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E-GEO

How to Track Whether AI Engines Cite You

Last verified: 2026-09-24. E-GEO rewrites pages so answer engines can cite them. It does not ship its own citation tracker. This page covers how to measure the result: the free method we use ourselves, the open-source trackers, and the hosted tools.

Why measure citations at all

Section titled “Why measure citations at all”

Rankings in Google tell you little about AI answers. An AI engine gives one synthesized answer and names a handful of sources. Your question is binary: for the queries your customers ask, is your site one of the named sources? Without measuring that, any GEO work is guesswork.

Option 1 — A fixed query set (free, what we use)

Section titled “Option 1 — A fixed query set (free, what we use)”

This is the method behind our public case study:

  1. Pick 10 queries your customers actually ask. Mix branded (<your product> github), category (best open source <category> tools) and problem queries (how to <job your product does>).
  2. Run them against one engine on a fixed schedule (we use Perplexity’s API weekly) and record, per query: whether you are mentioned, which competitors are mentioned, and which source domains are cited.
  3. Store every run as a dated snapshot. Discard runs with empty answers — a failed API call looks like “not cited”.
  4. Read the trend, not a single run. One snapshot can move by 1–2 queries on noise alone.

The cited source domains matter as much as your score: they are the sites you need to be mentioned on (see how to get cited by Perplexity).

Option 2 — Open-source trackers

Section titled “Option 2 — Open-source trackers”
Tool What it does (per its README) License
geo-optimizer-skill geo citations checks real answer engines for your brand and domain; geo monitor / geo track keep a history MIT
Elmo Self-hostable tracking of mentions and citations across ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini, Copilot, Grok and AI Overviews MIT
GEORank GEO ranking and optimization platform Apache-2.0

Expect to bring your own API keys and a machine to run them on. Full list: open-source GEO tools directory.

Option 3 — Hosted AI visibility tools

Section titled “Option 3 — Hosted AI visibility tools”

If you would rather not run anything, hosted tools track many prompts across engines and show trends in a dashboard:

  • Profound — enterprise AI visibility platform.
  • Peec AI — AI search analytics for marketing teams and agencies.
  • Otterly — AI search monitoring with an API.
  • Rankscale — AI search rank tracking with an API.
  • LLM Pulse — AI visibility tracking with API access.
  • AIclicks — AI visibility tracking; plans listed from $59/month.

We have not benchmarked these against each other. Try two on the same 10 queries before committing.

Turn measurements into fixes

Section titled “Turn measurements into fixes”

Tracking only helps if it changes what you publish. The loop:

  1. Measure with any option above.
  2. Pick the losers: queries where competitors are cited and you are not.
  3. Fix the page that should answer that query. For one page:
Terminal window
pip install egeo
egeo optimize your-page.md --query "best open source geo tools"

Or feed the whole tracker report to egeo fix-gaps, which maps every uncited query to its page through project.yaml and rewrites each losing page once (pip install -U egeo, v2.1.0+).

  1. Get mentioned on the cited sources for that query — on-page fixes alone rarely flip a citation.
  2. Re-measure on the next scheduled run, and keep the dated snapshots.

It is the same loop we run on E-GEO itself; the method and snapshots are in the case study.