AI Overview Visibility Tracker — who Google cites, and whether it's you

Google's AI Overview answers the question above the search results, and it names its sources. If your site is not one of them, you are invisible for that keyword no matter where you rank.

This Actor checks a keyword — or a whole keyword set — and returns the domains Google cited in its AI Overview, the exact passage it quoted from each, whether your domain is among them, and your organic position for the same term. Per country.

$0.02 per keyword checked. Keywords where the fetch fails are returned as ok: false and are never charged.

Who uses it

• SEO leads checking which of their target keywords trigger an AI Overview that cites a competitor and not them
• Content strategists reading the exact passage Google quoted from a cited page to see what shape of answer gets picked
• International SEO teams comparing the cited domains for one keyword in the US vs Germany vs France
• Agencies reporting a client's "cited in AI Overview" count next to their organic position for the same term
• PR and brand teams tracking whether their domain appears as a source for branded and category questions

What you get per keyword

field	meaning
verdict	cited · not-cited · citations-found (no domain supplied) · no-citations-visible
citations	every cited source: domain, URL, and quotedPassage — the sentence Google lifted
citedDomains	the citation set at a glance, for share-of-voice across your keyword list
citedInAiOverview	true/false for your domain
aiOverviewCitationPosition	where you sit among the cited sources
quotedPassage	the exact passage Google quoted from your page
organicPosition	your classic organic rank for the same keyword
organicResults	the organic top results, with titles

quotedPassage is the field people come back for: it tells you which sentence on your page earned the citation, which is the only actionable input to writing the next one.

Per country — the same keyword, different answers

AI Overviews are localised, and the difference is not cosmetic. Measured on 2026-08-16:

• US · "what is a pay per event apify actor" → cited docs.apify.com, help.apify.com, apify.com, reddit.com
• DE · "bester web scraping anbieter" → cited trusted.de, botpress.com, thunderbit.com, reddit.com

Fifteen countries are selectable, and all fifteen were verified working on 2026-08-16. Running the single keyword "best crm software" through every one of them returned a different citation set per market:

	US	GB	CA	AU	DE	FR	ES	IT	NL	BR	IN	JP	MX	PL	SE
sources cited	1	4	5	0	5	0	4	5	6	3	2	5	5	4	4

Two markets returned no cited sources at all for that keyword — which is itself the answer, and is reported as no-citations-visible rather than dressed up. If you sell in more than one market, checking only the US tells you about one of them.

What this Actor does NOT do — stated plainly

• It does not return the AI Overview prose. Google generates the overview text asynchronously after the page loads; the citations are server-rendered, the paragraph is not. We return what can be read reliably rather than a paragraph that is sometimes missing and sometimes stale.
• no-citations-visible is not proof no AI Overview exists. It means Google served no server-rendered citations for that query. It is an honest "we could not see one", not a claim. It is still charged, because it costs the same fetch and "this keyword doesn't surface cited sources" is a real planning answer — but it is never dressed up as more than it is.
• It is not a SERP scraper. Organic results are included because they come free with the same fetch, capped at 20. If you need deep SERP data, buy a SERP scraper.

Batch use

Put your whole keyword set in Keywords (batch), set Your domain, and one run gives you a visibility table across the set. maxKeywords caps the run and therefore caps your spend.

How the data is obtained

Searches are run through Apify's own Google SERP proxy, the paid product Apify provides for this purpose — not through private scraping infrastructure. Each check is one search for one keyword you explicitly asked for; there is no background crawling.

Your results are yours. Everything this Actor produces is written to your run's dataset. We do not retain, aggregate, or resell the search data it returns, and we do not build a database from your keywords.

This Actor is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to Google.

Pricing

event	price	when
keyword-checked	$0.02	one keyword resolved in one country

Six further events (country-extra, ai-mode-checked, competitor-tracked, serp-organic-captured, cited-page-fetched, report-generated) are declared in the pricing record but not charged by this build. They are reserved so planned features can ship without a pricing change; an event that is not charged never fires and never appears on your bill.

Comparable visibility trackers on the store charge $0.05 per prompt check, and one charges $2.00 per run to start. Raw SERP dumpers charge less — they sell a different thing.

FAQ

How many keywords can one run check? Put them in keywords (a list, or one string split on newlines/commas). Duplicates are removed case-insensitively, and maxKeywords caps the run: default 25, maximum 100. If you fill keywords, the single keyword field is ignored rather than added on top.

Am I charged when Google does not answer? No. A failed fetch, a SERP with no citations and no organic results, or an AI Overview still showing "Generating" is returned as ok: false, verdict: "fetch-failed" and is not charged. no-citations-visible is charged, because the fetch succeeded and the answer is that no cited sources were served.

What happens if I start it with no input? It runs one built-in demo keyword so the run shows real output, and charges nothing for it.

What format does domain take? example.com, www.example.com and https://example.com/page all work. Subdomains count as yours: tracking apify.com matches a citation from docs.apify.com.

How do country and language change the result? country (15 ISO codes, default US) sets both Google's gl parameter and the proxy exit country, so you see that market's citations. language (default en) sets the interface language. Check the same keyword in two countries with two runs.

Do organic results cost extra? No. They come from the same fetch, capped at 20. Set includeOrganic: false to leave them out; organicPosition is then null.

Changelog

• 2026-09-13 — fixed: every keyword was returning fetch-failed since 2026-08-21. Google changed how it renders AI Overview sources and organic results, and the parser stopped recognising both. Those runs were never charged. Citations are now read from the source records Google embeds with the AI answer: each citation carries the real cited URL and a new sourceName field; sources listed only behind a "+N" chip are reported at domain level (url is the site root). quotedPassage is filled only when Google serves the quoted text, which it currently does not.

Output sample

One dataset item, unedited, from a real run on 2026-08-16 (keyword: "what is a pay per event apify actor", domain: "apify.com", country: "US"):

{
  "keyword": "what is a pay per event apify actor",
  "country": "US",
  "language": "en",
  "ok": true,
  "verdict": "cited",
  "aiOverviewCitationsFound": 6,
  "trackedDomain": "apify.com",
  "citedInAiOverview": true,
  "aiOverviewCitationPosition": 1,
  "quotedPassage": "With the pay-per-event pricing model … from your Actor's source code.",
  "citations": [
    { "position": 1, "domain": "docs.apify.com", "url": "https://docs.apify.com/sdk/js/docs/concepts/pay-per-event", "quotedPassage": "With the pay-per-event pricing model … from your Actor's source code." },
    { "position": 2, "domain": "help.apify.com", "url": "https://help.apify.com/en/articles/10700066-what-is-pay-per-event", "quotedPassage": "The pay-per-event pricing model offers … than platform resources or results." },
    { "position": 3, "domain": "docs.apify.com", "url": "https://docs.apify.com/actors/publishing/monetize", "quotedPassage": "Pay per event (PPE): Users … result or starting an Actor." },
    { "position": 4, "domain": "apify.com", "url": "https://apify.com/apify/rental-to-pay-per-event-calculator", "quotedPassage": "Helps owners of rental Actors … the Rental to pay-per-event calculator" },
    { "position": 5, "domain": "reddit.com", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/apify/comments/1sxx2qu/confusion_on_apify_pricing/", "quotedPassage": "You will get $5 monthly … free plan would be sufficient." },
    { "position": 6, "domain": "docs.apify.com", "url": "https://docs.apify.com/actors/running/actors-in-store", "quotedPassage": "With pay-per-event pricing …  you pay … file …  or starting an Actor." }
  ],
  "citedDomains": ["docs.apify.com", "help.apify.com", "apify.com", "reddit.com"],
  "organicPosition": 1,
  "organicResults": [
    { "position": 1, "domain": "docs.apify.com", "url": "https://docs.apify.com/sdk/js/docs/concepts/pay-per-event", "title": "Pay-per-event monetization | SDK for JavaScript" },
    { "position": 2, "domain": "help.apify.com", "url": "https://help.apify.com/en/articles/10700066-what-is-pay-per-event", "title": "What is pay per event?" },
    { "position": 3, "domain": "docs.apify.com", "url": "https://docs.apify.com/actors/publishing/monetize", "title": "Monetize Actors | Platform" },
    { "position": 4, "domain": "apify.com", "url": "https://apify.com/pricing", "title": "Apify pricing - plans for data collection at any scale" },
    { "position": 5, "domain": "youtube.com", "url": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XoMUf-ML5eY", "title": "Apify Pricing Guide: Pay per event, Rentals, and Apify Plans" },
    { "position": 6, "domain": "docs.apify.com", "url": "https://docs.apify.com/actors/publishing/monetize/pay-per-event", "title": "Pay-per-event pricing model | Platform" },
    { "position": 7, "domain": "apify.com", "url": "https://apify.com/apify/rental-to-pay-per-event-calculator", "title": "Rental to pay-per-event calculator" },
    { "position": 8, "domain": "reddit.com", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/apify/comments/1sxx2qu/confusion_on_apify_pricing/", "title": "Confusion on Apify Pricing!" },
    { "position": 9, "domain": "docs.apify.com", "url": "https://docs.apify.com/actors/running/actors-in-store", "title": "Actors in Store | Platform" }
  ],
  "checkedAt": "2026-08-16T22:21:00.760Z",
  "tookMs": 2578
}

A keyword that could not be read comes back like this, also from a real run (2026-09-13), and is not charged:

{
  "keyword": "what is a pay per event apify actor",
  "country": "US",
  "ok": false,
  "verdict": "fetch-failed",
  "error": "SERP HTML (432720 bytes) contained no citations and no organic results — not charged."
}