MCP playbook

Buyer-intent search, from Claude Desktop

Before you measure what engines say, hear what buyers say. This recording searches Reddit from Claude Desktop through the connector, refines a noisy query, reads the one thread where someone tested ten AI visibility tools, and turns the objections in it into buying questions to measure. Two calls returned little; they are kept as recorded.

Recorded 4 September 2026 on the Linkeddit connector. Reddit quotes are attributed to the subreddit only; usernames are omitted. Setup for Claude Desktop is in the connect guide.

The transcript

  1. 1

    You ask: Find people asking for a tool to track competitor pricing changes.

    Tool call: reddit_search

    { "query": "looking for a tool to track competitor pricing changes", "time_filter": "month", "limit": 8 }

    Response, abridged

    {
      "count": 8,
      "posts": [
        { "title": "i've been building my own Apple Music client for 1.5 years. what would you want from it?", "subreddit": "AppleMusic", "score": 483 },
        { "title": "7 mental models every investor should run before buying any stock", "subreddit": "IndiaGrowthStocks", "score": 105 },
        { "title": "I tried 10+ AEO/GEO tools to help my brand get cited on ChatGPT more. Here are the results.", "subreddit": "DigitalMarketing", "score": 15, "num_comments": 14 },
        { "title": "My SaaS-GEO playbook", "subreddit": "SaaS", "score": 3, "num_comments": 12 },
        "… 4 more, off topic"
      ]
    }

    Kept as recorded: a long natural-language query on relevance sort returned mostly noise, with two usable threads. Reddit's search rewards shorter, more specific phrasing. Refine rather than read.

  2. 2

    You ask: Refine: people weighing AI visibility tools for their brand.

    Tool call: reddit_search

    { "query": "AI visibility tool recommend ChatGPT Perplexity brand", "time_filter": "month", "limit": 8 }

    Response, abridged

    {
      "count": 8,
      "posts": [
        { "title": "I tried 10+ AEO/GEO tools to help my brand get cited on ChatGPT more. Here are the results.", "subreddit": "DigitalMarketing", "score": 14, "num_comments": 14 },
        { "title": "I built a free tool that shows whether ChatGPT/Gemini/Perplexity can even see your website", "subreddit": "SideProject", "score": 4, "num_comments": 18 },
        { "title": "Is AI visibility becoming a new form of brand awareness?", "subreddit": "Rankin_AI", "score": 15, "num_comments": 11 },
        { "title": "Guide to AI Brand Visibility Tracking Tools in 2026", "subreddit": "SaaS", "score": 3, "num_comments": 7 },
        { "title": "I spent a week finding the best tools to improve my business's visibility on ChatGPT & Google AI Overviews. Here are the ones I loved!", "subreddit": "smallbusinessUS", "score": 3, "num_comments": 4 },
        { "title": "Same brand, same question, different country = different AI answer. And switching the language of the prompt changed it again.", "subreddit": "aeo", "score": 1, "num_comments": 4 },
        "… 2 more"
      ]
    }

    Eight on-topic threads. Titles with a first-person test, a question, or a count of tools are where buyers compare notes; vendor roundups posted to tool-review subreddits are not.

  3. 3

    You ask: Read the one where someone tested ten tools.

    Tool call: reddit_fetch_post_comments

    { "post_url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/DigitalMarketing/comments/1w545i2/…", "comment_limit": 8 }

    Response, abridged

    {
      "post": { "title": "I tried 10+ AEO/GEO tools to help my brand get cited on ChatGPT more. Here are the results.",
                "subreddit": "DigitalMarketing", "score": 16, "num_comments": 14 },
      "comments": [
        { "score": 4, "body": "same rabbit hole here for our B2B SaaS clients. Your split between \"monitor only\" vs \"monitor + 'what to do now'\" is exactly what I ran into: lots of dashboards, not many that actually change answers. …" },
        { "score": 1, "body": "… losing because a competitor has better content and losing because the cited sources don't mention you need completely different responses, and only one of them is fixable on your own site. For us, it's overwhelmingly the second; most of our citations … trace back to reddit threads and other people's listicles rather than our own domain. … Ours reports a handful of citations while ChatGPT-sourced meetings run several a week, which we only know because we ask every inbound lead where they found us. … answers shift by geography and time of day, so unless a tool runs the same prompt repeatedly across locations, its number is a single sample presented as a measurement …" },
        { "score": 1, "body": "I agree that mention is very different than citation. … The challenge I see is that we're trying to get a deterministic number to measure when the models are probabilistic." },
        { "score": 1, "body": "Did any two of them give you the same number for the same prompt on the same day? That is the one test a ten-tool run can do and nobody ever publishes it." },
        { "score": 1, "body": "… most of these platforms are pulling from slightly different model versions, geos, or response snapshots, so you'll see divergent source data even on identical prompts. … Curious whether any tool lets you export the raw AI response alongside the parsed citation, because that's the only real way to audit the gap?" }
      ]
    }

    Usernames are omitted here and the thread is attributed to r/DigitalMarketing only, which is the rule for every Reddit quote on this site. Read it as buyers: the objections are dashboards without actions, mention versus citation, single samples presented as measurements, and no way to export the raw answer beside the parsed citation.

  4. 4

    You ask: What do people type into Google around this?

    Tool call: keyword_autocomplete

    { "query": "competitor monitoring" }

    Response, abridged

    { "query": "competitor monitoring", "suggestions": [] }

    Kept as recorded: the autocomplete tool returned no suggestions for two seeds on the day, and the SERP tool returned empty People Also Ask, related and organic lists. We publish what happened. The Search Console playbook is the first-party route to the same question.

  5. 5

    Tool call: answer_prompts_update (not executed in this recording)

    { "project_id": "441e8df6-…", "add": ["Which AI visibility tools export the raw answer alongside the parsed citation?",
               "How do I tell whether I lose AI recommendations because of my content or because cited sources omit me?"] }

    Response, abridged

    Contract, from the live tool description:
    "Approve, remove (soft), add, reprioritize, and classify a project's buying questions. Only approved
    prompts are audited. … Classifying does NOT approve -- labelling and deciding what gets measured are
    separate acts."

    The point of the search: the thread's questions become buying questions to measure. Add them, approve the ones worth credits, and the next audit says whether the engines name you when someone asks them.

What the thread told us

Four objections buyers raised about this whole category, in one thread, in their words.

Dashboards that do not change answers

“Lots of dashboards, not many that actually change answers.” The split between monitor-only and monitor plus what-to-do-now is the split the fix-and-verify loop exists for.

Mention is not citation

Losing because a competitor has better content and losing because the cited sources omit you need different fixes, and only one is fixable on your own site. Citation share and the content gap view are built on that distinction; the methodology page defines both.

A single sample presented as a measurement

Answers shift by geography and time of day. That is why every Answer Radar number carries its numerator, denominator and segment, and why a segment with nothing admissible reports no number at all.

Export the raw answer beside the parsed citation

The commenter asked whether any tool allows it. answer_run_get in raw mode returns normalized samples with every citation, and the run pages show Answers and Citations side by side. That is a buying question worth measuring, so it goes on the prompt list.

Frequently asked questions

Why keep the noisy first search and the empty keyword result?

Because a playbook that only shows the calls that worked is an advertisement. Reddit search rewards refinement, and on the recording day the keyword tools returned nothing. Both are what a real session looks like, and the second search shows the refinement that fixed the first.

Why no usernames, and why not message these people?

Every Reddit quote on linkeddit.com is attributed to the subreddit only, never to a person, and this playbook is about learning how buyers talk, not about outreach. Read, then measure. If you do outreach, the help centre's DM best-practices article applies and none of it is automated.

Which tools did this use?

The connector-native Reddit tools, reddit_search and reddit_fetch_post_comments, plus keyword_autocomplete. The same session from Cursor or Claude Code is identical. Reddit tools do not spend Answer Radar credits.

Hear buyers, then measure engines

The Reddit tools ship on every Linkeddit plan through the connector. Answer Radar, which measures the questions you find, is included with Compete.