How to Track Brand Visibility in AI Search
Tracking brand visibility in AI search is the process of monitoring when and how your brand appears in AI-generated answers from ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, and other AI search engines. Unlike traditional search where you track rankings and click-through rates, AI search monitoring focuses on citations, mentions, sentiment, and share of voice across AI platforms.
This matters because AI search is already a significant discovery channel. The Conductor 2026 AEO/GEO Benchmarks Report found that AI answers appear in roughly one in four Google queries, and ChatGPT accounts for 87.4% of all AI referral traffic. You cannot optimize what you do not measure.
What Tools Track AI Search Visibility?
The AI search monitoring landscape has matured rapidly. Here are the tools that currently offer meaningful tracking capabilities.
Otterly.ai
Otterly.ai tracks brand mentions and citations across ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews. The platform monitors specific queries over time so you can see how your citation frequency changes as you optimize content. It also tracks competitor mentions, giving you a relative view of your AI visibility position.
Key features include citation tracking, brand mention alerts, competitor benchmarking, and AI Overview monitoring. Otterly is particularly strong for tracking Google AI Overview appearances.
Peec AI
Peec AI focuses on share of voice and sentiment analysis in AI search results. The platform evaluates not just whether you are mentioned, but how you are mentioned - positive, neutral, or negative - across multiple AI platforms.
Peec AI's strength is competitive intelligence. It maps your brand's mention patterns against competitors, identifying queries where you are missing and where competitors are winning. This gap analysis is useful for prioritizing which content to optimize first.
HubSpot AEO Grader
HubSpot's AEO Grader is a free tool that scores your brand visibility across GPT-4o, Perplexity, and Gemini. It runs queries that mirror real customer research patterns and calculates a 0 to 100 visibility score across five dimensions: brand recognition strength, competitive positioning, contextual relevance, sentiment polarity, and citation frequency.
The tool categorizes your brand as a Leader, Challenger, or Niche Player based on mention prominence and sentiment quality. For startups exploring AI visibility for the first time, this is the best free starting point.
SurferSEO AI Tracker
SurferSEO's AI Tracker monitors which queries trigger AI Overviews and whether your domain appears in the citations. It is built on SurferSEO's analysis of 36 million AI Overviews and 46 million citations, giving it strong data on citation patterns across industries.
What Metrics Should You Track?
Not all AI visibility metrics are equally useful. Focus on these in priority order.
Share of voice. The percentage of relevant AI-generated answers that mention your brand compared to competitors. This is the single most important metric because it captures both your absolute visibility and your relative competitive position. If your share of voice is growing, your optimization efforts are working.
Citation frequency. How often your brand or content is cited across AI platforms for your target queries. Track this separately for ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews, since each platform has different citation patterns and sources.
Sentiment. Whether your brand mentions are positive, neutral, or negative. Being mentioned negatively in AI search is worse than not being mentioned - negative AI citations can persist for weeks or months since AI responses do not change as quickly as traditional search results.
Query coverage. The number of relevant queries where your brand appears in AI answers. This tells you how broad your AI visibility is across your topic cluster. Gaps in coverage point to content you need to create or optimize.
Referral traffic. Check your analytics for traffic from AI referral sources. Google Analytics can segment AI referral traffic from platforms like ChatGPT and Perplexity. The Conductor report found AI referral traffic averaging 1.08% of total traffic, but this varies significantly by industry and is growing.
How Do You Set Up an AI Visibility Monitoring Workflow?
A practical monitoring workflow does not require daily effort. Here is a cadence that balances thoroughness with time investment.
Weekly (15 minutes). Manually run your top 5 to 10 priority queries through ChatGPT and Perplexity. Note whether your brand appears, what competitors are cited, and whether the information is accurate. This manual check catches issues faster than automated tools.
Monthly (1 hour). Run a full audit using your monitoring tools. Review share of voice trends, citation frequency changes, and sentiment shifts. Compare against the previous month to identify what is improving and what is declining. Document which content optimizations correlated with visibility improvements.
Quarterly (2 hours). Expand your query set. Research new queries your audience is asking AI search engines. Check emerging competitors that are gaining AI visibility in your space. Adjust your GEO optimization priorities based on the data.
What Do You Do When You Find Visibility Gaps?
When your monitoring reveals queries where competitors are cited but you are not, follow this process:
- Check if you have content on the topic. If not, create it - following the GEO-optimized content structure with definition-first openings, question-based headings, and statistics with sources.
- If you have content, check its structure. Does it have clear, extractable answers? Are statistics linked to sources? Is schema markup implemented? Often, restructuring existing content is enough to earn citations.
- Check your Bing visibility. ChatGPT relies heavily on Bing's index - if your page is not indexed or ranking on Bing, ChatGPT will not cite it.
- Build topical depth. AI models favor sources with comprehensive topic coverage. If you have one page on a topic but a competitor has ten, the competitor will be cited more often regardless of individual page quality.
Tracking AI search visibility is not a one-time audit. It is an ongoing practice that informs your content strategy, reveals optimization opportunities, and measures the impact of your GEO efforts over time.