AI Cite: Tracking Your AI Visibility

AI Cite is the AI visibility tab of a project. It answers three questions in one place: can the AI crawlers read your site at all, what the AI platforms already say about you from week to week, and what the engines answer when a customer asks them directly. Everything it shows is measured, never estimated: a panel with nothing behind it is not shown, and a cost is shown before it is spent.

Two Lanes

The tab has two lanes, switched at the top of the page.

• Visibility - the weekly tracker. It measures where ChatGPT and Google AI Overviews already mention and cite your site, the same way every week, and keeps the history.
• Live AI Audit - the live check. It puts a pool of real questions to ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and Perplexity, with web search on the way the consumer apps answer, and stores every answer word for word.

Between them sits AI Crawler Access, which answers the question both lanes assume: whether the crawlers can fetch and read the site.

The Visibility Lane

The strip at the top shows the weekly-tracking switch, what the weekly refresh and a manual scan will charge, and your balance. A project that has never been scanned starts with one on-demand scan; after that the Sunday refresh keeps it current while tracking is on.

• KPI cards - total mentions (AI answers that cited your site in the last scan, split by platform), your visibility score, top platform, when the last scan ran, and how many AI Overview prospects the Prospects tool has found.
• Visibility score - a 0 to 100 figure built from three parts: how many mentions were found, how much people ask about those topics, and how many platforms you appear on. It rises slowly on purpose, so a small site with a handful of mentions reads as moderate rather than excellent.
• Visibility trend - one point per weekly scan, with ranges from seven days to a year. A new page getting cited, or a mention disappearing, shows up here first.
• Distribution by platform - the same mentions, split by which platform made them.
• Detail panels - shown only when the scan produced something for them: pages of yours being cited (the URLs AI answers actually use), the questions that triggered a citation, recent mentions with the surrounding answer, competitor visibility on the same scale, the brands and domains AI names most in your space, and citations gained and lost since the previous scan.

AI Crawler Access

For each AI crawler the card tests three things against your home page: whether robots.txt allows it, what status the server returned, and whether the page text is present in the HTML without running JavaScript. That last column matters more than it looks: no AI crawler runs JavaScript, so a site that only renders in the browser can look fine in Google and be invisible to every assistant. The card summarises how many crawlers can read the page; Details opens the per-crawler table, grouped into the answer engines that decide whether an assistant can cite you and the training crawlers you may choose to block. Results are cached for a few hours and can be re-tested. This check is free.

The Live AI Audit Lane

• Prompt pool - the questions that get asked. Some are generated from your brand and category, some are discovered from the keywords you track, and you can add your own; each is labelled with where it came from (Auto, Discovered, Keyword, Custom). Questions can be paused without being deleted.
• Rotation run vs full deep dive - a rotation run draws a subset of the pool, favouring questions that are due, volatile or never asked, so stable questions are not re-asked every time. A full deep dive asks every active question. Both show their estimated cost before you click.
• Latest audit answers - one row per question per engine, with the engine, whether it searched the web to answer, our automated read of the tone, and the sources it cited. The full answer is stored as returned; the sentiment label is a hint, not a verdict, so read the text.
• Name match - when an answer matched your business name but not your domain, the row says so. Names are not unique, so check the answer is really about you and not a similarly named business elsewhere.
• Keyword coverage - when the project tracks keywords, each one is lined up with where you rank in search and whether the AI engines mention you when asked about it.

A run happens on the server, so you can leave the page and come back; the answers appear when it finishes.

When Credits Are Charged

• The first Visibility scan, when you start tracking a project, and any manual Run scan now after that.
• The weekly refresh, every Sunday while weekly tracking is on. Switch tracking off to pause it; nothing else changes.
• Each Live AI Audit run. The button shows an estimate; the charge is what the engines actually used, reported after the run, never the estimate.

Everything else is free: AI Crawler Access, editing the prompt pool, viewing stored scans and answers, and the AI Overview column captured with every rank check. Every cost is shown before you click it, and runs draw from the balance the project belongs to.

Alerts and Reporting

A drop in mentions or a turn in sentiment sends an email. The AI Mentions report type in your project's Reports tab renders your AI visibility over a selected period as a branded PDF, schedulable like any other report, so clients see the AI story alongside rankings.

Finding AIO Opportunities

The AI Overview Opportunity Finder works the discovery side: give it keywords and it checks which ones trigger an AI Overview and who gets cited. Combine it with the Rank Tracker's AIO column (captured free on every rank check) and the Prospects tab's AIO gaps, and you have the full loop: discover where AI answers exist, see who owns them, and target the ones worth contesting.

Improving Your Citations

Getting cited is part authority, part structure. The pages AI engines cite tend to answer specific questions directly and cleanly. Work through Content Structure for AIO for the structural side, and use your Cited Pages list as the template: what the AI already likes from your site is the best evidence of what to produce more of. If AI Crawler Access shows a crawler that cannot read the page, fix that first; no amount of content work reaches a crawler that is blocked.

FAQ

Which AI platforms are covered?
The Visibility tracker measures ChatGPT and Google AI Overviews, the platforms with reliable mention data today. The Live AI Audit asks ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and Perplexity directly. Others will appear as data becomes available rather than as empty placeholders.

How is this different from the AIO column in the Rank Tracker?
The AIO column tracks Google AI Overview citations for keywords you track, free with each check. AI Cite tracks mentions of your site across AI platforms regardless of which keywords you track, plus the pages being cited, and lets you ask the engines your own questions.

Why does an answer talk about a different business with my name?
The engine matched your business name, not your domain, and the row is marked Name match. Add questions to the pool that name your location or your domain, and read the answer before treating it as a mention.

Why is a panel missing from my dashboard?
Because the scan found nothing for it yet. Detail panels appear when there is data behind them, so a new project shows the cards, the trend and the crawler check first and fills in as mentions arrive.

What does ongoing tracking cost?
Credits are charged for each weekly refresh while tracking is on, and for any audit run you start. Turn weekly tracking off to pause the weekly charge. The exact cost is shown on every button before it is spent.

Related Documentation

• AIO vs Traditional SERPs
• Content Structure for AIO
• Prospects: Keyword, Content & AIO Gap Analysis