Exclusion Analysis
Sometimes an AI assistant answers one of your tracked prompts, recommends other brands and does not name Example Brand. Exclusion Analysis collects those answers and shows why they went the other way, which brands won instead and which pages the assistant relied on.
The page is called Where AI left you out. Find it in the left panel under Exclusion Analysis.
What Counts as an Exclusion
An exclusion is an answer to one of your tracked prompts that recommended other brands and left yours out. The page counts them as excluded answers for the period and filters you have chosen.
To find out why, Spotlit asks the same AI assistant a follow-up question about its own answer, in the same conversation: why was the brand not recommended, what would have helped, and which cited pages would it need to appear on. The reasons you see are the assistant's account of its answer. They are a strong lead on what to look at, not proof of how the assistant decides, so check them against the pages they point to.
What the Page Shows
From the top of the page down:
- Filters and export. Narrow the page by topic and platform, switch the charts between daily and weekly, and use Export to download the excluded answers as a CSV file.
- The summary card. The number of excluded answers, a short note on what stands out, and a bar chart headed "Left out, by day" (or by week) with the number of checks that ran in the period.
- Why you lost, who won, and what they read. Three cards, each with a line chart or a heatmap (you choose) and a table that counts each row and compares it with the previous period.
- Why you lost ("What the engines held against you"): the reasons the assistants gave, one row per reason.
- Who won ("Competitors recommended instead of" your brand): the brands named in the answers that left you out.
- What they read ("Pages the engines trusted"): the domains the assistants cited in those answers.
- Your action plan. A ranked list of the pages to win back. Each card shows a suggested step, the page's address, tags for the reasons linked to it and the number of lost answers it is tied to. The button on the right names the kind of step suggested: Create brief, Draft outreach or Suggest edits.
In each card, click a row of the table to show or hide its line on the chart.
The Gap Types
Behind each reason, the follow-up labels the gap with one of six types. You will see them in the export, in a column called "Gaps / What Would Help", next to what the assistant said would help.
| Gap type | What it points to | The kind of work that closes it |
|---|---|---|
editorial_coverage | The articles, roundups and guides the answer relied on do not cover your brand | Editorial outreach, PR |
comparison_presence | Comparison pages and lists in your category leave you out | Comparison content |
review_authority | The review sites the answer cited have not reviewed your product | Reviews |
category_mismatch | The assistant does not connect your brand with the category the prompt asks about | Content on your own site, product pages |
content_recency | What exists about your brand looks older than what the answer drew on | Content on your own site |
other | A reason that fits none of the five types | No fixed kind of work |
Reading the Page
- Start with Who won and What they read. They tell you which brands and which pages to look at first.
- Open the pages. Check whether the cited page names you, how it describes you and who it puts first.
- Look for repeats. A domain or a reason that shows up across several prompts is a better lead than one that shows up once.
- Read counts with care. A few excluded answers can move from day to day without anything having changed. Our reading: act on patterns that hold over a few weeks.
For a walkthrough of the page with an example account, read our blog post Exclusion Analysis in Spotlit.
Plans
Which plans include Exclusion Analysis is in the comparison on Plans & Limits. On a plan that does not include it, the page shows an upgrade prompt instead.
Related
- Visibility Tracking: how often AI assistants name your brand
- Citation Intelligence: which sources the assistants cite
- Competitor Benchmarking: how you compare with the brands you track