What Is an AEO Tracker? (And Why Your Old Analytics Don't Work Anymore)
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What Is an AEO Tracker? (And Why Your Old Analytics Don't Work Anymore)

When someone asks ChatGPT "what's the best CRM for startups?" and gets your brand in the answer, they might never click your site. No visit. No session. No conversion in Google Analytics. The value still happened. You just can't see it.
That's the problem AEO trackers solve. Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) is about how AI systems like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini recommend and cite your brand. An AEO tracker measures that visibility. But the way you measure it has almost nothing in common with traditional SEO or performance marketing.

Why Traditional Attribution Broke

In classic SEO, the funnel was simple: someone searches on Google, clicks your link, lands on your site, converts. Every step was trackable. Last-touch attribution made sense.
AI answer engines changed that. Users type a question into ChatGPT or Perplexity. They get an answer in the interface. Often they never leave. No click. No referral traffic. No way for your analytics to know your brand was recommended.
One industry expert described the old attribution model as having been hit by a "nuclear bomb." The linear funnel is gone. You need a different way to measure success.

What AEO Trackers Actually Measure

AEO trackers replace the old metrics with new ones.

Citation Share

Instead of "rankings," you care about citation share: how often your brand appears in AI answers when users ask relevant questions. Success is visibility inside the answer, not the position of a link. If ChatGPT recommends you in 40% of chats about your category, that's your citation share.

Prompt Volume

Keyword volume tracked what people typed into Google's search bar. Prompt volume estimates how many real users ask specific questions in ChatGPT, Perplexity, and other conversational interfaces. This data comes from GDPR-compliant panels and predictive modeling based on real user conversations. It tells you which topics are worth optimizing for.

Product Accuracy

For some brands, the metric that matters most is whether the AI gets your facts right. If you sell a drink and the AI reports the wrong caffeine content, that's a problem. Product accuracy measures whether AI describes your brand, products, and specs correctly.

Visibility, Sentiment, and Source Authority

Good AEO trackers also show:
• Visibility: How often you show up in AI answers across different engines
• Sentiment: Whether AI describes you positively, neutrally, or negatively
• Source authority: Which domains and URLs (Reddit, news, your site) feed into AI answers so you know where to invest

How AEO Tracking Actually Works

Because so much value happens without a click, AEO tracking uses methods that traditional analytics never needed.

Self-Reported Attribution

For B2B companies, the "How did you hear about us?" field on forms is often the only way to attribute revenue to AI. It's the foundation of the new model. Sales teams should also ask prospects what prompts they used. Sometimes prospects will even screen-share their ChatGPT or Perplexity results, which gives you qualitative data on what queries drive interest.

Server-Side Tracking

To see quantitative data on "invisible" AI traffic, you go to the server layer. CDN integrations (Cloudflare, Vercel, AWS CloudFront) let you analyze server logs and see which AI crawlers are accessing your content for training or retrieval. By checking User Agents, you can tell human traffic from AI bots and understand whether your content is actually being ingested.

Triangulation

You rarely get a single source of truth. You cross-reference:
• Citations: How often AI uses your content
• Referral traffic: The small share of users who do click through
• Prompt volume: How popular the topic is
If you see high citations and high prompt volume but low referral traffic, you can infer strong brand visibility (a "billboard effect") even though clicks don't show up in analytics. One practitioner called this "dark alchemy": extrapolating truth from fragmented data instead of relying on one dashboard.

What to Look for in an AEO Tracker

Not all tools that claim to track AI visibility do the same thing. Here's what matters.
Multi-engine coverage. ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Google AI Overviews all behave differently. You need visibility across the engines your audience uses.
Brand and product tracking. If you sell multiple products or SKUs, brand mentions alone aren't enough. You need to know when AI recommends specific products, not just your company name.
Sentiment and position. Being mentioned is one thing. Being mentioned first, or positively, is another. Look for tools that show where you appear and how you're described.
Source authority. Understanding which domains feed AI answers helps you prioritize content and partnerships. Reddit, Quora, news sites, and your own site all play a role.
Iteration support. AEO is new. You need to test, measure, and adjust. A tracker that gives you data you can act on beats one that only shows numbers.

The Reality: You're Building a New Attribution Model

AEO tracking means giving up the certainty of traditional SEO. There's no single dashboard that tells you exactly how much revenue came from AI. You combine self-reported data, server logs, citation metrics, and prompt volume to build a picture.
That picture is still worth having. As more users ask AI for recommendations instead of searching Google, brands that measure and optimize for AI visibility will have an edge. The ones that don't will be guessing.

Next Steps

If you're ready to start measuring:
• Add "How did you hear about us?" to your forms and train sales to ask about prompts.
• Set up server log analysis to see which AI crawlers hit your content.
• Use an AEO tracker to monitor citation share, visibility, and sentiment across the engines that matter to your audience.
• Treat the data as directional. Triangulate. Iterate.
The brands that figure this out now will own the next phase of search.
Ready to track your AI visibility? Orvi AI monitors citation share, sentiment, and source authority across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Google AI. Start a 7-day free trial.

Source: https://orviai.app/blog/2PwpNx2UX0lWHEW0kaiymq