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Before diving deeper into DevTune, it helps to understand the key concepts and terminology used throughout the platform.

Core Concepts

Projects

A project is your workspace for tracking and monitoring. Each project typically represents one product or brand you want to track. Projects contain:
  • Your tracked prompts and citation sources
  • Brand terms and competitor brands
  • Search tracking configurations
  • Analytics and insights
  • Actions and recommendations

Product Context

Product context is the description of what your product does. During project creation, DevTune generates this automatically from your website URLs. You can review and edit it at any time. Good product context leads to more accurate prompt suggestions and more relevant insights.

Brands

Brands represent the organizational concept for competitive tracking. Each project has:
  • A primary brand - your product or company
  • Competitor brands - the brands you want to compare against
Each brand has associated domains (citation sources) and brand terms that DevTune uses to identify mentions and citations in AI responses.

Search Tracking Concepts

AI Search Platforms

DevTune monitors your visibility across AI-powered search platforms. The platforms available depend on your plan tier:
  • ChatGPT Search - OpenAI’s conversational AI with web search (Starter and above)
  • Perplexity - AI-powered search engine (Starter and above)
  • Gemini - Google’s AI assistant (Free tier and above)
  • Google AI Mode - AI summaries and overviews in Google search (Pro and above)
  • Grok - xAI’s AI assistant (Pro and above)

Prompts

Prompts are the search queries you want to track across AI platforms. These are the questions users might ask when looking for solutions your product provides. For example:
  • “What’s the best project management tool?”
  • “How do I set up CI/CD for my project?”
  • “Compare Slack vs Teams for remote work”
During project creation, DevTune suggests relevant prompts based on your product context. You can also add custom prompts at any time from the Search Tracking Config page.

Brand Terms

Brand terms are the specific terms DevTune monitors for brand mentions in AI responses. These typically include your product name, company name, and any common variations or abbreviations. Brand terms are configured per brand (both your primary brand and competitors).

Citation Sources

Citation sources are the domains you want to track when they appear as citations in AI search results. This typically includes:
  • Your marketing website (e.g., acme.com)
  • Your documentation site (e.g., docs.acme.com)
  • Your GitHub repository (e.g., github.com/acme/project)
Citation sources are managed in the Search Tracking Config under the Citation Sources tab.

Citations

Citations track when AI search results link to your domains. This shows which of your content is being referenced by AI platforms and how prominently it appears.

Key Metrics

Primary KPIs

These are the top-level metrics that summarize your AI search visibility:
  • Overall Presence Rate - The percentage of AI search responses where your citation sources appear. This is your primary visibility metric.
  • Share of Voice - Your brand’s share of all citations for tracked prompts compared to competitors. This shows your relative market position.
  • Sentiment Score - How positively or negatively AI platforms describe your brand when they mention it.

Secondary Metrics

These provide deeper insight into specific aspects of your visibility:
  • Docs Presence - How often your documentation domains appear in results
  • Blog Presence - How often your blog content appears in results
  • Brand Mentions - How frequently your brand name appears directly in AI response text
  • Top of Answer - The percentage of times your domain appears as the first citation
  • Avg Citation Rank - Your average citation position when cited (lower numbers mean you’re cited earlier)
  • Primary Citation Share - How often you are the primary citation among all cited sources

Analytics Concepts

Trends show how your visibility changes over time, helping you track improvements or detect regressions across all key metrics.

Competitor Tracking

Track how competitors appear in the same AI search results, helping you understand your relative market position through Share of Voice comparisons.

Heatmap

The heatmap visualizes performance across different prompt and platform combinations, helping you identify patterns, strengths, and gaps in your AI search presence.

Adoption Tracking Concepts

Adoption Health Score

The Adoption Health Score is a 0-100 composite score that summarizes your package or library’s adoption health based on download growth, market share trend, GitHub star growth, and competitive position.

Package Registries

DevTune tracks weekly download counts from npm, PyPI, crates.io, NuGet, and RubyGems for your packages and your competitors’ packages. This data feeds the Adoption Tracking dashboard.

Market Share

Market share represents your percentage of total downloads across all tracked packages in your category. It shows your competitive standing relative to the alternatives you track.

AI Traffic Concepts

AI Bot Crawlers

AI bot crawlers are automated agents from AI platforms (such as GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot) that visit your website to index content. DevTune detects these crawlers by their user-agent strings.

AI Referral Traffic

AI referral traffic consists of human visitors who arrive at your website after clicking a link in an AI-generated response (e.g., from ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, or Gemini).

Tracking Snippet

The tracking snippet is a lightweight JavaScript snippet you install on your website to collect AI traffic data. It sends raw page view signals to DevTune, where all traffic classification happens server-side.

Team Concepts

Team Account

A team account is a shared workspace where projects are managed. Teams can have multiple members with different roles.

Roles

DevTune has two roles:
  • Owner - Full access including billing management, team settings, member management, role management, and invitation management
  • Member - Access to projects and analytics, with permissions to manage settings and send invitations

Next Steps

Now that you understand the basics: