Which AI Visibility Tracker is right for me? The AI Search Maturity Model

seohelper
seohelper December 4, 2025


Executives want an answer to a simple question: Why aren’t we showing up in ChatGPT?

SEOs wave their hands to explain the long list of explanations that all map back to “it depends.”

Maybe your executive team has given you some time to come up with a better answer. Maybe they understand that the answer to this question doesn’t exist in your existing tech stack. Maybe they even understand that this question can’t be answered with your existing team. So, you’ve got some time. But that doesn’t mean you can file this under “2026 problems.”

I advise you to move with urgency on collecting the data to inform the narrative that will enable your brand to win in AI search.

One of the first steps on that mission is selecting your tracking tool. I can tell this is one of the first steps you’re taking because I am asked to advise on this exact question weekly.

In order to best advise, we’ve developed a basic maturity model at Seer. Choosing the right tool for your team is dependent on what you want to do with this data.

The way I see it, there are four basic stages of AI Search maturity that any SEO or Inbound marketing function falls within.

AI Search Maturity Model Overview

  1. Curious
  2. Aware
  3. Playing Defense
  4. Playing Offense

Level 1: Curious

You haven’t invested any real time or budget into AI Search, and you were a late adopter to LLMs. At this stage, you need to build a level of curiosity within yourself and your team. If you haven’t done that yet, why should an executive team fund anything?

What’s the value in Level 1?

Seeing is believing. Whether you believe GEO is an extension of SEO, or a totally different discipline is actually irrelevant. When you start searching consistently in LLMs and comparing your experience to SEO, you begin to see both the similarities and the differences. Experienced SEOs will see the difference in days or even hours. Less tenured SEOs may take weeks. This stage will set the foundation for your approach to AI Search.

At this stage, I have tool recommendations — but they aren’t trackers: 

  • Sparktoro.com: This will help you (and your execs) understand the relative priority of AI Search to your overall digital marketing strategy. See how the audience that visits your website leverages AI Search platforms like Perplexity and ChatGPT, and how your audience differs from the average American, Canadian, or UK citizen. Further, search by keyword to round out your audience’s affinity.
  • Poe.com: If you haven’t spent significant time (10+ hours) with any LLMs, start today. Poe.com allows you to use many different LLMs in the same tool. Pick a few priority prompts, such as “Tell me about [Brand]” and “What are the best [Product Category]” and search these prompts daily in 3-5 priority LLMs. 
  • Use whatever note taking system you prefer to jog down insights, capture responses, and more. You’re creating a digital diary that will become a future source of hypotheses.
    • What strikes you as interesting about the way your brand is described? What about your competitors?
    • What do LLMs get wrong about your brand? Is there nuance between LLMs?
⚡ How to Advance: Spend roughly a month in this stage, and you’ll be ready for the next level. 
A word of advice: Just because you’re ready for the next level, doesn’t mean you should stop this habit you’ve built of daily checks. 
Some of us at Seer have been doing this daily since 2023, which has greatly helped inform our pattern recognition ability.


Level 2: Aware

You’ve now invested some real time into AI Search and are starting to form hypotheses about this new black box. You’re better prepared to communicate findings and insights to an executive audience. But, do you have a compelling case for more budget? Depends on how independently bought in your stakeholders are.

What’s the value in reaching Level 2?

Let’s assume your primary stakeholder is not naturally bullish on AI Search. In that case, you want to use the tools you already have in hand to build a narrative. This will both help you ensure you’re maximizing value, and to help your stakeholders better understand the gaps in your current stack.

Here are the priority features to look for:

  • Priority Models: Does the tool offer visibility into your audience’s highest affinity LLMs? Remember, Sparktoro can inform what your highest affinity LLMs are, or you could use good old fashioned audience research.
  • Custom Prompt Tracking: Can you track specific prompts, or are you at the mercy of the ‘out of the box’ keywords the tool thinks are relevant?
  • Competitive Insights: The above data is interesting, but requires more context to make it valuable. Understanding both how your brand appears as well as how other brands appear is critical to gaining a true awareness benchmark.

Here are the features that I believe are overkill at this stage:

  • Citation data: The primary value in collecting citation data is diagnostic. We’re not diagnosing anything at this stage, we’re benchmarking visibility. Too many metrics muddles the signals into noise.
  • Exportable data: This is a ‘nice to have’, but I don’t think it’s required at this stage. If the tool you’re using is clunky in its exports and tries to keep you focused on the UI, that’s a pain but it is manageable. 
⚡ How to Advance: 

Use this data to build an executive narrative - a ‘state of AI search’. 
What strengths have you observed? This could be visibility in specific product categories or accuracy in understanding of branded prompts. 
Similarly, what weaknesses have you observed? Translate those weaknesses into opportunities. Opportunities that require further investment to exploit.

Level 3: Playing Defense

You’ve presented a ‘state of AI search’ overview to your executive stakeholders and they are bought in that there’s opportunity here. You’ve got approval to allocate budget and resources to take this a step or two further. 

It’s possible your existing SEO tracker can work here. This may also be the stage in which you’re ready to invest in a new tool. My advice: If you’re ready to invest in a new tool, make it a short term contract. You may find you have different needs or team preferences once you move to the final stage, and you don’t want to be locked into the wrong technology.

Here are the priority features to look for:

  • High Volume Tracking: You’re going to need to start tracking a higher volume of prompts at this stage. You still want to track your basic prompts i.e. “What’s the best SEO agency?” but you’ll also want to layer in different personas and specific features/benefits your audience may be searching for, i.e. “What’s the best SEO agency for B2B?” and “What’s the best SEO agency for B2B brands to maximize high PPC investments?”
    • Note: You’ll never reach a point where you track every iteration of what your audience may search for. That’s not the goal. The goal is to get coverage on as many configurations as possible.
  • Share of Voice: This is a north star metric for execs, and it’s especially useful if you can slice and dice SOV by priority persona or business segment.
  • Custom Tagging: Speaking of slicing and dicing, this is most likely to be possible if your tool allows for custom tagging. 
  • Sentiment Trends: We’ve spoken extensively about this, but in short: I think sentiment data is primarily useful in tracking branded prompts i.e. “Tell me about Seer Interactive”
  • Custom Frequency: You’ll want to track some priority prompts daily, while weekly will be fine for others.

Here are features that are really nice to have:

    • Topical Heatmap: This level of tracking configuration enables you to show a single visual that depicts where you’re winning and where you’re losing. It’s catnip for execs, and tremendously helpful for your strategists.
  • Citation Tracking: Again, citations are largely helpful for diagnostic work. We aren’t there yet, but it can be helpful to leverage these insights as part of stakeholder education.

Here are other elements you’ll need to account for in budgeting and resourcing to fully live into this level:

  • Analysis: Once you buy the data, who’s going to do the analysis? You, your team, or your agency will need to be able to turn data into actionable insights. This may mean de-prioritizing other scheduled work or investing in additional support.
  • Measurement Strategy: Your analysis will be far stronger if you include insights from your website analytics. The traffic numbers may be small, but what do conversion rates look like? What pages are users landing on and what are they doing from there? This data will help your stakeholders understand the upside of the investment.
  • Cross-Functional Education: Just like with traditional SEO, AI Search lives or dies based on cross-functional support. Before you have asks for other teams, start with education. Get aligned in terminology and opportunities to increase your likelihood of successful collaboration in the future.
⚡ How to Advance:You’ve successfully moved to this level of robust reporting, and your strategists (who have developed a keen ability to identify patterns & develop hypotheses) have reviewed the data and its trends to identify a testing roadmap. 
You know the strengths you need to maintain. You also know the gaps you need to fill. And best of all, your team is ready to shift from defense to offense once you approve.

Level 4: Playing Offense

Your full team is on board with the opportunity at hand and the potential ahead of you. You’re fired up about your ability to beat your competitors and build yourself an AI Search moat.

Here are the priority features you need:

    • Citation Tracking: You are finally ready for citation data! You’ll want to be able to easily sort through citation domains and pages, filtering by LLM and custom tags.
    • Robust Filtering: The more you can slice and dice a representative sample of data, the more threads your analysis will have to pull in in testing & optimization. Our team tends to use the UI for this type of exploration
  • Robust Exporting via API: Inevitably you or your stakeholders will develop hypotheses about the relationship between AI Search visibility and other channels. Do we see an increase in branded paid clicks when SOV increases by 10%? What about 20%? No tool will tell you this natively, which is why the ability to easily export is key.

Here are nice to have features:

    • Timeline/Event Annotation: The ability to tag specific Input dates (e.g., Footer Update Deployed) to see if they correlate with Sentiment or Description changes.
  • AI Bot Visibility: Many of today’s tools offer insight into how AI bots are accessing your content. This isn’t the only way to get this data, if you have access to log files you can do this research yourself. 
  • Query Fan Out Visibility: When a user prompts an LLM, there are times when the LLM will perform a websearch to supplement it’s existing knowledge. Query Fan Out refers to the search terms searched by LLMs based on the prompt. Few tools have this data at scale, but it’s a very intriguing connective tissue between traditional and AI Search. 

Here are other elements you’ll need to account for in budgeting and resourcing to fully live into this level:

  • Testing Workstream: We’ve moved beyond a special ‘one-off’ project, and now you need to resource this work. Who’s going to be ideating tests? Who will implement them? Who will measure efficacy? While cross-functional collaboration is important (more on that later), you also need accountable and responsible individuals.
  • Reporting: You could consider this part of your Testing Workstream, but if you’re already engaged with an internal team or agency for SEO reporting, you may have an opportunity to build upon existing frameworks vs create something new.
  • Cross-Functional Collaboration: Your analysis will reveal the highest priority opportunities, but you still need to implement them. Your mileage will vary when it comes to the details, but it’s a good bet that you’ll need support from PR or Communications as well as IT or Web Development. Your existing SEO and Content support should be able to handle the bulk of the remaining work.

Where do you go from here?

At this point perhaps you have realized I haven’t recommended a single GEO tracking tool. That’s by design.

I figured, if you’re reading this you probably already have a few contenders in mind. Take calls with those contenders and consider what level you’re at, and review the tool’s features accordingly.

No idea where to start? Ask your peers, find their customers, and get insights from those you trust. As a rule, I take just about every demo request call that I see. This space is evolving rapidly, and I find it helpful to hear from all parties that are out there.

If you’ve read this far to see what stack we use at Seer, as of December 2025 here it is:

  • Scrunch is our primary GEO tracker, and we’re confident it gets us (and our clients) all the way through Level 4 on the maturity model.
  • Peec.ai is also a great tool that we use as a backup and for specific use cases. Peec is a good bet to get you through Level 4 as well.
  • We additionally have access to SEMrush and Ahrefs. Your mileage may vary, but I would consider these tools good bets to get you through Level 3.
  • Further, we collect various search data metrics from DataforSEO’s API. 

I’d recommend investing in multiple trackers if you’re bullish on AI Search. Simply because it’s very difficult to find one tool that does everything you want it to do. 

My final piece of advice is that in the AI era, I like betting on speed boats over cruise ships. The teams that can collect our feedback and quickly ship feature requests are the ones I most want to work with. Established players have many advantages, but shifting strategic direction is not one of them.


Want to learn more about how brands that work with Seer are moving through these stages of AI maturity? Let’s talk. 





Source link

Categories: SEO Tips

Related Articles