AI visibility tools: who ChatGPT and Perplexity cite for your queries

An AI visibility tool measures whether AI engines cite your site, not where it ranks — because Google positions don’t tell you whether ChatGPT or Perplexity quote you. We built a probe that asks the AI engines directly for your tracked queries, reads their answers, and shows: are you cited, and who is cited instead of you.

The problem: the tracker sees results, not the AI answer

A classic rank tracker knows one thing — a link’s position in the SERP. From it you can indirectly guess a Google AI Overview hit. But engines that aren’t built on Google’s results — Perplexity, ChatGPT Search — are invisible to a normal tracker. And that’s increasingly where whether a person sees your brand gets decided.

What we built

/seo-matrix:ai-citation takes the same set of tracked keywords and, for each, actually asks an AI engine (Perplexity sonar by default; provider-agnostic), then parses the answer:

• whether you’re cited for that query;
• which domains are cited instead of you (competitors in the answer);
• citation share — your share of citations across the query set;
• movement vs the last run — who entered the AI answers, who dropped out.

History is journaled (ai-citation-history.jsonl), so you see the trend, not a single snapshot.

First — a free pre-check

The probe is paid: one call per keyword. To avoid spending on queries you can’t win, there’s a $0 offline pre-check, /seo-matrix:citation-sim. It takes the best page for each keyword, scores its citation-worthiness (the same 0–100 heuristic as citation-audit), and predicts a verdict — likely / borderline / unlikely / weak / no_coverage — splitting queries into ”🔬 probe” vs ”🛠 fix first.” The paid probe spends only on what’s actually winnable.

Why it works this way

An AI answer is assembled from extractable passages, not positions: one query fans out into sub-queries, and a source makes the answer by citation frequency, not by its rank line (see our breakdown, What is GEO). So “am I cited” is a separate metric — measure it with a direct probe, don’t infer it from positions.

What to do with it

1. Run citation-sim → get the list of winnable queries.
2. Run ai-citation on them → see where you are, where a competitor is.
3. Where a competitor is cited, strengthen the page (facts, sources, extractable paragraphs) and re-probe.

In short

• Positions ≠ AI citation; a normal tracker can’t see Perplexity/ChatGPT.
• ai-citation asks the engines directly → are you cited, and who instead of you.
• citation-sim ($0) filters out unwinnable queries first — pay only for winnable ones.
• Citation is a separate metric; measure it with a direct probe.

Sources

• This is a native seo·matrix capability (/seo-matrix:ai-citation + /seo-matrix:citation-sim), validated against the live Perplexity API.
• Why citation ≠ position: Aggarwal et al., “GEO”, KDD ‘24 — arXiv:2311.09735.
• AI-answer architecture (query fan-out, citation chips): US v. Google case materials (2025).