detail.

Can I run prompts in languages other than English?

Yes. The engines all support multiple languages. We parse English answers most accurately, but mention detection works across major languages (Spanish, French, German, Portuguese, Italian). For less-common languages, the parser may produce noisier results — we'd suggest validating manually for the first 2-3 weeks.

Does the tool work for non-SaaS businesses?

Yes. We have customers in e-commerce, agencies, local services, B2B consulting, and consumer apps. The methodology (prompts → engines → snapshots) is category-agnostic. Read the industry-specific examples in Writing good prompts.

Data privacy

Do you use my prompts to train models?

No. Your prompts go to the four AI engines as queries, but we never use them for model training ourselves, and we don't aggregate them for any cross-customer analytics.

Do the AI engines store my prompts?

They get the prompt text as part of each API request. Each provider has its own data-retention policy. We send only the prompt — never your brand identity, never your account info, never your competitor list separately.

OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and Perplexity all offer enterprise data-handling commitments via their APIs that prevent training-data use on customer requests. We're on those tiers where available.

Is the tool GDPR compliant?

Yes. We're a data controller for your account data and a data processor for the prompts you submit. Our Data Processing Agreement is available at bdgeotracker.com/dpa. Email privacy@bestdid.com for a countersigned copy.

What about CCPA?

Yes. California residents can request data access, deletion, or non-sale at privacy@bestdid.com. We don't sell data, so the non-sale provision is automatic. Access and deletion are honored within 30 days.

Where are servers located?

Primary infrastructure is in US-East. Engine API calls go to whichever region each provider operates from (varies). Customer dashboard data and stored snapshots are US-East only. EU-resident customers concerned about cross-border data transfer should review our DPA before purchase.

Comparisons

How is this different from Profound?

Profound is a more enterprise-tier tool with a higher price point, broader engine coverage, and more sophisticated entity-extraction. If your budget is over $1,000/month and you need attribution-level tracking, Profound is a more complete tool. BD GEO Tracker is for the segment Profound's pricing excludes — solo founders, small in-house teams, and agencies on a tighter budget.

How is this different from Otterly?

Otterly was an early entrant in the GEO-tracking category and pioneered some of the workflow. Their pricing and feature mix overlap with our Growth tier. Honest comparison: try both for 14 days; both have refund policies. We're not going to claim we're strictly better on every dimension.

How is this different from Ahrefs Brand Radar?

Brand Radar is bundled into Ahrefs subscriptions. If you already pay for Ahrefs and want AI-search visibility as a check-the-box feature, Brand Radar might be enough. If GEO tracking is a primary workflow for you (weekly or daily review, PDF reporting, competitor share-of-voice as a real metric), a purpose-built tool gives you more control.

Should I use this and another tool together?

Many customers do. Common stacks: BD GEO Tracker for AI search + Ahrefs/Semrush for Google SERPs + Google Search Console for owned-site analytics. The three tools answer different questions and don't replace each other.

Setup and operational questions

Why is my license key not working at signup?

Most common cause: a leading or trailing space when you paste. Re-copy from your email or from the getbdshield.com/my-account/licenses page. If the key is still rejected, see Troubleshooting.

I forgot my password.

A self-service password-reset email is on the roadmap. Until it ships, email support@bdgeotracker.com from the address tied to your account and we'll rotate it within 1 business day. Include your license key in the email for faster lookup.

How do I share access with a teammate?

Share your sign-in credentials (email + password). Each device that signs in counts as a session. There's no separate team-member concept today — anyone signed in sees the same view.

What time of day do automated runs happen?

On Starter (weekly), runs trigger on Monday morning UTC, with prompts staggered over a few hours to avoid hitting engine rate limits simultaneously. On Growth and Agency (daily), runs trigger between 00:00 and 06:00 UTC, again staggered.

Can I change the time of day runs happen?

Not on Starter or Growth. On Agency, you can request a specific UTC hour for daily runs in Brand settings → Run schedule. Useful if you want fresh data ready before a daily standup in a specific time zone.

How do I know if a run failed?

If a single engine in a snapshot fails, the snapshot finalizes with the engines that succeeded, and the failed engine is marked. If all four engines fail (rare), the snapshot is marked failed and the scheduler picks up where it left off on the next cadence cycle. The retry timing for individual engine calls follows each engine's own Retry-After header.

Cancellation and offboarding

What happens to my data if I cancel?

By default, your data sits idle on our servers — we don't auto-delete on cancellation. Re-subscribe later and everything resumes where it left off. Want your data wiped immediately? Email support@bdgeotracker.com and we'll process the deletion within 7 business days. See Account management.

Can I export everything before I leave?

Yes. Use CSV export from each brand. See PDFs and exports. Export covers your full retention window.

Will you keep my prompts after I cancel?

By default, yes — your data sits idle on our servers when the license deactivates, so you can come back and pick up where you left off. We don't auto-delete on cancellation today. If you want your data wiped, email support@bdgeotracker.com from your account address and we'll process the deletion within 7 business days.

Roadmap and feedback

Will you support more AI engines?

When a new engine reaches material end-user share, yes. We're watching DuckDuckGo's AI assistant, You.com, Brave Leo, and Kagi. Adding an engine isn't free for us — engine API costs go up — so we wait until coverage is justified by usage data.

Can you add feature X?

Email feedback@bdgeotracker.com. We read every message. We don't promise timelines, but we do publish a roadmap quarterly. Customer-driven requests have been the source of most of the features that ship.

Is there an iPhone or Android app?

Not today. The dashboard is responsive and works on mobile browsers. A native app isn't on the 2026 roadmap.