Understanding the key concepts and terminology used in Microscope.ai will help you navigate the platform more effectively and communicate clearly with your team about AI search optimization.
Core Concepts
Organization
An Organization is the top-level entity in Microscope.ai that represents your company or team. It serves as the container for all your projects, users, and subscription information.
Key characteristics:
- One organization per company or business unit
- Contains all team members and their roles
- Manages subscription and billing
- Can contain multiple projects
- Provides organization-wide settings and permissions
Use case: If you're a marketing agency managing multiple clients, you would typically have one organization for your agency, with separate projects for each client.
Project
A Project is a dedicated workspace for monitoring a specific brand, website, market, or business initiative. Projects allow you to separate and organize your AI search monitoring activities.
Key characteristics:
- Focused on a single brand or website
- Contains its own product catalog
- Has independent prompts and analyses
- Maintains separate results and history
- Can have different team members with specific access
Use case: A company with multiple brands (e.g., Coca-Cola Company) would create separate projects for Coca-Cola, Sprite, Fanta, etc.
Product
A Product is an item in your catalog that you want to monitor in AI search results. Products provide context for product-related analyses and help track how AI models represent your offerings.
Key characteristics:
- Defined with name and description
- Associated with a specific project
- Referenced in product-related prompts
- Tracked for mentions and accuracy
- Can have use cases and specifications
Use case: An electronics retailer would add products like "Wireless Headphones Model X", "Smart Speaker Y", "Fitness Tracker Z" to track how AI models recommend and describe each product.
Prompt
A Prompt is a question or query that simulates what real users might ask AI assistants about your brand, products, or services. Prompts are the foundation of your analysis.
Types of prompts:
- Automatic Prompts - Pre-built questions covering essential categories (Brand, Product, Technical, Trust, Purchase Process)
- Custom Prompts - Questions you create tailored to your specific needs and target audience
Categories:
- Brand - Questions about brand recognition, positioning, and reputation
- Product - Questions about product recommendations and features
- Technical - Questions about technical specifications and capabilities
- Trust - Questions about reviews, reliability, and authority
- Purchase Process - Questions about where and how to buy (coming soon)
Example prompts:
- "What are the best wireless headphones for working from home?"
- "Tell me about [Brand Name] and what they offer"
- "Where can I find reviews for [Product Name]?"
- "How does [Product X] compare to [Product Y]?"
Analysis
An Analysis is a collection of prompts that are executed together as a unit. Analyses help you organize your monitoring activities and track specific aspects of your AI presence.
Key characteristics:
- Contains multiple prompts (automatic and/or custom)
- Can be run manually or on a schedule
- Queries multiple AI models simultaneously
- Generates comprehensive results and insights
- Maintains historical data for trend tracking
Use case: You might create separate analyses for "Product Launch Campaign", "Competitive Monitoring", "Brand Health Check", each with relevant prompts for that objective.
Execution
An Execution is a single run of an analysis at a specific point in time. Each execution captures a snapshot of how AI models respond to your prompts at that moment.
Key characteristics:
- Represents one point-in-time measurement
- Contains results for all prompts in the analysis
- Records responses from all selected AI models
- Includes timestamp and execution metadata
- Can be compared with other executions to track trends
Use case: If you schedule an analysis to run weekly, each week produces a new execution that you can compare to previous weeks to see improvements or changes.
AI Model
An AI Model refers to the specific artificial intelligence system that processes prompts and generates responses. Microscope.ai supports multiple AI models to give you comprehensive coverage.
Supported models:
- GPT (OpenAI) - Popular conversational AI, widely used for general queries
- Gemini (Google) - Google's AI assistant, integrated with Google services
- Claude (Anthropic) - Coming soon
- Perplexity AI - Coming soon
Why multiple models matter: Different users prefer different AI assistants, and each model may have different knowledge, biases, and response patterns. Testing across models ensures comprehensive coverage.
The Platform Hierarchy
Understanding the relationship between these concepts is crucial for effective use of Microscope.ai:
Organization → Projects → Products + Prompts → Analyses → Executions → Results
Detailed hierarchy:
- Organization (top level)
- Contains: Multiple projects and team members
- Project (workspace level)
- Contains: Products, Prompts, and Analyses
- Analysis (monitoring unit)
- Contains: Selected prompts and schedule settings
- Execution (point-in-time)
- Contains: Results for each prompt across AI models
- Results (outcome level)
- Contains: Scores, AI responses, and insights per prompt
Key Metrics and Terminology
Mention Rate
The Mention Rate is the percentage of prompts where your brand or product was mentioned by the AI model. A higher mention rate indicates better visibility.
Example: If you run 100 prompts and your brand is mentioned in 65 responses, your mention rate is 65%.
Position
Position refers to where your brand appears in the AI's response. Being mentioned first (Position 1) is most valuable, as users are more likely to notice and act on it.
Categories:
- Top 1 - First mention (highest value)
- Top 3 - Among first three mentions
- Top 5 - Among first five mentions
- Lower - Mentioned but not in top positions
- Not Mentioned - Not included in response
Score
A Score is a numerical rating (typically 0-100) that represents the quality and favorability of your AI presence for a specific prompt or category.
Factors that influence scores:
- Whether your brand was mentioned
- Position of the mention
- Accuracy of information provided
- Completeness of the response
- Tone and context of the mention
Trend
A Trend shows the direction and magnitude of change in your metrics over time. Trends help you understand whether your AI presence is improving, declining, or stable.
Types of trends:
- Improving - Metrics increasing over time
- Declining - Metrics decreasing over time
- Stable - Little change between periods
- Volatile - Significant fluctuations
User Access
Currently, all users in an organization have full access to all features and capabilities. Every user can:
- Create and manage projects
- Add and edit products
- Create and run analyses
- View and export results
- Invite other users to the organization
- Manage organization settings
Note: Role-based permissions (Owner, Admin, Member) are planned for a future release. This will allow you to control which users can manage billing, delete projects, or perform other administrative tasks.
Subscription Terminology
Daily Executions
Daily Executions is the limit on how many analysis executions can be performed per day. This limit resets every 24 hours.
Plan Limits
Plan Limits are the constraints on your subscription, such as maximum number of projects, products, analyses, and users allowed.
Common limits by plan:
- Trial - 5 projects, 4 products, 2 analyses, 10 daily executions
- Focus - 100 projects, 20 products, 2 users
- Magnify - 300 projects, 10 users, 500 daily executions
- Enterprise - Unlimited projects and analyses, 10 users
Next Steps
Now that you understand the core concepts and terminology, you're ready to:
- Explore the key features of Microscope.ai
- Learn about user roles and permissions in detail
- Create your first project
- Set up your product catalog