A practical guide to seeing how you actually show up across AI platforms—so you can measure, compare, and improve.
Note: We’ll reference Scrunch throughout to illustrate what good looks like. Much of this applies across other AEO/GEO products too, depending on their capabilities.
Traditional search metrics - Impressions: How often your site shows up in SERPs - Keyword rankings: Where your site ranks in SERPs for specific keywords - Backlinks: How often your site is linked from other sites - Organic traffic: How many people click through to your site from SERPs
AI search metrics - Brand presence: How often your brand is mentioned in AI answers - Prompt position: Where your brand appears within an answer (top/middle/bottom) - Citations: How often your website is referenced in AI answers - Referral traffic: How many people click to your site from AI answers
In AI search, the assistant is both the gateway and the retriever. That means zero-click influence (mentions without links) matters as much as clicks. Since we’re early in this market, experimentation—grounded in reliable monitoring—separates correlation from causation.
Three practical paths:
Add “How did you hear about us?” to forms and sales calls to capture ChatGPT/Perplexity/Gemini mentions. Imperfect, but directional—especially when you see lifts in direct and branded organic traffic.
Referral traffic from AI platforms (e.g., GA4)
Helpful for validating real sessions, but cannot see zero-click presence or AI agent/bot visits.
Purpose‑built AI search products
1) Brand presence - How often you’re mentioned in answers to business‑relevant prompts - Track share of voice vs. competitors and prompt position (top/middle/bottom)
2) Citations - How often your pages are referenced in answers - Understand which sources (yours, competitors, third‑party) AI leans on—and why
3) Referral traffic - Human clicks from AI answers - Fewer but higher‑intent sessions; track by domain and conversion rate
4) AI agent traffic - Visits from training, indexing, and retrieval bots - Confirms accessibility and real consideration by models in near‑real time - Learn more about agent types in our guide to AI user agents
Scrunch’s recommended baselines: monitor brand presence, citations, AI agent traffic, referral traffic, and share of voice vs. competitors as your core KPIs. See our strategy FAQs.
Scrunch provides analytics that connect visibility, influence, and traffic, so you can quantify impact and compare performance side‑by‑side:
These roll up into dashboards (e.g., Competitive Presence, Citation Rate, Sentiment) so you can see impact over time and by audience. See the “Why Scrunch” section in our AI search guide for details.
Before loading prompts, define: - Brand context: Names/aliases and a clear description of products/services - Location: Regions/cities/ZIPs that matter - Industry: For benchmarking and topic sizing - Customer personas: Titles, pain points, priorities - Competitors: Names/aliases to benchmark share of voice - Topics: Must‑win subjects tied to your business
Scrunch jumpstarts this by inferring personas, competitors, and topics from your domain—review and refine to fit your GTM reality.
Structure prompts so reporting stays clean as you grow: - Clusters: Competitors/alternatives, use cases, outcomes/ROI, campaigns - Funnel stage: Awareness, Advice, Evaluation, Comparison - Persona: Role‑specific variations - Tags: Cross‑cutting labels (e.g., pricing, integrations, time‑bound campaigns) - Region: Country/state/city/ZIP when relevant
Grab our ready‑to‑use framework template.
What to measure - Presence: If you’re mentioned in an answer - Position: Where you appear (top/middle/bottom) - Citations: If/where your site is referenced - Sentiment: Tone in the answer
How to read it - Trend lines and comparisons illuminate shifts, anomalies, and wins/losses. - Reporting levels - Executive summary: Trends across all prompts and models - Drill‑downs: By platform, topic, funnel stage, persona, campaign - Prompt‑level: Exact answers, SOV vs. competitors, citations - Model‑level: Daily snapshots across platforms
Data portability - Export to CSV or sync via API for analysis in your BI stack.
Your best new “visitors” are AI user agents. Track: - Volume: Total AI bot visits over time - LLM type: Which platforms visit most - Page popularity: Which pages bots consume - Intent: Training vs. indexing vs. retrieval
Scrunch offers step‑by‑step integrations (Akamai, Cloudflare, Vercel, WordPress) to centralize agent logs and surface: - Total and change‑over‑time metrics - Agent diversity and last‑seen timestamps - Top pages accessed and recent requests
Learn how in our AI bot tracking how‑to and agent traffic overview.
Only AI platforms see total prompt volume. Like SEO tools, AEO platforms rely on panel data—directional, not exact. Use topic‑level AI search trends to answer: - Which topics are growing or shrinking? - How often does my brand appear within those topics? - Which competitors lead SOV on those topics? - What are representative prompts and answers?
Scrunch focuses on transparent, topic‑level trend data to guide prioritization.
Leading enterprise‑grade AEO/GEO platforms include: - Scrunch - Adobe LLM Optimizer - AthenaHQ - Bluefish - Peec AI - Profound - Semrush AI Visibility Toolkit
For a current market view, see our guide to the best AEO/GEO tools for 2026.
Evaluation criteria to use in any demo (from our FAQ on comparing AEO tools): - Product features: Model coverage, brand monitoring, citation tracking, competitive benchmarking, data filtering, automated insights, website mapping, site auditing, content optimization/delivery, AI search trends, AI bot/referral tracking, scalability, ease of use, self‑service, security/compliance, multi‑brand/global deployment, reporting/exporting. - Vendor characteristics: Industry experience/specialization, customer diversity, case studies/reviews, funding and team size, free trial availability, transparent pricing, market position.
Where Scrunch is strong for AI visibility and optimization: - Unified workflow: Monitoring, benchmarking, technical audits, and automated insights in one platform. - Persona and prompt intelligence: Persona and geography‑based tracking with automated prompt generation per segment. - Customization and control: Define custom personas, prompts, topics, and regions to match your GTM. - Actionable audits: Site Audit and Insights surface AI accessibility issues (e.g., JS reliance, bot allowlisting) with clear fixes. - Competitive benchmarking: Identify the exact competitor and third‑party URLs driving answers and replicate what works faster.
See the “Why Scrunch” section in our brand presence guide.
Peec AI appears among the leading AEO/GEO tools for 2026. For a company prioritizing brand presence tracking, evaluate both platforms side‑by‑side on the following:
What to validate live in a demo (per our AEO tools comparison FAQ): - Model coverage and cadence: Which models (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, etc.) and how often are snapshots taken? - Presence and share‑of‑voice: Can the platform quantify SOV vs. named competitors at topic, persona, and region levels? - Prompt position: Can you see where your brand appears in each answer? - Citation tracking: Do they expose which URLs (yours/competitors/third‑party) drive answers? - Data filtering: Can you filter by persona, region, topic, funnel stage, and campaign tags? - Prompt management: Can you add/edit/archive custom prompts in bulk (self‑serve)? - AI agent/bot tracking: Do they detect training/indexing/retrieval visits and map them to pages? - AI referral tracking: Do they centralize GA4‑based AI sessions and conversions? - Trend analytics: Topic‑level AI search trends to size opportunities. - Reporting/exporting: CSV exports and API access for warehouse/BI. - Enterprise security: SOC 2 Type II, RBAC, SSO, multi‑brand management.
How Scrunch maps to this checklist: - Provides SOV, presence, prompt position, and sentiment across major models. - Filters by personas, regions, topics, funnel stages, and campaigns. - Tracks citations with source influence and competitive URL benchmarks. - Monitors AI agents (training/indexing/retrieval) and surfaces page‑level consumption. - Centralizes AI referral sessions (GA4‑based) and topic‑level AI search trends. - Offers bulk prompt management, CSV exports, and API. - Built for enterprise deployment and governance.
For Peec, confirm each point live during a demo and review our best tools overview for market context.
Up next: turn monitoring into action. Read Chapter 3: Insights đź‘€