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Ads screen

Assistants have started selling placements beside their answers. This screen records the ads served against the prompts Silktide measures for you.

The ads themselves belong to the assistant. Silktide did not place them. Advertising in AI covers which platforms show ads today and why that will change.

The question it answers is a competitive one: who is paying to appear at the moment your customers are asking, and what do they say when they get there.

The screen opens on that competitive picture: how many ads were served (or shown) over the reporting window, a trend by advertiser, and a standings table of who bought the most. Narrow to one assistant with the Platforms filter, then click an advertiser to see only their placements.

What a card is

One card is one ad, identified by the page it sends people to. The same ad is usually served against many prompts, so a card gathers all of those together rather than repeating itself.

Under each card are the numbers that make it worth reading:

  • Responses - how many measured answers carried this ad. This is the headline, because it is the closest thing to how much of your audience's attention the ad took. An ad served against one prompt every day is a bigger share of what people saw than an ad served against three prompts once.
  • Prompts - how many different questions it was bought against. This is the breadth of the buy, and it is why the response count is not read as reach on its own.
  • Shown - how many of those the assistant actually displayed. See below.

Click a card to see the responses that carried the ad. The small arrow in its top corner opens the advertiser's landing page instead.

Served is not shown

Assistants report ads that were served against a prompt, including ones the interface never actually displayed. Both are real, and they mean different things: served tells you who is bidding against your questions, shown tells you what the person asking actually saw.

Silktide keeps both. Cards that were never displayed are marked Never shown, and cards displayed only some of the time say so. Use Shown only above the grid to narrow to placements people actually saw.

Counting the two as one thing would overstate a competitor's reach, sometimes by a third or more.

Who is buying

The panel down the left lists advertisers, busiest first, with a bar comparing each to the busiest. It stays put while you scroll the ads, and you can drag the divider to give it more or less room. Search the list to find a buyer by name or site, then click one to narrow the ads to theirs.

Advertisers are grouped by their own website rather than by the name printed on the ad, because names get re-punctuated between one measurement and the next and websites do not. This is also why an advertiser's site sometimes differs from where the ad lands: ManageEngine buys under zoho.com and sends clicks to site24x7.com, and both facts are worth having.

An empty list is a finding

If nobody is advertising in this workspace, the screen says so. That is worth knowing rather than an error, and it can change quickly - a competitor starting to bid is the kind of thing you want to notice in the week it happens rather than the quarter.

What is not here

Ads are recorded only from assistants that display them, and only as answers arrive. They cannot be backfilled, so a workspace shows nothing here until its next batch runs.

An ad appearing beside an answer is not a citation, and does not count towards anybody's visibility. Paid placement and being recommended are different things, and Presence keeps them apart deliberately.

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