How do you track your brand's visibility in AI search?

What to record for every answer

AI search visibility is how often your brand appears in the answers AI tools give to the questions your customers ask. You can’t see it in your analytics, because most people who read an AI answer never click through. You have to look at the answers.

For each question, on each engine, record:

What to record	Why
Was there an answer?	Google doesn’t show an AI Overview for every search. Two of our 27 marketing questions on 21 October had none.
Is your brand named?	This is the main thing you’re measuring. Note where you appear and what the answer says about you.
Is one of your pages cited?	A citation is a link to your site. You can be named without being cited, and cited without being named.
Which competitors are named or cited?	Your share only means something next to theirs. See AI share of voice.
What kinds of sources does it cite?	Articles, forums, review sites, or videos. Google’s AI Overviews cite a lot of YouTube and TikTok, and that changes what you need to make.
Who made the videos it cites?	Your channel, a creator, or a booking site. Each needs a different response.

The last two matter most for travel brands, because Google’s AI Overviews cite so much video.

Track each engine separately

Our data shows why you need to check each engine.

We asked Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude the same 11 questions on 26 October 2026. Between them they cited 194 different sites. Only 22 of those sites were cited by more than one engine for the same question, and none by all four.

Engine	Sources cited (11 answers)	Median per answer	Answers with no sources	Video sources
Google AI Overviews	103	10	0	19
Gemini	112	11	0	0
ChatGPT	52	4	2	1
Claude	47	6	4	0

Three things follow:

• A good position in one engine tells you little about the others. If you only track Google, you’re guessing about ChatGPT.
• Google’s AI Overviews cite far more video than the others. Google cited 19 videos in 11 answers. The other three engines cited 1 between them. If your customers plan on YouTube and TikTok, watch Google’s answers closely.
• ChatGPT and Claude often cite little or nothing. For those answers, whether you’re named, and how you’re described, matters more than links.

Choose the questions your customers actually ask

The examples in most AI visibility advice come from software, such as “best project management tools”. Your list should come from the people you want to book with you, at each stage of their decision:

• Choosing where to stay or what to do. They haven’t picked a brand yet: “where to stay in langkawi with kids”, “maldives resort with water slide”, “best things to do in queenstown”. These are the questions where an AI answer builds the shortlist, and where you compete with everyone.
• Comparing options. They’re checking a shortlist: “is maldives worth it for a week”, “best hotels in queenstown reddit”, “[your hotel] vs [competitor]”. Answers here lean on reviews and first-hand opinions, often from creators.
• Checking you by name. They’ve found you: “[your hotel] review”, “is [your tour] worth it”, “[your airline] baggage allowance”. Here you’re checking that the answer is accurate, and which sources it trusts about you.

Take the questions from real searches, not from a brainstorm. Autocomplete, your own site search and the questions guests send your reservations team are good places to start. See what travellers search before booking a hotel.

Keep each question’s wording fixed. If you change the wording, you can’t tell whether a change came from you or from the engine.

Do it by hand, or use a tool

By hand. Put your questions in a spreadsheet, run them in each engine from a logged-out browser, and paste each answer and its links. It’s slow but free, and the right way to start with 20 questions.

With a tool. When we asked how to track AI visibility, all four engines recommended dedicated tools, from SEO suites to specialist AI trackers. Whichever you look at, check four things:

1. It covers the engines your customers use, each reported separately.
2. It stores the full answer and every cited link, not just a score.
3. It classes sources by type, so you can see videos separately from articles.
4. You can export the raw data.

SocialSeal tracks Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude answers, and classes each cited source as a web page or a video. It also tracks who ranks on TikTok, Instagram and YouTube for the same searches, so you can see whether a video an AI cites is yours, a creator’s or a competitor’s.

How often to measure, and how to read changes

Run the same questions monthly. AI answers vary from one run to the next, so a single capture tells you what an engine can say, not what it always says. Look for changes that hold for two or three months, or that appear across several questions at once.

When you lose a position, read the sources that replaced you. They tell you what to make next: a clearer page, a third-party review, or a video that answers the question.

More on AI search visibility

• What sources Google’s AI Overview uses: we counted 331 citations.
• How to get cited in Google AI Overviews: what 119 cited pages have in common.
• What AI share of voice is, and why the two common formulas rank brands differently.