Set up AI visibility tracking
Track the answer first, then use the search, source, competitor and traffic evidence to understand what shaped it.
1. Choose the business and website
Create one AI Visibility tracker for the business or location you want to measure. Confirm the brand name, website domain and competitors carefully: the source and traffic views use the website domain to identify your own pages.
2. Add the questions buyers ask
Use questions a real customer would ask before choosing a provider: “best family dentist near harbour east”, “who do you recommend for emergency plumbing in Austin?” or “which local physio is good for shoulder rehab?” Quick Setup can suggest separate tracking keywords and a starter mix of discovery, comparison and specific-need prompts; you can edit or remove any suggestion as the market changes.
Prompt variations and fan-out searches are related but different. Prompt variations are the buyer-style questions you choose to test. Fan-out searches are the additional queries an answer engine may create while researching one of those questions. Reputably records the latter only when the engine discloses them.
3. Let the first checks finish
Reputably checks ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Google AI Overview and Google AI Mode. The Prompts view shows each answer and the dashboard rolls the results into three core measures:
- Visibility — the share of checked answers that mention the brand.
- Sentiment — how positively the answer describes the brand, on a 0–100 scale.
- Position — the brand's average place when the answer presents a ranked or ordered set.
Use the date, model and prompt filters before comparing numbers. A tracker that has never completed a run can look like zero visibility, so check the latest run status before treating an empty result as absence.
Google AI Overview has an extra availability state. Google decides whether to generate an overview for each search. If no overview is served, there is no answer for the brand to appear in, so Reputably reports that check as “no AI answer generated” and excludes it from the visibility denominator instead of scoring it as a miss. Google AI Mode is measured separately because it is a different experience with its own answers and references.
4. Read the evidence views in order
- Dashboard — the current pattern and change against the prior period.
- Prompts — the exact questions and answers behind the aggregate.
- Fan-out Searches — searches the engines disclosed, the sites they surfaced and what they cited or passed over.
- Competitors — named rivals, their visibility, sentiment, position and direct evidence.
- Sources — cited domains and pages, grouped by source type and filtered to opportunities you can realistically earn.
- Ads — sponsored placements, advertisers and landing pages, kept separate from the organic visibility score.
- AI Traffic — identified crawler activity and detectable AI referrals after the site tracker is installed.
5. Install AI Traffic when you want on-site evidence
The answer checks work without installing anything on the website. AI Traffic is separate and has two parts: a server-side channel records identified crawler hits and pages fetched; a browser beacon records visits that arrive with a detectable AI referrer. AI crawlers do not execute browser JavaScript, so one channel cannot replace the other.
Use the generated WordPress plugin, the Install with AI brief, or the PHP, Cloudflare Worker and Express snippets for the server-side half; add the browser beacon for referral tracking. The setup flow verifies both channels from one place but reports each result separately: a bot fetch with a one-time token proves the crawler path, while opening a one-time browser test page proves the referral beacon.
What the evidence can and cannot prove
Each engine reveals a different amount of its retrieval process. Claude exposes a traceable search-and-page trail. ChatGPT exposes a partial trail, so a page missing from that trail is not proof it was never read. Gemini, Google AI Overview and Google AI Mode return answers and references without the searches behind them. Reputably names those disclosure states rather than treating vendor silence as zero.
AI answers also vary by prompt, model, location, timing and session context. Read the dashboard as a repeated measurement and direction of travel, not a guarantee about every individual conversation. See Understanding scores and Data sources & limitations before sharing a conclusion.
Related
See the public overview of AI visibility tracking or the practical guide to what AI visibility tracking measures.
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