How often AI assistants named Forty Questions

Forty Questions was named in 0 of 480 answers.

That counts every answer, including the questions Forty Questions could hardly win. The most-named company in the same answers was Otterly, named in 114 of them.

The headline stays the all-questions figure. This split explains it, it does not replace it — a rate whose denominator we choose is a rate we could quietly improve.

One square per question, shaded by how many of the repeats named you

Not named by any assistant, in any run, on 40 of the 40 questions: q1, q2, q3, q4, q5, q6, q7, q8, q9, q10, q11, q12, q13, q14, q15, q16, q17, q18, q19, q20, q21, q22, q23, q24, q25, q26, q27, q28, q29, q30, q31, q32, q33, q34, q35, q36, q37, q38, q39, q40.

What they read before they answered

4413 citations across 480 answers. 639 of them — 14.5% — went to pages owned by companies selling in this category.

Reviewed by a person on 4 October 2026. Each action names the figure behind it; nothing is published on your behalf without your approval.

1. Publish fortyquestions.io/audit: what the $390 audit contains, what it costs, and this document as the worked example.Q15 "What does an AI visibility audit include, and what should it cost?": 0 of 12 answers named us. The 12 answers cited 31 pages, none ours; the most-cited were vendor explainers (sparkletechnologies.com 8, lovedby.ai 7, mywebaudit.com 6). There is no page on our site that answers this question.
2. List Forty Questions on SourceForge and G2 (free profiles), with the method and prices in the description.sourceforge.net was the most-cited source on Q7 ("a service that measures and fixes...", 10 of that question's citations) and g2.com on Q4 ("alternatives to Profound", 5). Both questions: 0 of 12. These directories are what the assistants read when a buyer asks for a service, and we are in neither.
3. Publish fortyquestions.io/geo-pricing: what done-for-you GEO services cost, from the 27 sellers' published prices we collected on 28 Sep, with ours in the table.Q8 (GEO cost, UK) and Q32 (fair monthly price): 0 of 24 answers named us; the cited pages were agency pricing guides (gripped.io, revvgrowth.com, neuraladx.com, nutshell.com). Our /cost page is about API cost, not service price, so it does not match the question.
4. Publish fortyquestions.io/three-runs: why one answer proves nothing, with our own 0.57 same-list rate and the SparkToro figure, linked from /method and the GitHub repo.Q10 and Q33 ask about repeated runs; 0 of 24 named us even though it is our method's central claim. The assistants cited arxiv.org (6), evertune.ai (5) and unite.ai (5) instead: they want a source page that states the finding, not a method page that assumes it.
5. Answer the three live Reddit threads in OFFSITE-DRAFTS.md (r/SaaS, r/b2bmarketing, r/ProductMarketing) with the measured figures and a disclosed affiliation.reddit.com was cited 65 times across the 480 answers, 61 of them by Google AI, and was the top source on Q1 ("How do I measure how often AI assistants recommend my company?", 5 of 12 citations) and Q9. Google AI named us in 0 of 120 answers; Reddit is the one source it reads that we can be on this week.
6. Publish fortyquestions.io/check-claude: how to check whether Claude recommends your software, step by step, with the three-run rule.Q26 ("How do I check whether Claude recommends my software?"): 0 of 12 named us; cited pages were support.anthropic.com (8) and a vendor explainer (trysight.ai, 8). No measurement company has a page on this; it is the cheapest question on the list to win.

Runs in which each assistant named you, out of the repeats taken.

Every question was asked in its own fresh session, logged out, with no memory and no follow-up, and repeated on separate days. The wording was frozen before collection and will be identical next month. A company counts as named when its name appears in the answer text, decided in code and applied the same way to Forty Questions and to every competitor.

What this cannot tell you. It measures a logged-out stranger, not a customer with months of chat history. It counts naming, not revenue. Where an assistant runs without web search, that row measures what the model already knows and is reported beside the number rather than inside it. When a provider changes a model mid-month, a movement may be theirs rather than yours.

The full method is published at fortyquestions.io/method.

Arithmetic checked before this page was produced:
· question classes add back to the headline (0 of 480)
· assistants add back to the headline
· winnability split adds back to the headline