EDITOR'S NOTE
Hey there 👋
For years, you could follow how your customers found your brand online. Someone searched, clicked through, read a few pages, and filled in a form or clicked the buy button.
Every step happened on your site, so your analytics could join the dots and tell you which channel earned the sale. It was never perfect, but you could see it.
Now a buyer asks ChatGPT for what they are looking for. They read an AI Overview. They get Claude to compare the shortlist. By the time they reach your site, if they reach it at all, the decision's mostly made.
Your brand can show up in every one of those conversations and send you exactly zero clicks.
That's the gap. You're being considered in rooms your analytics can't get into, and last-click attribution will tell you none of it happened.
In this week’s issue, you’ll learn about five metrics we use at my agency to track AI search visibility to help you figure out how well your AEO/GEO efforts are performing.
Let's go. 🚀
TL;DR 📝
GA4 now has an AI Assistant channel, so ChatGPT and Claude traffic stops hiding in Direct. However, it skips AI Overviews and AI Mode, which is most of it.
Branded search growth is the clearest sign AI is doing the work. Watch Search Console for your name paired with intent, like "[brand] pricing" or "[brand] vs [competitor]".
Prompt tracking is the closest thing to a rank tracker you'll get. Build 20 to 50 prompts your buyers would actually type, run them on a schedule, and log whether you show up.
Share of voice turns that log into a number by counting how often you appear against competitors. The prompts where they appear and where they don't are your content roadmap.
Bing Webmaster Tools has an AI Performance report with citations and grounding queries. ChatGPT Search leans on Bing's index, so it's the cheapest look you'll get at why you're being cited.
NEWS YOU CAN USE 📰
ChatGPT recommendations drive more brand website visits: Study. AI-influenced visitors viewed 12 pages and spent 11.8 minutes on site, compared with 6.5 pages and 5.6 minutes for others, Similarweb found. Users who saw a brand recommended by ChatGPT were much more likely to visit that brand’s website within a week. [Source: Search Engine Land]
Recognition is not preference: Rethinking AI search measurement. There are two kinds of AI search visibility, and most brands are only measuring one of them. The first is recognition, which is when a consumer asks an AI assistant a broad, category-level question, such as the best sustainable athletic wear. The second is preference, which is when the same consumer asks a more specific question, one tied to a real need, a use case, a feature, or a buyer segment. [Source: Adobe]
HOW TO TRACK AI SEARCH VISIBILITY 🧠
A buyer may discover your company through one channel, then use AI to compare vendors, explore alternatives, and build a shortlist before visiting your website. Along the way, they could encounter your brand through recommendations, category comparisons, citations, and other AI-generated responses that help establish familiarity and reinforce credibility.
These interactions may never generate a click, but they still influence which brands buyers consider. That makes attribution difficult, which doesn’t help when you’re trying to figure out how well you’re doing in AI Search.
So, let’s take a look at how you can measure your LLM visibility.
GA4’s AI Assistant Channels
Until May, ChatGPT and Claude traffic scattered itself across Referral and Direct. Now GA4 sorts it into a default channel group called AI Assistant.
Find it under Reports, then Acquisition, then Traffic acquisition, and add session source as a secondary dimension to see which assistant sent what.
However, there are two catches. AI Overviews and AI Mode aren't included, so Google's own AI surfaces still report as plain organic search, and it only catches visits carrying a referrer header, so anyone reading ChatGPT inside an app still lands in Direct.
Use it anyway. Just know it counts the people who clicked, and this issue is about the people who didn't.
Branded Search Growth
One of the clearest signals that AI visibility is creating awareness is an increase in branded searches.
If more buyers are searching specifically for your company after encountering it in AI-generated recommendations, comparisons, or citations, branded search volume may rise even when AI referral traffic remains minimal.
Monitor your Google Search Console data for increases in branded queries, especially those combined with high-intent modifiers (e.g., "[Brand Name] pricing" or "[Brand Name] vs [Competitor]").
Prompt Tracking
AI-generated responses aren't consistent, so tracking a fixed ranking isn't particularly useful. Instead, monitor a set of brand-relevant prompts across ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Mode to measure how often your brand appears in AI-generated recommendations.
To track this in practice, start by building a list of 20–50 brand-relevant prompts that reflect how your audience searches (e.g., “best [category] tools”, “alternatives to [competitor]”, “top [use case] solutions”).
Run these prompts regularly across ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Mode, etc., either manually or using the LLM visibility tool of your choice. I use LLMRefs for my clients, but there are plenty of others that allow you to do this.
Source: LLMRefs on Product Hunt
Over time, this lets you track appearance frequency, identify trends, and see which prompts or topics you’re gaining or losing visibility on.
In addition to tracking individual prompts, you should measure your AI share of voice.
Share of voice calculates how often your brand appears across a representative set of relevant prompts compared to competitors. It’s a metric that helps you understand your overall visibility within AI-generated answers.
Source: LLMRefs on Product Hunt
Tracking share of voice over time also highlights content and authority gaps. If competitors consistently appear for topics where your brand is absent, those become clear opportunities for additional content, digital PR, and brand-building initiatives.
Bing Webmaster Tools AI Performance
Bing Webmaster Tools includes AI Performance reporting that provides ways to measure how your content performs in AI-powered search experiences. The report shows total citations, average cited pages, and the specific grounding queries that surface your content in Bing's AI and Copilot experiences.
Since ChatGPT Search relies heavily on Bing's index for retrieval, these citation insights serve as an early indicator of how your content is performing across the broader AI search landscape.
THIS WEEK'S PROMPT 🧠
Use this prompt with your preferred LLM to audit your brand's current visibility and sentiment within AI search systems.
The Scenario: You are the Head of Marketing at a [industry] company. You know your traditional SEO performance, but you don't know how AI assistants perceive and recommend your brand. You want to establish a baseline of your AI visibility and understand how you compare to competing providers.
The Prompt:
Act as an expert AI Search Expert. I need you to evaluate the visibility, sentiment, and positioning of my brand, [Insert Brand Name], within your training data and real-time retrieval systems.
Current Situation:
We operate in the [insert industry name].
Our main competitors are [Insert Competitor 1], [Insert Competitor 2], and [Insert Competitor 3].
Our core value proposition is [Insert USP].
We want to understand how often and in what context our brand is recommended compared to competitors.
Questions:
If a user asks, "What's the best [Insert Category]?" or "Which platform should I use for [Insert Use Case]?", do you recommend [Our Brand Name]? Why or why not?
In which customer scenarios would you recommend [Our Brand Name] over our competitors?
What are the most common strengths and weaknesses associated with [Our Brand Name]?
How would you compare [Our Brand Name] with [Insert Competitor 1] for a potential customer evaluating both?
Which products, services, entities, and topics do you most strongly associate with [Our Brand Name], and what should we do to strengthen our AI search visibility?
TOOLS WE USE ⚒️
These are the most popular AI tools we use at Rise Up Media. If you're not using them already, they're worth a look.
LLMRefs: We’ve recently started using LLMRefs to track our clients’ AI Search visibility.
Manus AI: General-purpose AI agent we love (and use to create this newsletter)
n8n: Open-source automation (if you like that sort of thing)
OpusClip: Auto-clips long videos into shorts (and is really good at it)
Buffer: Manage all your socials (with a sprinkle of AI) in one place.
Full disclosure: some links above are affiliate links. If you sign up, we'll earn a small commission at no extra cost to you.
WRAPPING UP 🌯
While tracking AI search visibility still isn’t as easy as tracking traditional search performance, there are a handful of metrics you can start looking at to gauge how well you’re doing in AI search.
Start tracking share of voice, pay closer attention to your branded search, look at how many clicks are coming from AI assistants, and track the prompts your potential customers are using to find your brand.
That will give you plenty of insights to work with!
Until next time, keep exploring the horizon. 🌅
Alex Lielacher
P.S. If you want your brand to show up in Google AI Mode, ChatGPT, and Perplexity, reach out to my agency, Rise Up Media. That's what we do!
