Four free sources cover most of it. I read them every week for my own appraisal firm, Lukes & Lukes, and for this site.
What can Bing Webmaster Tools tell me?
Bing Webmaster Tools has an AI performance report that shows how often Copilot cited your pages. It is free, and you verify your site the same way you would for regular Bing search. If you already use Google Search Console, Bing can import the verification. For Lukes & Lukes, this is the report where Copilot citations went from 835 to about 2,100 in 90 days.
What can Google Search Console tell me?
Search Console's performance report counts impressions and clicks from Google's AI features along with regular search. Watch impressions for the pages you wrote to answer buyer questions. On Lukes & Lukes, Google AI impressions went from 689 to about 1,450 in 90 days.
How do I see visits from ChatGPT and other assistants in GA4?
Look at traffic acquisition by session source. Visits from assistants show up with sources like chatgpt.com, perplexity.ai, copilot.microsoft.com, and gemini.google.com. Build a saved report or an exploration that filters to those sources so you can read it in a minute each week. These counts run low: many assistant answers never produce a click, and some visits arrive without a referrer at all.
How do I check what the assistants say about me?
Ask them, on a schedule, with the same questions every time.
- Write ten to twenty buyer questions, in your buyers' words: "Who does machinery appraisals in Minneapolis?", "How much does a website cost for a small law firm?"
- Ask each one in ChatGPT, Copilot, Gemini, Google AI Mode, and Perplexity, once a month, logged out or in a private window where you can.
- Log who gets named, in what order, and which page gets cited. A spreadsheet is plenty.
- Note your competitors. The businesses that show up instead of you tell you what pages you are missing.
Answers vary from one run to the next, so judge the trend over several months instead of any single answer.
Do I need a paid AI visibility tracker?
Not to start. Paid trackers run your prompts across assistants automatically and chart the results, and the category is changing fast, so check each vendor's current plan page before you buy. They earn their price once you have pages worth citing and more prompts than you can run by hand. Until then, the free reports and a monthly log answer the question.
How often should I check, and what does help cost?
Weekly for the dashboards, monthly for the prompt log, and always compare to the same period last month. I save the Bing and Google reports every week with a script so the history never depends on someone remembering. A one-hour check-up with me is $150: I ask the assistants your buyers' questions, show you what they say, and tell you which free reports to turn on first. Ongoing measurement fits inside a fractional CMO seat or runs hourly. Details are on the AI search page.
Answered by Jared Lukes, Minneapolis. Twenty-five years in brand, UX, and technology, currently holding fractional AI and technology seats at three companies. About Jared.