Tools

What You'll Build

A standing Saturday-morning check on whether your business exists in the place customers now look first.

A developer named arbyther wanted one workflow to run his side-project marketing every week: pull traffic, check whether the product shows up in ChatGPT and Perplexity, crawl competitors for pricing changes, and suggest a few grounded ideas. He built it twice. The first version used Anthropic's Managed Agents API, a persistent Claude session in the cloud with a Saturday cron. It worked, but a single run cost $4.23, and $3.30 of that was the agent polling Slack every 60 seconds waiting for his reply. He rebuilt the same cycle in n8n as a visual workflow. No polling cost because it only runs when triggered, Slack worked cleanly, and duplicating it for a second product is a copy and paste.

Strip away the engineering and what he built is a weekly answer to four questions: Is my traffic up or down? Do I show up when someone asks an AI about my category? What did my competitors just change? And what should I do about it?

Why This Works

Your customers have quietly changed how they find you. A growing share of them no longer type a search and scroll ten blue links. They ask ChatGPT "who's the best plumber in Tucson" or ask Perplexity "compare the top three CRMs for a small agency," and they act on whatever the AI says.

If the AI does not mention you, you do not exist in that conversation. You will never see it in your analytics, because there was no click to measure. You just quietly stop getting those customers.

This is the single clearest version of "getting left behind." Not that you failed to adopt AI, but that AI failed to mention you, and you had no idea. The old version of this worry had a name, SEO, and a whole industry watching it. The new version, showing up inside AI answers, has almost nobody watching it yet. A weekly agent that checks for you is how you find out before your competitor does.

Prerequisites

Step-by-Step Setup

Step 1: Write Down the Questions Your Customers Ask

The whole report is only as good as these prompts. Use the exact phrasing a buyer would, including your city and your category: "best emergency electrician near downtown Austin," "cheapest commercial cleaning service in Leeds." Five to ten questions is plenty to start.

Step 2: Ask the AI Engines and Read the Answer Back

Add HTTP nodes that send each question to the OpenAI and Perplexity APIs. For each answer, the workflow checks three things: are you named, how are you described, and who got named instead of you. The output is a simple verdict per question: present, absent, or described wrong.

Step 3: Pull Your Traffic

Add an analytics node that pulls the week's numbers so you can read the AI-visibility check next to the trend. Up, down, and where it came from.

Step 4: Watch Your Competitors

Point the scraping node at a short list of competitor pages. It flags pricing changes, new offers, and new content since last week. Start with the two or three rivals you actually lose customers to, not twenty.

Step 5: Turn It Into a Report With Grounded Ideas

Use the Tavily web-search node to ground a few marketing suggestions in what is actually happening this week, then send the whole thing to Slack or your inbox. Not a dashboard you have to remember to open, a report that lands in front of you every Saturday.

Step 6: Put It on a Saturday Cron and Walk Away

Set the schedule trigger and let it sleep the rest of the week. When you want to cover a second product or location, duplicate the workflow and change the questions.

Adapting This for Your Business

The pattern is "ask the AI what my customers ask, and see if I exist." It repoints to almost any business.

Gotchas and Tips

What This Replaces

Before this stack, there was no real "before." Most owners have no idea whether they appear in AI answers, because the tools that would tell them barely exist yet:

After this stack, you get a weekly, written read on whether you exist in the conversation that now decides who gets the call, plus competitor moves and grounded ideas, for the cost of a few API calls. It is the AEO and GEO version of rank tracking, running on autopilot, while almost none of your competitors are watching at all.

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