The Difference Between Advanced Mode And Smart Research
Savannabay is designed for two types of users: experienced SEO professionals and beginners who are new to SEO.
To support both, we created two modes, Advanced Mode, for users who want full control, and Smart Research, which automatically handles the complex SEO and GEO analysis for you.
Below, we’ll walk you through how each mode works.
1. Advanced Mode
When you are using Savannabay with Advanced Mode activated, you are fully responsible for find keywords, adjust your competitors, generate AI Q&A Sets with the models of your choice, and finally generate the recomendations, all manually. You are free to personalize your research.
You can research keywords manually, generate questions for those keywords, and choose the AI models you want to rank in. You can disable Advanced Mode using the switcher located in the sidebar above the Setup step.
2. Smart Research
Smart Research follows a methodology to help you rank in AI tools generating recommendations. This feature consumes more credits because it automatically performs keyword generation, AI Q&A set creation, and recommendations.
How Smart Research Builds Your SEO & GEO Strategy
Smart Research isn’t just running AI prompts, it performs a structured market investigation designed to uncover where your brand can realistically win visibility inside AI search results.
At the end of the process, you’ll receive a set of strategic recommendations tailored to help your brand appear more often in AI-generated answers.
Step 1. Finding Strategic Keywords (Not Just Popular Ones)
Instead of pulling random keywords, Smart Research identifies opportunities where your brand has a real chance to rank.
The system analyzes:
search demand and topic relevance
ranking difficulty
brand alignment
This ensures we focus only on keywords that are both valuable and achievable, not vanity keywords that look good but rarely convert.
If suitable opportunities cannot be identified (which is rare), you can switch to Advanced Mode to manually define your targets.
Step 2. Learning From Real Community Conversations
Before generating AI questions, Smart Research looks at discussions happening across Reddit communities related to your niche.
Why?
Because Reddit reflects real problems asked by real people, not artificial question variations.
By analyzing community discussions, the system discovers:
how users naturally phrase questions
hidden pain points competitors miss
emerging topics before they become saturated
This allows us to generate questions that mirror authentic user intent, the same type of questions people ask AI assistants every day.
If relevant community discussions are unavailable, the system intelligently generates questions grounded in the selected keyword context.
Step 3. Testing Your Brand Inside AI Responses
Next, Smart Research runs structured AI simulations using the generated questions.
It is not just a AI prompt, he system evaluates the answers to understand:
whether your brand is mentioned
how competitors are positioned
what sources the AI favors
which narratives dominate the answers
This recreates how users actually discover brands through AI tools, something manual prompting cannot reliably reproduce at scale.
Step 4. Turning Gaps Into Opportunities (Blue Ocean Strategy)
If your brand is not cited, Smart Research generates actionable recommendations based on:
patterns observed in AI responses
content currently winning in AI SERPs
differentiation opportunities using a Blue Ocean strategy
The goal is not to compete head-to-head with existing content, but to position your brand where competition is low and authority can grow faster.
If your brand is already being cited, you’ll instead access the AI Q&A Sets, where you can review the generated questions and responses to understand how your visibility is evolving.
The Result
Smart Research transforms scattered data into a clear GEO + SEO action plan by combining:
✔ strategic keyword selection
✔ real community intelligence
✔ AI visibility testing
✔ competitive analysis
✔ differentiated content strategy
🤔 Why Smart Research Starts With Reddit
Reddit discussions come from real users asking real questions.
Unlike traditional keyword tools, community-driven questions reveal:
genuine demand
natural language patterns used in AI queries
problems users actually care about solving
This helps you create content aligned with real conversations — which significantly increases the likelihood of being referenced in AI-generated answers.
Best Practices
Recommendations: Currently, Smart Research provides recommendations only for ranking in Perplexity. If you want to rank in ChatGPT or Gemini, you need to use Advanced Mode.
Credit Consumption: Smart Research consumes credits even if it fails to find the best keywords and you need to switch to Advanced Mode. However, any generated keywords will still be available on the Keywords page.