AI buyer journey: Buyers learn, then compare, then choose. Show up for all three.

The model that writes your prompt set. It returns Learn, Consider or Decide with each question it drafts, and the value is checked against those three before anything is stored; a fourth answer is refused and the prompt lands in Consider. The database enforces the same three values. It is a judgement about buyer intent, not a rule about wording, and it does not always land where you would expect: on Willowdale's own set, “Find me the best multifamily real estate syndication companies in the southern U.S. for 2026.” is tagged Learn, while “Best multifamily real estate syndication firms for accredited passive investors in Texas and Georgia.” is tagged Consider.

No. The scan records whether each engine named you and moves on; it never looks at the stage and never rewrites it. The tag is written once, when the prompt is created, and the funnel joins to it at read time. That is deliberate: a stage that drifted between scans would make the per-scan trend inside each stage meaningless.

It is scanned like any other prompt and it appears everywhere else on the tab, with its visibility, its average position and the rivals it turned up alongside. What it carries no trace of is a stage or a type, because only the generator writes those, so it sits outside the funnel and outside all three denominators. If nothing on your site has a stage, the card says so in plain words rather than drawing an empty funnel.

No. It runs no scan and calls no model. Every figure in the card and in the stage drawers is counted from the checks your visibility scan already stored, and recomputed on each page load, so the funnel has no schedule and no allowance of its own.

Not in the default view. “What is Willowdale Equity” trivially mentions Willowdale Equity, so the Unbranded toggle is on when the tab loads and prompts naming you are dropped from the funnel entirely. Separately, no more than 20% of a generated prompt set may name your brand at all, and that ceiling is enforced in code rather than asked for in the instructions.

Yes. The three figures follow the tab's controls, so the date range, the Models dropdown and the Topics dropdown all narrow the funnel the same way they narrow everything else on the page. The Models list only ever offers the engines your plan includes, and a hand-edited URL cannot reach past it.