The engines behind AI answers
AITWIRE polls these leading public AI systems and answer surfaces — the assistants and answer engines your customers actually use: ChatGPT, ChatGPT Search, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, Grok, Mistral and Llama (Meta). Google AI Overviews is not measured: AITWIRE captured the overview off the live results page until that capture was retired on 25 September 2026.
Training-prior answers versus live-search answers
Not all AI answers are produced the same way, and AITWIRE distinguishes them:
- Training-prior engines answer from what the model learned during training. They change only when the model is retrained, so correcting them is a longer game. As of early 2026 the standard Grok chat mode is one of these: xAI retired its live-search auto-grounding, so bare Grok now answers from its training prior.
- Live-search engines retrieve the web at answer time and can cite their sources, so they reflect your freshly published facts within days of a re-crawl. Perplexity and ChatGPT Search work this way — and AITWIRE now also polls a live-search variant of Grok (
grok_search) that uses a live web-search tool and returns citations, tracked as a separate, opt-in line on top of the core set so it never muddies the training-prior Grok trend.
Knowing which kind of engine gave an answer tells you what to expect from a fix: live-search engines move within days of a re-crawl; training-prior engines move on the model retraining schedule.
How probes are allocated
AITWIRE sends only the questions you have approved, on the schedule you choose (up to the cadence your plan includes). Within them, by design, it concentrates your probe budget where it carries the most signal rather than spreading it thin:
- A fixed sentinel core of your highest-priority questions — your core brand-identity and pricing facts — is measured every cycle, so your headline trend line never loses continuity.
- Event-driven probes keep full density: anything steered by an active campaign, and any question inside a verification window after you publish a fix.
- The remaining questions rotate on a deterministic schedule, so the whole set is covered over successive cycles without over-sampling any one area.
This is a measurement-design choice, not cost-cutting: steady-state accuracy drifts only slowly, so anchoring the questions that matter and rotating the rest measures what counts without adding noise.