What an AI visibility checker measures
An AI visibility checker answers one question. When Google writes an AI Overview, how often is this website one of the sources?
The count is a sample of real searches in one country and one language. A high number means the site is cited often in that sample. It is a sample. Nobody outside Google has every answer Google has written, so we never call the number a rank.
In short: enter a domain. We count AI Overview citations for that site in the United States, in English, and we put the closest sites from its Google searches beside it.
What you get
- One domain. The site you type, with its subdomains counted together.
- Up to three other sites that show up on the same US searches. They are the closest by how often a buyer would see both of you on Google’s first two pages. A shared search does not prove they sell what you sell. The weekly read checks that before it calls anyone a competitor.
- A citation count for each. How many AI Overviews in the sample cite that website.
- Nothing stored on an account. The check is one look. Come back tomorrow and it runs again. It does not email you when the number moves.
What this check leaves out
- ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Claude. A prompt tracker covers those. This check is Google’s AI Overviews only.
- The questions and the sources. The weekly AI visibility tool keeps the questions behind each count and the pages the answers leaned on. A single number cannot tell you what to change.
- Your keywords. An AI Overview tracker records, for each keyword you choose, whether Google showed an AI Overview and which sites it cited.
- Prices, pages and rankings. Those are the rest of the weekly read. This page is the citation count alone.
- A history. One sample is a snapshot. AI Overviews move. A week of samples is what shows a trend.
LLM visibility checker
An LLM visibility checker is the same job aimed at answers from a large language model. Google’s AI Overviews are one of those answers, written from pages in Google’s index and shown above the usual results.
Other checkers send a list of prompts to ChatGPT every day and score the replies. That is a different measurement. It tells you what one model said to the prompts you wrote. This check tells you which sites Google’s own AI answers cite, across a sample of searches people already make.
AI visibility checker vs an AI Overview tracker
| Free AI visibility checker | AI Overview tracker | |
|---|---|---|
| What you give it | One domain | The keywords you care about, and your competitors |
| What you get | One citation count, beside sites that share your searches | Each keyword, whether an AI Overview showed and who it cited, every week |
| History | None | Week over week |
| Price | Free, one check at a time | From $49 a month, with the rest of the weekly read |
Use the checker to see whether a store is cited at all. Use the AI Overview tracker when you need the keyword, the cited page and the change since last week.
What to do with the result
- Read the order, not the raw number. Your count means something next to the sites beside it. Ahead of them, you are the one Google is citing. Behind them, open the pages they are known for and see what those pages state that yours do not.
- Don’t rewrite the site for the model. State the answer a shopper wants in the first sentences, with the facts a product page owes them: price, what it is and who it is for. That is the same work as ordinary search.
- Check the crawlers. An answer can only cite a page its crawler was allowed to read. Google’s crawler is the one that matters here.
- If the number is worth watching, watch it weekly. A free AI visibility checker will not tell you that a rival passed you on Thursday. The AI visibility tool will, with the question that changed.
Today’s free checks are capped, because each one is a paid read of Google’s AI Overviews. When the day’s checks are used up, the form says so and the weekly read is still there.