Documentation

Coverage Groups

PR teams don't land one placement at a time — a healthy client earns dozens to hundreds of media hits per month. Coverage Groups let you paste that entire list into Spyglasses at once, keep it organized as a named group, and attach it to a PR project as a single goal with a single influence rate: "this month's placements account for 9% of all the sources AI cites for our tracked prompts."

Coverage Groups are distinct from Placements, which score an individual brand mention's quality (PQS). A coverage group is a list of placement URLs tracked as a project goal; a Placement is a quality analysis of one specific mention.

Why Coverage Groups

Without them, tracking a month of placements means creating one article goal per URL — hours of manual entry, a project page listing hundreds of rows, and a client report that reads like a spreadsheet. A coverage group collapses all of that:

  • One paste, one goal. Import the whole placement list in a single step. The group tracks as one goal in the project and one row in exported reports.
  • One influence number. Instead of asking "did placement #37 get cited?", you get "what share of AI's sources came from our work?" — the number that justifies a retainer.
  • Living lists. Add this month's placements to an existing group (or create a monthly group) at any time — attached projects pick up the changes automatically, including retroactive matching against citations that already happened.

Creating a Coverage Group

Navigate to Coverage in the property sidebar (under Projects), then click New group.

Give the group a recognizable name — "March 2026 placements" or "Tier-1 launch coverage" — and optionally paste URLs right in the creation dialog, one per line. You can also add URLs later with the Import URLs button on the group's detail page.

What the importer accepts

  • One URL per line; comma- or tab-separated lists also work
  • URLs with or without https://
  • Any web URL — news articles, blog posts, YouTube videos and Shorts, LinkedIn posts, syndicated copies (MSN, Yahoo, etc.)

The importer normalizes each URL so cosmetic variants can't cause missed matches or duplicates: www. prefixes, tracking parameters (utm_*, gclid, share tokens), and trailing slashes are all unified. YouTube links get special handlingyoutu.be short links, watch?v= URLs, and Shorts are expanded into companion entries so the group matches however an AI platform cites the video.

After the import you'll see exactly what happened: how many URLs were added, how many were already in the group, and any lines that couldn't be parsed (with reasons).

The Group Detail Page

Each URL in the group shows:

ColumnDescription
URLThe placement, linked, with its publisher domain
TypeClassification badges — the publisher's media type (Press, Video platform, etc.) and the page's content format (News, Review, Listicle…). Classification runs automatically in the background after import, using the same engine that classifies citations
AIPVSThe publisher's AI Placement Value Score and tier — how valuable this outlet is for AI visibility
AuthorThe article's author, extracted from the fetched page content — this is the same author data that powers author goals
CitedHow many times this exact URL has appeared as a source in any tracked AI answer for your workspace

Because coverage items share their classification vocabulary with Citation Intelligence, your coverage mix and your citation mix are directly comparable — useful for spotting gaps like "AI cites video heavily in this category, but our coverage list has almost none."

Removing URLs

Select rows and click Remove. Removing a URL also removes the goal hits it contributed to attached projects, so influence numbers always reflect the current list — a paste mistake can't permanently inflate a report.

Attaching a Group to a Project

Two ways:

  1. At project creation — PR projects show a Coverage Groups to Track checklist alongside publisher/article/author goals.
  2. On a running project — use Add goal on the project's Goals card and pick the coverage group.

Either way, Spyglasses immediately checks the project's past citations against the group. If placements were already being cited, the goal shows its hits and influence rate right away and is quietly marked as Hit — no waiting for the next nightly run, and no notification blast for coverage that already existed.

From then on, every nightly prompt run records new matches. The project's goal row shows:

Coverage: March 2026 placements (46 URLs) — 14 citations, 9% of this project's citations

One group can be attached to any number of projects; each project computes its own influence rate against its own prompts.

Best Practices

Group by campaign or by month

The two natural groupings mirror how you report: a campaign group ("Product launch coverage") shows a campaign's total AI influence; monthly groups ("March 2026 placements") show how each month's work performs and make month-over-month comparisons trivial.

Import everything, including syndication

If a story ran on abc7.com and was syndicated to MSN and Yahoo, import all three URLs. AI platforms cite syndicated copies frequently, and each URL only matches exactly — the syndicated copies are separate placements earning separate citations.

Watch the Cited column before attaching

The Cited count is workspace-wide and populates as soon as the group is created. A quick scan tells you which placements AI is already using — useful context before you even attach the group to a project.

  • Projects — Attach coverage groups as goals and read influence rates
  • Citation Intelligence — See every source AI cites, including your placements
  • Placements — Score an individual placement's citation quality (PQS)
  • Publisher Lookup — The AIPVS scores shown on coverage items

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