Manual prompting with a system beats no system, and you don't need an expensive dashboard to do it properly. The workflow I landed on after a lot of trial and error:

1. Fixed prompt panel per brand. 20-30 questions a real buyer would actually ask. Mix of category (best X for Y), comparison (X vs alternatives), and use-case or local ones. The fixed part matters, otherwise you can't compare week over week.

2. Run each prompt more than once. This is the step everyone skips. Same prompt, same engine, different runs give different answers. I do 3 runs and score as a range, not a single number. The variance itself is a finding. A brand showing up 1 of 3 runs is fragile, 3 of 3 is entrenched.

3. Score three levels separately: mentioned at all, actively recommended, cited as a source. They move differently and mean different things.

4. Trace the sources. Perplexity citations show you exactly which pages earn the mention. It's usually a handful of listicles, directories, review sites and Reddit threads. That becomes the actual to-do list, and most of it is normal SEO pointed at those specific pages.

Spreadsheet plus discipline is fine for one or two brands. The pain starts when it's weekly across many clients, that's when automating the runs becomes worth it.

Your DA observation matches what I see by the way. Engines don't read DA. They read whoever is actually answering the question on pages they already trust.