What is an AI visibility tool?
An AI visibility tool measures whether AI assistants show your brand or link your website in their answers. A classic rank tracker reports a position on a results page. An assistant writes one answer with a handful of sources, so the useful questions change: were you cited, were you mentioned, and who was cited instead? You will also see these tools called AI visibility trackers, AI rank trackers or ChatGPT rank trackers, although a written answer has no position, only sources.
Serpel covers 2 surfaces: ChatGPT with web search and Google AI Overviews. It doesn’t query other assistants such as Perplexity, Gemini or Claude, but it does check whether the crawlers of other assistants can reach your site.
How does Serpel check ChatGPT and Google AI Overviews?
| Surface | What Serpel does | What you see |
|---|---|---|
| ChatGPT with web search | Asks your prompt in the country and language of the prompt. | Cited, mentioned or not mentioned, the cited URL, every source and an answer excerpt. |
| Google AI Overviews | Searches the same prompt on Google, on your project’s device. | Whether an Overview appears, whether it links to you or mentions you, and its sources. |
A citation means a source in the answer links to a page on your domain. A mention means your name or domain appears in the text. Cited answers count as mentioned too, and a failed check is recorded as failed, never as a miss.
AI answers change from one request to the next, so a single result is a sample. Serpel stores every check, which lets you compare citations over time and ignore one-off outliers. The Google side has its own page: AI Overview tracking.
Which AI crawlers can reach your website?
Citations need access. Each Serpel crawl tests your robots.txt against 13 AI crawlers, plus Googlebot and Bingbot, and checks whether an llms.txt file exists. A blocked AI search crawler raises a warning in the site audit, because the site can’t appear as a source there.
| Purpose | Crawlers checked | How Serpel treats a block |
|---|---|---|
| AI search | OAI-SearchBot, Claude-SearchBot, PerplexityBot, MistralAI-Index | Raises a warning in the site audit. |
| User request | ChatGPT-User, Claude-User, Perplexity-User | Listed in the access report, not flagged. |
| Training | GPTBot, ClaudeBot, Google-Extended, Applebot-Extended, CCBot, Meta-ExternalAgent | Listed in the access report, not flagged. You can block these separately. |
Without an account, the free robots.txt checker runs the same crawler check for any domain.
What does AI visibility tracking cost?
| Check | Credits per prompt | Price per prompt |
|---|---|---|
| ChatGPT with web search | 2 | €0.02 |
| Google AI Overview | 2 | €0.02 |
| Both together | 4 | €0.04 |
Checking 25 prompts once a week on both surfaces uses about 429 credits a month, or €4.29. Prompts per project: 10 on Free, 25 on Starter and 50 on Pro. Reading results costs nothing, and all plans include the dashboard, CLI and API. See pricing for plans and credit packs.
Where do you see the results?
- Dashboard: an AI visibility page with citations per prompt, a ChatGPT result chart and the most cited sources.
- Reports: new and lost citations in every monitoring report.
- CLI:
serpel ai prompts,serpel ai historyandserpel ai statusprint the same data, or JSON with--json. - API:
GET /api/v1/projects/{id}/ai-visibilityreturns the summary. The REST API also lists prompts and their history. - Coding agents:
get_project_overviewover MCP includes AI visibility next to rankings and audit results.
Start tracking AI visibility
Add the questions your customers ask
Write prompts the way people phrase them to an assistant. Serpel uses the market of your project unless you choose another.
Terminal serpel ai add --project <project-id> --prompt "Which SEO tool has a CLI?"Run a check
Check all prompts now, or let monitoring run them on your schedule.
Terminal serpel ai run --project <project-id> --waitRead the results
One summary shows citations, mentions, the most cited sources, AI crawler access and llms.txt.
Terminal serpel ai status --project <project-id>
Frequently asked questions
How do I check whether ChatGPT cites my website?
Add the questions your customers ask as prompts in a Serpel project and run a check. Serpel asks ChatGPT with web search and reports whether a source links to your domain, whether your name is mentioned or whether you are missing. It repeats the check on every monitoring run, so you see changes over time.
Does Serpel track Perplexity, Gemini or Claude?
No. Serpel checks ChatGPT with web search and Google AI Overviews. The crawler check still covers the crawlers of other assistants, such as PerplexityBot and Claude-SearchBot, so you can see whether they are allowed to fetch your pages.
How many prompts can I track?
The limit depends on your plan: 10 on Free, 25 on Starter and 50 on Pro per project. Each check of one prompt uses 4 credits when Google AI Overview tracking is on, or 2 credits for ChatGPT alone.
Why do AI answers differ between checks?
Assistants can word an answer differently and pick different sources on each request. One check is a sample, not a verdict. Serpel keeps the history of every prompt, so you can judge the trend instead of a single result.
Updated 10 Oct 2026
Keep reading
- AI Overview trackingSerpel is an AI Overview tracker: see for which Google searches an AI Overview appears and whether it cites your website, checked with every rank check.
- Generative engine optimization (GEO): what it is and what worksGenerative engine optimization (GEO) is how you get cited in AI answers. See what the research found, what Google says and a checklist you can use.
- Robots.txt checkerFree robots.txt checker: see which of 13 AI crawlers can reach your homepage, list your sitemaps and check llms.txt.
- Site auditSerpel runs a technical SEO audit with 94 checks, JavaScript rendering and Core Web Vitals, and explains every issue and its fix.