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AI Citation Tracking” Feels Like Snake Oil
Posted by on May 7, 2026 at 11:51 pmI find it absurd and frankly foolish when people claim that GEO and AEO are truly measurable.
The results vary every single time depending on highly dynamic factors such as system settings, personalized memory, AI subscription plans, external search resources, constantly changing synthesis outputs, and even unknown user query prompts.
And yet people claim they can solve all of that and accurately track AI citations? What kind of tool in the world could possibly do that? If such a tool exists, I believe it’s either a scam or the results are going to be terrible.
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1 Reply
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Your right, there isn’t a tool that can accurately do it. You can throw aload of money at it and you’ll have some idea , but the juice isn’t worth the squeeze at the moment in my opinion.
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Absolutely agree
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Yes the model is stochastic but not as much as you might image. Test API responses vs. VPN for the location and you get some pretty consistent results.
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The skepticism is fair and most tools selling “AI visibility scores” deserve it. But the challenge is methodological, not fundamental.
The variance you are describing is real. Memory, personalization, subscription tier, query phrasing all affect outputs. Where people go wrong is treating a single snapshot as ground truth. What actually gives you signal is running the same prompts repeatedly, across multiple engines, with consistent phrasing, and looking at trend lines not point-in-time scores. That levels out most of the stochastic noise.
The part that does remain genuinely hard is personalized memory. Short of running everything through API without memory or using clean browser contexts, you are always measuring a slightly different surface. Honest tools will tell you that upfront.
I built something in this space so I am obviously biased, but the way we approached it was to track mention rate and citation rate separately across ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and a few others, using standardized prompt sets tied to your product and buyer stage. Over enough runs, the pattern becomes pretty reliable. Not perfect, but directionally useful.
The tools that just give you a score with no methodology breakdown? Yeah those are probably snake oil. Worth asking any vendor how they normalize for the variables you mentioned before trusting the number.
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