// Research · Engine Index
How the answer engines behave, measured — not modelled.
An aggregate over every completed audit in Synthic, refreshed hourly. Only averages leave the database — no brand, prompt, answer or user — and a rate is only printed once an engine has 25 or more answers behind it.
10
verbatim answers
2
completed audits
2
brands audited
90d
rolling window
| # | Engine | Names the brand | Cites a source | Grounded | Positive | Latency | n |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| — | GeminiGoogle | collecting | collecting | collecting | collecting | — | 6 / 25 |
| — | PerplexityPerplexity AI | collecting | collecting | collecting | collecting | — | 4 / 25 |
The index is forming. Synthic is young and the sample is small; rates appear per engine as each one crosses 25 answers. Everything shown is already real — there is simply not much of it yet.
// Method
What each column means.
Plain averages over stored rows. No weighting, no smoothing, no imputation for engines that don't cite.
- Names the brand
- Share of answers in which the engine mentioned the audited brand at all. Low numbers are normal: most brands are not yet in most answers.
- Cites a source
- Share of answers that carried at least one citation URL. Engines without native citations sit near zero by construction.
- Grounded
- Among answers that named the brand, the share whose mention was backed by a live citation (retrieval) rather than recalled from training.
- Positive
- Among answers that named the brand, the share the analyst classed as positive in tone.
- Latency
- Mean round-trip time of the engine's API for an audit prompt, in seconds.
// Questions
About the data.
Is my brand's data in here?
Only as part of an average. The aggregate functions return counts and rates per engine; brand names, prompts and answers never leave the database through this page.
Why are some engines 'collecting'?
A rate over a handful of answers is noise dressed as a number. Each engine's rates appear once it has 25 answers in the window.
Why do citation rates differ so much between engines?
Because the engines differ. Perplexity returns citations natively; several others return prose without sources unless the answer happens to include a URL. The index reports what came back.
How often does it update?
The page is regenerated hourly from the live database.
Every audit you run makes the index better.
Run yours — the answers are yours, the aggregate is everyone's.