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llms.txt GeneratorWe Found Our Competitors’ AI Prompt Strategies in Search Console
What structured queries reveal about buyer personas, rivals, markets and evaluation rules.
Read the studyLead researcher · Founder & CEO, Trakkr
Mack Grenfell
Researching how AI discovers,
evaluates and cites the web.
Original studies on the sources behind AI answers, the crawlers that reach them, and what it means for brand visibility.
Cross-model research
Selected work
All publications ↓Study 010
Do AI Crawlers Prefer Markdown?
A randomized experiment measuring crawler coverage, retrieval demand and transfer efficiency.
Study 010 · Published 6 May 2026
Page-level assignment to HTML or Markdown
HTML↔Markdown
Page-level assignment with weekly crawler and live retrieval aggregation. Read the method before interpreting the result.
Read the experiment →All publications
Trakkr Research · 13 studies, newest first
Study 013
Zombie Stats: Where the Numbers AI Quotes Come From
We asked ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude and Google AI Overviews 200 questions that call for a number, then followed every statistic they quoted back to its source. Four in ten reached a study that says the same thing.
Study 012
We Found Our Competitors’ AI Prompt Strategies in Search Console
We decoded 3,476 structured Search Console queries that revealed buyer personas, competitor sets, markets and evaluation rules used in AI visibility tracking.
Study 011
Cited, Not Chosen
An exploratory benchmark separating AI citation from recommendation and measuring how recommendation rates change around a brand page's first observed citation.
Study 010
Do AI Crawlers Prefer Markdown?
Live randomized experiment measuring whether Markdown changes AI crawler coverage, retrieval demand, and transfer efficiency.
Study 009
The Half-Life of AI Citations
Longitudinal citation persistence and visibility volatility benchmark behind the Citation Decay study.
Study 008
The Anatomy of an AI Citation
Benchmark of the content, schema, authorship, and structural traits shared by AI-cited pages.
Study 007
Hidden Prompts in AI Search
Benchmark of websites embedding hidden prompts that attempt to influence AI chatbot citation and memory behavior.
Study 006
AI Crawls Your Product Pages. It Cites Your Blog.
Page-type citation efficiency benchmark cross-referencing AI citations with AI crawler visits.
Study 005
The llms.txt Effect
llms.txt adoption and citation-impact benchmark across AI-cited domains.
Study 004
Same Question, Different AI, Different Answers
Cross-model agreement benchmark showing how often AI systems recommend the same brands for the same prompts.
Study 003
When AI Comes to Your Website
AI crawler behavior benchmark covering traffic share, entry pages, session depth, and revisit patterns.
Study 002
How AI Translates Your Questions
Prompt-to-search-query rewrite benchmark showing how AI systems transform user questions before retrieving sources.
Study 001
Where AI Gets Its Answers
Public AI Citation Index covering 80.8M citation appearances, domain concentration, source categories, prompt intent, and explicit coverage limits.
About Mack
Founder of Trakkr · Previously Byword ↗
2016–2021
Growth marketing
Built and scaled paid acquisition at agencies and in-house. Managed millions in ad spend across social and search. Learned that the best marketing is finding leverage.
2022
Founded Byword
Built an AI writing tool from scratch. Watched it grow organically to 85,000 users. Saw firsthand how AI was reshaping content creation, and realized something bigger was coming.
byword.ai ↗2025
Founded Trakkr
People started asking ChatGPT for recommendations instead of Googling. AI became the new discovery layer. Trakkr exists to help brands understand this shift: who AI recommends, and why.
trakkr.ai →How Trakkr is built
Independent
No VC, no committees. Just relentless focus on building the best product. That’s why we can move fast.
Bootstrapped
Revenue-funded from day one. Aligned incentives with customers, not investors. Sustainable by design.
Shipping weekly
The AI landscape changes fast. We ship updates weekly while others wait for approvals.
Let’s talk.
Happy to chat about Trakkr, AI visibility, growth marketing, or just say hi.