Running scans and reading the evidence
What a scan does, why partial scans exist, and how to trace any number back to the answer it came from.
A scan asks every approved prompt of every provider you enabled, once each, and stores the full answer exactly as it was returned.
Providers
Citerva can query OpenAI, Anthropic, Google Gemini and Perplexity. Only providers with credentials configured can be selected — one without a key cannot appear in a scan, and is therefore never reported as checked.
They differ in one way that affects your numbers:
| Provider | Returns sources |
|---|---|
| Perplexity | Yes — it searches the live web |
| Google Gemini | Yes, when grounding is enabled |
| OpenAI | No, unless web search is enabled |
| Anthropic | No, unless web search is enabled |
Providers that cannot return sources sit outside the citation-rate denominator.
Partial scans are normal
If Perplexity answers and Gemini is rate-limited, the scan finishes as partial. That is a first-class outcome, not an error: some of it worked.
Scan health is shown above every figure, listing which provider failed, how many runs it affected and why. Those runs are excluded from every rate rather than counted as a missing mention, because there is no way to distinguish "not recommended" from "not asked".
Reading the evidence
Every answer is stored verbatim and shown against the prompt that produced it, with:
- whether your brand was named, and at what position in the answer
- which competitors were named
- every source cited, marked as declared (the provider said it used this) or found in text (we found a link in the prose)
A declared source is much stronger evidence than a URL typed into a paragraph, so the two are counted separately and never summed without the split available.
If a number ever looks wrong, open the prompt and read the answer it came from. That is the point of storing them.
Raw answers are never overwritten
Mention detection improves over time. Because the original answers are kept, an improved parser re-derives historical results from the same observations instead of history quietly changing meaning underneath you. Every derived row records the parser version that produced it.
Scheduling
Scans can repeat weekly or monthly on Pro, and daily on Growth.
Scheduling is where most of the value is. A single scan tells you where you stand today with meaningful uncertainty; twelve weekly scans tell you which direction you are moving, which is the question worth acting on.
Trends are only drawn between scans that asked the same prompt set version of the same providers. Change either and the chart marks a break rather than drawing a misleading slope.