What happens behind the scenes of the new AI monitoring tools? What specific technical challenges do providers face? We discuss this with David Mühlenweg, founder of Finseo. An open ‘real talk’ from the engine room.
Topics we discuss: Where do the data that AI monitoring tools are based on today come from? How do tool providers handle invalid or mixed model responses? How can prompts be meaningfully derived if there is no real prompt data? What features will we need in the future? All this in our conversation with David.
Our guest David Mühlenweg, founder of Finseo
David Mühlenweg does not come from a classic marketing background, but from skilled trades and technology. After training as a mechatronics engineer, he earned a Bachelor of Engineering degree. At the same time, he started building his first websites – initially for pragmatic reasons, to earn money during his studies. A self-built site suddenly ranked well, the first clients came in, and later his own agency. A classic career change into SEO, as is common for many in the industry.
Finally, David decided to develop his own AI monitoring tool. Finseo now has a three-digit number of customers, as he states in the interview. Five people are working on the tool.
This is also typical for the current phase: many SEO experts are engaging with GEO (Generative Engine Optimization). New tools for AI visibility are emerging everywhere. A completely open market.
What is the basis for prompt monitoring?
Many new AI monitoring tools rely on setup assistants. A service to ensure users get results immediately. However, the devil is in the details here. Which prompts are selected?
Finseo uses a multi-layered system for this. First, the website is crawled and recorded. Based on this, an automatic keyword research starts. Subsequently, the keywords are converted into prompts and assigned to a phase of the customer journey and specific personas. A Search Console integration is also available. Overall, a very strong SEO-based approach.
The “Awareness” area is skipped at Finseo – meaning it is not considered in the selection or recommendation. “It’s pointless if someone clogs up their monitoring with top-of-funnel prompts and then wonders why nothing is displayed,” says David. Instead, the tool focuses on transactional prompts that are crucial for purchase decisions.
How valid is the data basis?
All new AI analysis tools operate in a “gray area,” as David puts it (from minute 18). They scrape content from ChatGPT and then process it. Simply put: an AI monitoring tool pretends to be a user. The prompt to be monitored is entered, and the response is read out and transmitted. There are also scraping service providers who handle this and forward the results to the tools.
The problem: OpenAI, in particular, has no interest in ChatGPT being scraped. After all, this consumes resources every time. Therefore, after a certain number of queries, it switches to a basic version, a point we also discussed with Matthäus Michalik in the last interview.
Everything depends on the IP addresses of external scraping providers. While they have a large pool of IP addresses, more and more tool providers are accessing them. OpenAI, in turn, recognizes the IP address and eventually throttles it down. However, exactly when this happens cannot be predicted. The consequence: sometimes valid results come back – but often also “flimsy” results, as David calls them. The invalid results are characterized by AI responses being heavily abbreviated, no brands being mentioned, or originating from an old model.
The results in the tools are therefore only partially valid and should be used with caution. Or to put it another way: we need data that is as close to reality as possible. How the tools intend to solve this problem is currently unclear.
Further topics we discuss
Other aspects from our conversation:
- Which models should definitely be monitored?
- How is sentiment analysis evolving?
- What features is Finseo still working on?
Many thanks to David Mühlenweg for the open conversation! Here is the link to the video interview on YouTube.
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