Anyone actually tracking AEO / AI citations?

[searchgarden]

I just read Neil Patel’s post with some tracking tool suggestions: https://neilpatel.com/blog/llm-optimization-llmo/

He mentions, “Semrush’s AI Tracking, Ubersuggest LLM Beta, and Ahrefs Brand Radar”

I haven’t started using any but I’d love to hear if anyone has experience with those or others.

You can also create your own set of questions and manually ask different platforms every week or so and record the results.

[seoexpertgaurav]

yeah it’s mostly manual rn No real AEO tools exist yet just people checking Perplexity/ChatGPT answers and watching referral spikes in GA. A few startups are trying to build AI citation trackers, but nothing solid like Ahrefs/SEMrush for SEO yet.

For now, best bet = set up alerts + monitor branded queries + referrals.

[betsy__k]

I am building in the space, and I can tell you even our biggest, heavily funded competitor doesn’t have solid tracking. It’s in baby stages, I would give it a few months before you can expect solid metrics from any provider.

[OldMcDonaldAEAEO]

I built a tool that does this for companies. There’s some basic metrics that everyone seems to track (visibility, share of voice, possibly sentiment) and sometimes clients want to see specific things that we add for them. DM me if you want to see what a sample report looks like

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[Jfrites]

Most people are still doing manual checks because the tooling is pretty limited right now.

There are a few options popping up but honestly most are just basic synthetic mention tracking or sentiment analysis. The real challenge is measuring context and positioning, not just whether you got cited.

Right now most brands have zero visibility into how different AI models represent them across various question types.

The manual approach works but doesn’t scale. Plus the normalization across models is a nightmare. Ask ChatGPT “best marketing software” vs “top marketing tools” and you get totally different results. Change one word and Claude might mention you while Perplexity doesn’t.

Referral analytics help but are incomplete since most people don’t click through from AI responses anyway. They just take the AI’s recommendation and go direct.

The industry is super early on this stuff. Most companies are still optimizing for Google while being invisible in AI responses.

We’re building Sentaiment to tackle exactly this problem.

[WebLinkr]

Tracking outcomes is somewhat easy:

1. Reverse engineer prompts into QFOs – track QFO’s/Drifts in SERP Reports

2. Track referral traffic + key events in GA4/ Looker

3. Use LLMs to generate prompts

Generating prompts is anything from guesswork to art but can be done. Its like SEO in the early days with more guesswork

[Yada-Yada-Yadda]

I came across this video and I plan on building it out this afternoon. It’s a way to see it in G4, but not like a 3rd party tool like Ahrefs.

How to Create an AI Traffic Report in Looker Studio

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PfQcKfCwWzM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PfQcKfCwWzM)

[agencyanalytics]

Early tools like Otterly didn’t show anything that a source medium/source referral in GA4 can’t, and some of the latest tools aren’t showing much other than very similar data to GA, just with a price tag.

SEMrush and Ahrefs have add-ons that give a bit more visibility into the AI/LLM driven traffic based on the search term/branded terms that *you choose*, but ultimately here’s no reliable tools that can tell you what prompt a user typed into an LLM/AI platform that ultimately drove them to your domain, though many companies are sprinting into solving this.

[robohaver]

SEM Rush has a tool its 65 a month. I have not used it their keyword traker tracks it also. I don’t think it is accurate as I rank for a lot of in the LLMs , overviews and AI mode and it does not reflect it.

[emuwannabe]

I have started manually tracking. It does seem to be easier of the AIO refers to a block of text because the referring URL contains that block of text so it should be easier to find in the data.

So far I’ve found 8 results across 2 of my sites where I’m the primary source.

[raviranjan2291]

I know spotting AI tools on referral traffic only.

[Lili_1027]

Yes, I just found two two that track AI search traffic:

1.LLMrefs
2.SurferSEO

[askoshbetter]

For now I’m treating it similar to serp analysis and doing recurring checks. 

I’m also tracking referrals in analytics and as part of my forms as a self attribution field. 

[fjonessr]

SE Ranking does a great job