AI tracking tools: Monitoring every mention, link & traffic source (workshop)

Good old Blue Links are quickly kind of losing their attractiveness and a lot of marketing teams are already regrouping around the changes. And today you're about to see where our product team is taking the platform further to make AI search a breeze across both AI overviews and Chad GPT. If you want to be visible, you first need to understand your current state, your current state of visibility across AI results. This tool treats AI overviews as if they were a separate search engine with its separate SER. Google's AI overviews are shaping the way search uh results look like and function. They're changing user behavior, visibility, and Jon is the way we think about SEO. Hello everyone. Say hello and introduce yourselves to our guests, please. Hello. Hello. Thank you for welcoming us, Helina. I guess we can do a very short round of intros now or I guess we can also introduce ourselves as we progress before everyone can will

start talking and about their respective theme. Definitely. And I'll start. Hi everyone. I'm Mike. I'm a director of product here at SE Ranking and I'm really excited to talk about how we can support your AI search journey and about all the recent updates that will help you doing that. By AI search here, I mean two things. one is changes in traditional Google search results with the introduction and proliferation of AI overviews across the globe and number two of course is AI chats like chat GPT that are becoming the new search interface for so so many and how you can be successful with that because you're in this in this conference and in this conversation it's probably very clear to you that good old blue links are quickly kind of losing their attractiveness and a lot of marketing teams are already regrouping around the changes So here at SE Ranking, we've got you covered and we've been in this game for a long Helina, can you please switch to the next slide? Even back at the time when Google just

announced their search charity of experiences back then or SG for a short back in 2023, we've already had our first closed beta solution that was available to select customers and we already started collecting the data and playing with with back then SGE and now AI overviews. And later in August 2024, we have made AI results tracking available to everyone, empowering users with both AI overviews, link tracking, and AIO traffic estimations and competitive research. And now, earlier this May, we have also expanded link tracking in AIO with many new EU countries, including Spain, Germany, Netherlands, Portugal, and many, many others. And today you're about to see where our product team is taking the platform further to make AI search a breeze across both AI overviews and Chad GPT. So without much further ado, let's give the stage to one of our product managers, Boris. Boris, the mic is

yours. Yeah, thanks Mike. Hi everyone. Hi folks. My name is Boris and I'm the product manager of SU Rink. You're responsible for some part of the functionality of our large platform. Uh namely responsible for what that functionality does and uh generally how it looks, what it looks like. And today I'm going to show you the already existing functionality uh that can help you optimize websites and brands also for online search in this new AI reality. What you're seeing before your eyes now is uh our recent tool that uh actually allows you to track rankings of your website or even brand within AI overviews as if they were a separate uh search engine and have some metrics uh of your presence in AI or AI overviews over time. But we will not dive deep into the details of this tool just yet

because I I want to uh share some other things. First I want to tell you about the two types of approach to monitoring visibility that we uh practice here in at SE ranking. Uh I want to tell you about the way our classic tools address uh Google AI overview's existence and then I'll uh uh make a more detailed overview of this new tool that we have. So uh for now I would want to open a an example of an AI overview for you. This is just a cached copy of uh one of the one of the AI overviews. As Mike highlighted, we have we've been focusing on AI overview related functionality because Google is still uh kind of the leader uh of online search including AI search. But uh in fact AI overviews are just one type of possible AI results because there are many other tools uh uh providing AI AI search like JGPT or Perplexi or Gemini or Col or Deepseek

etc. But what unites them is uh if you want to optimize for the results of those tools, for the results of AI search, if you want to be visible, you first need to understand your current state, the your current state of visibility across AI results maybe for uh some particular keywords or in general. So this is pretty much the same as the needs for classic SEO where you need to first measure the current state. you you want to see if you're making progress or if you have to actually do anything about your optimization. Maybe you don't you maybe you don't need to do anything. Uh there are two approaches to monitoring visibility uh just like uh with the classic SEO. One is to track your visibility, track your positions across a particular set of keywords that are of interest to you uh and and uh view your visibility over time, right? Which which means uh you you need some

kind of tracking type tools, tracking tools. The other approach is to um to view report large reports of tools providing you large lists of keywords that you are organically organically visible for or you might want to be visible for while your competitors are visible. Which means uh you need research type tools for this. As for me, I'm going to show you the way SE ranking handles the first approach uh namely the ranking the rank tracking approach. Uh by the way uh whatever I show today the functionality I'm going to show I'm asking you to leave feedback in the comment section because we value all feedback and even if it's kind of brutal criticism because you know it's after all it's uh it's better to face reality than to escape from it. So back to AI overviews as you know the AI overview is is of a of a double nature is of double nature. uh it's is both a SER feature within Google search and can be treated

as a SER in itself I mean a a separate search engine and um the first simplest task of an SEO as we understand it of an SEO uh specialist as we understand it is to actually track the presence of AI overviews as SER features u which is actually available in our classic rankings detailed tool in our core core rank tracker. So you probably know if you have ever used SE ranking. Uh here uh in the rankings detailed you have both a SER features chart tab and a SER features column uh in the table which both show you the state of SER features for for this project this website uh on the last date of the period selected in the in the uh calendar period selector. So it's kind of static and here the AIO AI overview is just one of the ser

features that we we're checking and tracking. So in this example the project this example project has 10 keywords tracked and uh in this particular day on this particular day 2 the 9th of May we have six uh keywords showing triggering AI overviews. The column shows you the presence of AI overviews as this symbol per keyword as usual. But then when you when you're looking at this, you have this classic SEO project. When you're looking at at the SER features and you see that some keywords trigger AI overviews, you the next step is you might want to run a deeper analysis of what happens within those AI overviews of whether you are visible there and if you are how visible you are. And for this we have our recent dedicated tool located just in this uh in this same menu. It's called AI results tracker that actually actually analyzes uh the the content of AI overviews for your

keywords and makes some conclusions makes provides some uh higher level stats on on your visibility. This tool actually works with the same set of keywords that you have in your classic in your project. More exactly, you can select a subset uh among those keywords. In this example, I have selected all of them, all of my keyword search engine combinations to also track them in uh in this AI result tracker tool. And this tool treats AI overviews as if they were a separate search engine with its separate SER. So, it's a kind of a engine within an engine or SER within a SER, right? While this tool provides some some overview, some metrics. Uh this is based on actually on a more basic analysis that is present on the other page not the A rankings but the AA SER comparators page. This is the the beginning of uh of all the data analysis in this A results tracker tool. So this

tool is pretty similar to our classic SER competitors uh which is in the my competitors section. It what it does is it analyzes the SER or the the results of AI a overviews per date per check daily and shows decomposes those uh results decomposes the ao ser and analyzes its main parts. So what kind of analysis happens here? First each column represents a check uh date. Let me select a broader period. Each column represents a check date and each column has three sections. AI mentions, AI source links, top 20 organic results. Uh the first section AI mentions lists the relevant named entities that the tool has found in the text of this particular AI overview obtained on on this date. These entities may be businesses, brands, just abstract brands,

businesses, organizations, people, personal names, places, something that is relevant to to the query. So, and it shows them in their order of appearance in the text, right? So, it's in fact this is positions uh but of unlin mentions or maybe link mentions, but mentions is is the main part of this phrase. Uh the AI source links section lists the links that are present in within the AI overview. Usually this means the source links that are uh within the right hand column but it can al it also contains inline links that are that occur within the text if they if they do. So this is the the list of links from uh upon which AI over a Google generates its AI overviews. But then the third section top 20 organic results is uh an additional one. Uh it's it provides the top 20 obviously blue links that occurred on that same uh

Google search results page on that during that check. And here you can compare the top 20 organic uh results with the results wi-i with the links within the AI overview. And for example, if uh if there are a lot of intersections highlighted with this special magenta color that you you might you might have some uh conclusions about this. For example, that this AI overview was generated with um with the use of u sources that are in the top 20. So you might want to optimize for top 20 organic. Okay. You can you can view some other kinds of data here. For example, when you switch between keywords to their to see their AI overview history, you can see their search volume or search intent. Also, you can you can view uh the cacheed copies of those Google search pages where we uh took this every particular AI overview. I

will already shown you an example of this. Okay. And um you can also view plain text of of the AI overview answers just for for the speed of it. And by the way, here's an example. So on on the 19th of May, this particular brand Medvidi, a a clinic of telly health was on position two among mentions and on position one among links. And let's look at the corresponding AI overview result here. So here the mentions that were extracted there are they they occurred in the first paragraph. So the first position of mentions was Clarity Health and our brand of that project Madvidi was uh in position two. As for links here we had uh an inline link to the uh to actually the Medvidi website which is position one. as we see here that we seen in the AI source links uh section. This is not extremely typical. The more

typical example would be this one uh when the options uh suggested for for the user to review are listed as a as a bulletoint list as a as a listicle but still we look at all the mentions both in line like in in paragraph and listed mentions. Uh so as you can see we uh work with two types of visibility within uh AI overviews. This is straightforward but still so one type is whether your brand is visible among mentions and whether your site is visible among the links within AI overview. And upon this uh simple or maybe not so simple but still basic analysis, we built our rankings history and our metrics presented on the AI rankings page right here. This AI rankings tool is pretty similar to our classic core rankings

detail tool, right? The the classic SEO tracker, but there are a number of differences. So the most prominent difference is that the positions shown here are positions within AI overviews as I already said within AI overviews as if they were a separate search engine. And for each date the positions are split in two col into two columns. One uh is positions for mentions and another one is for links. Otherwise the logic is is the same as with uh the classic rank tracker. Another important difference is in the nature of of the metrics that we have here. Here in this tool we uh don't have traffic forecast yet. We don't have visibility calculated uh by a special formula yet. We don't have average position uh as in our classic rankings because average positions would wouldn't make much sense here. But what we have is quite a simple uh me uh presence

presence metric both for mentions and for links. What is what is its nature? Let's let's look at one example. So here we have the 21st of May. For example, if we look at the AI overview presence on on on May 21st, we had five keywords among these these keywords tracked here for this search engine. We had five out of 10 keywords showing or triggering an AI overview. Right? So let's look at the mention link presence chart. 21st May we registered two mentions two keywords had mentions of our brand medi within the AI overview text. Two out of five means 40%. So mentioned presence is 40%. Um, as for links in this example, four out of those five AIO reviews had a link to Medvid's site, which means 80% presence of uh links in AO. I hope this this helps understand this metric. So in

other in other words, this is how present how much presence you have among the AI overviews for this uh particular set of keywords that are of interest to you. There's a variation of this uh general metric which is called top three presence. It is the same but it it does not account for all positions but only uh for those mentions that are in positions one two three the top three positions. So obviously it's going to be lower than the general presence because usually you have uh less uh keywords keywords for which you rank in top three than for which you rank in general. A couple of additional metrics here uh are the following. AO presence is the presence of AI overviews for your set of keywords uh as such because sometimes some of the keywords will not trigger an AIO. So this is u not not not just a horizontal line. Another additional

metric is organic AI overlap which means physically that it shows you how much intersection how much overlap there is between the uh top 20 organic results for those checks for those uh at on pages and your links your list of links within the AI the corresponding AI overview. So if if there's much uh overlap then you you or very little overlap you can make conclusions. Yes. Right. As as with many uh other our tools you can export data from from this section. You can also uh you can also see that the the tracking works for both the national level and local level for the city or zip code level. So uh it's it's it's just uh it's the same as the usual rank tracker, the classic SEO tracker. Okay. So all in all using these metrics, you can at least see how how uh roughly how visible you are against the

keywords of interest. Maybe you have thousand keywords here. So it will be more representative of your visibility. If if needed, you you can present these results, these um metrics, this current state, this measurement to whoever needs this uh needs your reports. Okay, so as I said this uh the AI AI overviews are just one type of AI results that a user can see, right? Because there are chat GPT, perplexity, etc. And uh currently we're in the process of developing a similar tool but for Chad GPT. It's going to have a a user interface quite similar to this one and hopefully we'll add more uh AI engines in the future at least those that are most popular. Okay. So this that's it for the rank tracking approach of measuring your visibility and uh my colleagues have something to share about the tools that address the research approach where you have your large reports with uh large lists of

keywords that you organically rank for you organically visible for in AIO reviews or you might want to be visible for and the next one to speak is Marsha product manager. that is usually respons responsible for our research type tools. Yeah, I guess before we head hand it over to Masha Fully, just one last note here is that everything that Boris has shown so far is applicable to to AIO rank tracking, right? And we're also planning to introduce AI chat support rank tracking very soon. So watch out for announcement later in June for using SE rankings AI rank tracking for Chad GPT first and then for more systems later. Thank you Mike and thank you Boris and hi everyone. So my name is Masha. I'm have been working as a product manager at test ranking for two years now and my area of responsibility lies around our search tools competitive

and keyword research uh and also the backlink checker and my aim at SE ranking is to create solutions that will make life of marketeteers by providing easier by providing a high quality data and insights and I'm really really excited uh to welcome you to this session as You all know and we have spoken about this um several times already today. Uh Google's AI overviews are shaping the way search uh results look like and function. They're changing user behavior, visibility and generally the way we think about SEO. With these changes, uh it just becomes an absolute must uh to understand your site presence in the context around it. And today I would like to share how a ranking can be helpful for these tasks. What you see on the screen right now it is the first step that we um did. So uh and the first

step was just adding AI overview detection as a sub feature in both competitive research and keyword research. So we rolled out this almost a year ago last summer and this allowed you to analyze which of your ranking keywords trigger in your review and more importantly where is the your website uh or the website of your client is cited within it. So you can just select and this is already available in this ranking. You can just select uh you can enter your domain select a feature that is called AI overview. see all the keywords uh that have AI overview in the SER and additionally it will also provide you information on whether the analyze domain is cited in this AI review. So this is this is already of functioning and working and can be helpful for you. And the second step is our brand new AI uh AIO research solution which primarily focuses on the

context of a website appearance in AI review brand mentioning and what is most important measurement of uh presence in AI review and I would like to move to I would like to ask to move to the next slide because here uh is where we are going to uh have a look at this new solution a little bit of spoilers basically what is is AIO research. Um it is a tool that detects when any domain yours or your competitors is either me mentioned or linked in Google's uh AI generated summary. So basically with just a few clicks um you can do the following. You can see this uh snippet this section uh in the table the same one that you see on the screen and see it's just now displays uh displayed for one keyword but this will be a table with all the keywords where domain appears in AI reviews not just the ones that you track but just all the keywords that um that have a AO overview then you

can see that there is an full uh AI snippet available with the tag text and also with the links that are present and uh this helps you not only see that you're cited and know this fact but also to see how and understanding the context of your mention allows you to identify to quickly identify some patterns. So what context, what structure may have led to this inclusion and basically in this case you you really don't need to analyze every page in deps move to another tab or another tool. This can be um at your hand just in this table and here uh also and this is just again the example that is provided on the screen. You can also track mentions not just links. So you will be able to enter the brand. Uh we also there will also be an opportunity to have it entered automatically. So we will do it work for you. Even if it's not linked even if

there is no link uh to your domain in EF review but your brand is mentioned there we will show it and so you will be able to see both links and mentions. Okay. So I think that this is this is mostly it for this first part of the functionality of AO research and I would like to uh ask to open uh the next slide. Uh and so the second uh big part of uh this new tool uh is to basically help you see a bigger picture and for this we provide you so you with a set of metrics that give a deeper understanding of a domain presence in your overviews. You can see this metrics um on the screen right now. And the first one is definitely the the most necessary one uh is total citations and mentions the absolute number for right now and also including monthsto months dynamics. So you can uh see whether your presence is growing or

declining. Also we calculate average link position within the snippets uh and again it will also show how changes over time and this helps you assess not just whether you are included but how prominently and last but definitely not the least is traffic dynamics. Uh so this is uh what you can also see uh on the screen at the bottom. Uh we show you how much traffic your site is receiving from AO links and whether it's just adding new traffic or simply redistributing the what you already get from traditional blue links. This is especially valuable in helping you understand whether AI AI reviews visibility is worth investing more resources in or this is just something that simply redistributes your links um and traffic uh from traditional traditional traffic and traditional blue links. So here uh here is how a your

research will look like and what tasks it will solve and I think you can think of it as a radar for how how Google AI sees your brand and your domain and this is just the beginning a research is a liveing growing tool and your feedback will help will really help us shape what comes next. So uh any comments any questions on this in chat and in Q&A session are highly welcome highly appreciated and I guess that that that was it from my side. So it was um a demo of this tool that will go live very soon in a couple of weeks and I would like to pass the floor to Nick who has some more insights about uh our new solutions and we'll share them with you. Thank you. Thank you Masha. Hey everyone, my name is Nick. I'm a product manager at SEO Ranking responsible for several parts of our application. And today I would like

to talk about search provided by AI models or we can say large language models I will say LLMs like chat GPT Gemini and perplexity and also about our future solution related to this. Today we are diving into something that not just the future of digital marketing. It's already happening right now. AI models are shaping how people discover, compare and choose products and services. Our users have many questions related to AI search, how it affects their business and how they can improve their presence. That's exactly why we are developing LLM research, a tool designed to sh to help you measure, compare, and optimize your presence in AI search. Let's move on to the next slide and uh how it works. It's super simple to be honest, at least for users, not for us. In the first step, you should enter your domain and choose your country. We identify your brand,

indices, and niches. you need to confirm it or of course you can correct it. And in the third step, we identify key or we can say parent topics for each niche. Find the most popular prompts or queries for every parent topic and analyze the responses to each prompt. Finally, you get a clear report with niches, parent topics, prompts, detailed metrics, comparisons, and insights. That's it. Next slide, please. Let's discuss what you can do as a LLM research. You can analyze your brand mentions. We track various prompts and show you where your brand's appears and what these models are actually saying about your brand. Uh you will have access to detailed statistics at multiple levels from a high level overview to specific parent topics and even individual prompts. Also, you will be able to monitor changes over time, compare metrics from months to months to determine what is

growing, what is falling, and adjust your actions based on the data. Additionally, you will be able to compare your metrics head-to-head with your competitors. For example, find the gaps where they are getting mentions and you are not and use that information to improve your visibility. And finally, you will get actionable insights. It's not just raw data. You will get recommendations to leverage your strengths and minimize your weaknesses. And uh the tool will become available in the coming months. We will open the registration for better testing soon. So anyone who is interested can give it a try. Uh don't let AI underell your brand. It's time to take control, get visibility, and turn AI search into a powerful AI for your marketing strategy. Thank you for your attention. I'm giving the floor to Mike. Yeah. Thank you, Nick. Thank you,