AEO Tracker: Use Ours Free or Build Your Own

The short version: An AEO tracker measures outcomes: mentions, citations, engine coverage, and share of voice over time. An audit diagnoses possible causes. Use our free AEO Visibility Tracker to log results, then run the AI Visibility Audit to find readiness gaps.

What Is an AEO Tracker?

An AEO tracker measures whether AI engines mention or cite your brand. It runs a stable set of buyer questions across engines, records the answers, and shows how visibility changes. A tracker measures outcomes. It does not grade the site factors that may have caused them.

There are three ways to get one:

Approach	What You Get	Best For
Free AEO tracker (use our browser-based tracker)	A recurring log of prompts, mentions, citations, and engine coverage	Tracking visibility over time at zero cost
DIY prompt-testing sheet	A spreadsheet of buyer prompts you re-run monthly per engine, logging mentions	Teams that want ongoing tracking at zero cost
Paid tracking platform	Automated citation monitoring across engines, with alerts and competitor views	Brands already earning citations that need trend data

Start with the free tracker and audit. Move to a paid platform once you have enough prompts and citations to justify automation. Keep the distinction clear: the tracker records visibility, while the audit diagnoses readiness. This post covers both and gives you a tracker workflow to reproduce.

We rolled out our free AI Visibility Audit earlier this year. It is part of a growing set of free tools we are building for customers and growth marketers.

AI engines like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews are a real distribution channel now. Frase reports AI-referred traffic is growing 527% year over year. RankScience found visitors from AI search convert at 4 to 5x the rate of regular organic traffic. This is already happening, not some future trend you can wait out.

The goal is bigger than getting your name to “show up” in AI results. It’s to change how you think about content so AI visibility becomes a normal part of how you work.

Building the tool took real effort, and nothing stops you from doing the same. Here’s how we figured out what’s working.

Where Did the Research Come From?

We learned from two places: our own client work and academic research.

What we saw firsthand

During a consulting engagement with Hedge Fund Alpha, we noticed something odd. The more we posted on Reddit and YouTube, the more likely we were to show up in ChatGPT answers. And this was a big jump: our Reddit posts and comments led to a 300% increase in ChatGPT mentions. (ChatGPT still drives more referral traffic than Claude and other AI engines, but I expect that to change soon.)

At People Inc, while leading growth for MyRecipes, I saw firsthand how internal experiments with YouTube and content summaries led to higher mentions across AI engines. With over 200 million visitors, People Inc’s main revenue source is search traffic. Figuring out AI was not optional for them.

What the research says

We also drew from outside sources:

• The Princeton/Georgia Tech GEO study, which analyzed 10,000 AI queries and found that citing credible sources boosts your chances of showing up in AI answers by 30-40%
• Research from Ahrefs, Semrush, Amsive, and HubSpot on what gets brands mentioned by AI
• Conversations and events with people like Jonathan Martinez (GrowthPair) and Sean Ellis on growth-led discovery strategies

Which Five Readiness Factors Does the Audit Group?

Our audit groups citation readiness into five factors. These are diagnostic inputs, not the metrics in the tracker and not a guarantee of source selection.

Factor	What It Means	Key Stat
1. Page structure	Format content so AI can easily pull answers: tables, question-and-answer sections, short direct answers	Tables get cited 34% of the time vs 3% for plain paragraphs
2. Third-party authority	Get mentioned on Reddit, G2, Wikipedia, YouTube, and industry publications	85% of AI citations come from third-party sources, not your own site
3. Citations and credentials	Use real statistics, cite where you got them, and put a named author on every piece	Adding citations boosts visibility by 30-40% (Princeton/GEO study)
4. Technical setup	Behind-the-scenes site code, FAQ pages, an llms.txt file, clean URLs	Sites with the right technical setup get cited 2.8x more often
5. Freshness	Keep content updated and publish regularly	76.4% of top-cited pages were updated within 30 days

Here is what each one looks like in practice.

1. Structure your pages so AI can pull answers from them

AI engines don’t read your page top to bottom. They scan for passages they can grab and drop straight into an answer. So the format of your content is what decides whether you get picked or skipped.

What works:

• Question-style headings followed by a direct answer (40-60 words), then a longer explanation
• Comparison tables whenever you’re comparing features, pricing, or options. AI engines love tables
• Bullet points and numbered lists for supporting detail
• Short paragraphs. Two to three sentences. Keep sentences under 20 words when you can

Our content-structure benchmark puts tables first at 34%, followed by Q&A blocks at 29% and structured lists at 21%. Plain paragraphs trail at 3%. Treat those figures as prioritization guidance, then use your tracker to measure what each engine cites in your market.

2. Build authority on third-party platforms

This was the most surprising finding. 85% of the time AI engines cite a brand, the source is a third-party website, not the brand’s own site. Ahrefs found in December 2025 that how often your brand gets mentioned across the web is the single strongest predictor of whether AI will cite you, ahead of how many sites link to you and how well-known your domain is. Mentions matter way more than links.

According to research from Amsive, the platforms that matter most are Reddit, Wikipedia, G2, YouTube, and authoritative industry publications. And it’s better when communities mention your brand on their own rather than through traditional PR.

Here’s what creates a real flywheel: publish original research that other people cite. More third-party mentions lead to more AI citations. We saw this play out directly with Hedge Fund Alpha.

3. Add real numbers, cite your sources, and put a name on it

The Princeton/Georgia Tech GEO study gives the clearest evidence here. Across 10,000 queries:

• Adding credible source citations boosted visibility by 30-40%
• Swapping vague claims (“very fast”) for specific statistics (“10,000 requests per second”) boosted visibility by 30-40%
• Content with a named author and visible credentials gets cited 41% more often

The takeaway is simple. Replace marketing fluff with real numbers, cite where they came from, and put a real person’s name on the content with their credentials visible. AI engines reward all three heavily.

4. Get the technical setup right

I did not know much about this until recently, but it makes a real difference. Here is what it involves:

• Structured data: This is code your developer adds behind the scenes that tells AI engines what your page is about. Is it a product? An article? A FAQ? Sites with this get cited 2.8x more often, according to AirOps
• FAQ pages with the right code: If you have a FAQ section on your site, there’s a way to tag it so AI engines can read the questions and answers directly. Only 10.5% of AI-cited pages do this. Adding it gives you a real edge
• An llms.txt file: A simple text file you add to your website that tells AI engines what your site is about and where your key pages are. Think of it as a welcome mat for AI
• Clean URLs: Descriptive URLs with 5-7 words get 11.4% more AI citations than generic ones
• The content formats that get cited most: “Best of” lists, “vs” comparison pages, how-to guides, product pages with clear factual descriptions, and original data studies

5. Keep freshness accurate

Freshness belongs in the readiness model because current answers often need current sources. Update content when facts, products, examples, or recommendations change. Do not change a date without making a meaningful revision.

In our internal sample, 76.4% of top-cited pages had been updated within 30 days. That is a correlation, not proof that a new date causes citations. Use freshness to keep the page accurate, then let the tracker show whether visibility changes.

How Should Tracking Differ by AI Platform?

Each AI engine rewards different things. We learned this the hard way:

• ChatGPT rewards authority and clarity. It cites Wikipedia in nearly half its answers
• Google AI Overviews overlaps heavily with traditional search (76% overlap with the organic top 10)
• Perplexity prefers fresh content with lots of cited sources and averages 6.6 references per answer
• Claude favors structured, long-form content with clear logical flow

Here’s the kicker: there’s less than 1% overlap between what ChatGPT and Perplexity cite for the same query. Treat them as one channel and you leave a lot of visibility on the table.

How Did We Build the Audit?

The audit is the diagnostic tool, not the tracker. We built it to inspect six scoring categories that sit behind visibility outcomes.

1. Put all our research into one document. Every stat, every best practice, every scoring idea in one place. (We published this as part of our AEO/GEO service page.)
2. Fed it to Claude and planned how the audit would work. We mapped six audit-only categories: crawler access, structured data, content structure, third-party presence, citations and authorship, and freshness. The five readiness factors above group crawler access and structured data together as technical setup.
3. Built the tool with Claude Code. We went from plan to working prototype in about a week.
4. Tested it against real sites and iterated. This is where it got interesting.

What surprised us during the build

A few things we didn’t expect:

• You need web search APIs. Claude Code can’t browse the web on its own. We added APIs like EXA and Brave Search to check brand presence on Reddit, Wikipedia, G2, and other platforms
• Every scan costs money. Each time someone runs a report, it costs us a little. This is why we gated part of the report behind an email capture. We need to at least start building a relationship with the people using the tool
• Scoring is harder than it sounds. Grading a website’s AI readiness is not straightforward. We spent a lot of time scanning well-known sites like HubSpot and Ahrefs to calibrate. Every time we added a new check, we had to go back and see if the grades still felt right

How Do You Build Your Own AEO Tracker?

Build the tracker around a stable measurement protocol. The goal is not to grade your website. It is to rerun the same buyer questions and compare the answers over time.

1. Create the prompt set. Start with 20 to 50 questions buyers ask during discovery, comparison, and purchase. Keep the wording fixed after the baseline.
2. Choose the engines. Track ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, and Claude where access is available. Record the model or product surface when possible.
3. Define the fields. Log the run date, engine, prompt, brand mention, owned-domain citation, cited URL, named competitors, and answer notes.
4. Establish the baseline. Run every prompt once before changing the site or authority program. That first complete run is the comparison point.
5. Set the cadence. Monthly runs suit most teams. Use weekly runs during a launch or a concentrated update, but do not compare periods with different prompt sets.

Use the same formulas on every run:

Metric	Formula	What It Shows
Mention rate	Answers naming your brand / total answers	How often the brand appears
Citation rate	Answers citing your domain / total answers	How often engines use your site
Engine coverage	Engines mentioning you / engines tracked	Whether visibility spans platforms
Share of voice	Your mentions / all tracked brand mentions	Your presence against named competitors

A spreadsheet is enough for the first baseline. Automate only after the prompt set, fields, and review rules are stable. Save raw answers or screenshots so a human can verify ambiguous mentions and citations.

How Can You Try This Yourself?

Here’s what I’d recommend:

1. Use our free AEO Visibility Tracker or create the baseline sheet above.
2. Run the AI Visibility Audit separately to diagnose readiness gaps.
3. Repeat the same prompt set on schedule and compare mention rate, citation rate, engine coverage, and share of voice.

Send me a note at alex@theremarkableagency.com if you have questions about how to do this or want help improving your AEO/GEO visibility. Or Book a Free Strategy Call and we will walk through it together.