Title - How to Track AI Citations for Your Brand (Monthly Tracker Template)
URL - https://ainora.lt/blog/how-to-track-ai-citations-for-your-brand
Last Updated: 2026-05-02
Author: Justas Butkus

# How to Track AI Citations for Your Brand

AI citation tracking is the monthly measurement of how often AI search engines (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini, Google AI Overviews) cite your brand when buyers ask category-relevant questions. Output: a per-engine citation share table covering 15 to 20 buyer-intent prompts, run once a month, with verbatim quotes captured and a side-by-side comparison against the top three competitors.

## Why monthly is the right cadence

Daily is noise; quarterly misses model changes. Monthly catches live-retrieval wins (4-6 weeks) and training-data cycles (4-12 weeks). 90 minutes per month for 20 prompts across 6 engines.

## Spreadsheet column structure

- Prompt, Category (comparative/informational/local/brand), Date run, Engine, Cited (yes/no), Position in citation list, Primary recommendation, URL cited, Verbatim text, Top competitor 1-3 cited, Notes.

## Engines to track

- Perplexity (free tier)
- ChatGPT search-on
- ChatGPT search-off
- Google AI Overviews (incognito browser)
- Gemini standalone
- Claude

## Five metrics

1. Cited rate per engine
2. Primary recommendation rate
3. Citation share vs top three competitors
4. Citation accuracy
5. Month-over-month delta

## Common pitfalls

- Running prompts logged in (personalization skews)
- Only tracking comparative prompts
- Switching prompts between months
- Skipping verbatim text
- Treating one bad month as trend

## Free audit + tracker template

https://ainora.lt/ai-visibility-audit