AI Search Visibility Tracker — ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Google AIO

Track if your brand or domain gets cited in ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Google AI Overviews — across 24 languages, with daily diff alerts and a stability score across multiple samples. Bring-your-own-key model — start at $0/month with Gemini's free tier.

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Why this actor

The Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) tracker market in 2026 is dominated by enterprise tools — Otterly ($29–489/mo), Profound ($99–2k+/mo, no free trial), Peec AI (€89–199/mo), Semrush AI Toolkit ($99–549/mo), Ahrefs Brand Radar ($328+/mo). They share three blind spots:

1. Pricing locks out indie SEOs and small agencies — the cheapest viable tier is $29/mo for 15 prompts.
2. Multilingual coverage is shallow — Semrush admits "US English only," Profound and Otterly are English-first.
3. No bring-your-own-key option — you pay them, they pay the LLM vendors, and you can't see the underlying call.

This actor flips all three:

• $0/month entry point — supply your own free Gemini API key (250 queries/day on the free tier) and run end-to-end at zero marginal cost.
• 24 languages — Hungarian, German, French, Spanish, Italian, Polish, Czech, Romanian, Turkish, Japanese, Korean, Russian, Ukrainian, and 11 more.
• BYOK transparency — your OpenAI / Perplexity / Anthropic keys, your bills, your data. The actor never proxies your traffic through our account.

What it does

Given a list of queries (e.g. "best CRM for small business", "top fogorvosok Budapesten") and one or more domains you care about, the actor:

1. Fans out each query to every selected engine — Gemini, ChatGPT (gpt-4o-mini-search-preview), Perplexity Sonar, Anthropic Claude with web_search.
2. Captures the answer text plus structured citations (URL + title + snippet).
3. Detects whether each tracked domain appears — via citation OR via brand mention in the answer text.
4. Computes citation share-of-voice across your domains and competitor domains.
5. Optionally runs each query N times and reports a stability score (how consistently each source is cited — useful for filtering one-shot hallucinations).
6. Optionally diffs against a previous run and surfaces gained/lost citations per query (delta mode).

Quick start ($0)

1. Get a free Gemini key: https://aistudio.google.com/apikey (Google account, no credit card).
2. Run the actor with this minimal input:

{
    "queries": ["best CRM for small business", "top project management tools"],
    "brandDomains": ["yourcompany.com"],
    "engines": ["gemini"],
    "geminiApiKey": "AIza..."
}

That's it. Free tier covers 250 queries/day on Gemini 2.5 Flash — enough to track ~250 prompts daily for $0.

Going further (BYOK paid engines)

Add any combination of these to the input:

Engine	Where to get a key	Approx cost / query
OpenAI / ChatGPT	https://platform.openai.com/api-keys	~$0.025
Perplexity Sonar	https://www.perplexity.ai/settings/api	~$0.005–0.015
Anthropic Claude	https://console.anthropic.com/	~$0.01–0.02

A single query across all four engines costs you ~$0.05–0.08 in third-party API fees. You pay them directly.

Output

Each engine call writes one record to the dataset:

{
    "type": "citation",
    "engine": "gemini",
    "model": "gemini-2.5-flash",
    "query": "best CRM for small business",
    "language": "en",
    "answerText": "...",
    "citationCount": 7,
    "citations": [
        {"url": "https://...", "host": "hubspot.com", "registrable": "hubspot.com", "title": "..."}
    ],
    "brandMatches": {
        "yourcompany.com": {"cited": true, "viaCitation": true, "viaText": false, "matchedUrls": ["https://yourcompany.com/pricing"]}
    },
    "competitorMatches": {
        "competitor.com": {"cited": false, "viaCitation": false, "viaText": false, "matchedUrls": []}
    },
    "citationShare": {
        "yourcompany.com": {"hits": 1, "sharePct": 14.3},
        "competitor.com": {"hits": 0, "sharePct": 0}
    },
    "latencyMs": 2104
}

When samplesPerQuery > 1 the actor also writes one stability record per (query, engine):

{
    "type": "stability",
    "engine": "gemini",
    "query": "best CRM for small business",
    "samples": 3,
    "stability": {
        "hubspot.com":   {"occurrences": 3, "samples": 3, "stability": 1.0},
        "salesforce.com":{"occurrences": 2, "samples": 3, "stability": 0.67},
        "pipedrive.com": {"occurrences": 1, "samples": 3, "stability": 0.33}
    }
}

When previousRunDatasetId is set, the actor writes a delta record showing per-query gained/lost citations versus the prior run.

A final summary record closes every run with stats and finishedAt.

Recipes

Daily monitoring with weekly diff

Schedule the actor daily. Use Apify schedules to run it every morning. Pass last week's defaultDatasetId as previousRunDatasetId to get a weekly diff alongside today's snapshot.

Multilingual brand share-of-voice

Set language: "hu" (or de, fr, …) and Gemini will reply in that language and prefer same-language sources. Especially useful for European B2B SaaS, agencies running multi-country pipelines, or local SEO consultants.

Stability filter for hallucinations

Set samplesPerQuery: 3 and ignore citations whose stability < 0.5 — these are likely one-shot hallucinations rather than reliable AI rankings.

Local development

# install deps
npm install

# unit tests on pure-JS utils (no API keys, no network)
npm test

# end-to-end smoke test against real engines
GEMINI_API_KEY=AIza... npm run smoke

scripts/test-utils.js validates the citation parser, brand-detector, share-of-voice math, stability computation and delta diff with hand-crafted fixtures — runs in under 100ms with no network.

scripts/smoke.js calls each engine for which a key is set and prints a compact citation report. Useful for verifying the adapters still work after API surface changes.

Architecture

.
├── .actor/                 Apify actor metadata (actor.json, input_schema.json)
├── src/
│   ├── main.js             entry point — reads input, fans out, writes dataset
│   ├── utils.js            pure helpers (no I/O): canonicalHost, citation parsing, share-of-voice, delta diff
│   └── engines/
│       ├── gemini.js       Gemini 2.5 Flash + google_search grounding (free tier)
│       ├── openai.js       Responses API + web_search_preview tool
│       ├── perplexity.js   Chat completions + sonar model
│       └── anthropic.js    Messages API + web_search tool
├── scripts/
│   ├── test-utils.js       offline assertions for utils.js
│   └── smoke.js            live-network smoke test for the engine adapters
└── INPUT_SCHEMA.json       legacy top-level schema (also at .actor/input_schema.json)

The four engine adapters share the same return shape so main.js doesn't care which engine produced a record. Adding a new engine = one file under src/engines/ plus one entry in engineAdapters in main.js.

Limitations / honest disclosure

• AI answers are non-deterministic. A single sample of a single query can miss citations that appear most of the time — that's why we expose samplesPerQuery and a stability score. Don't make business decisions on a samplesPerQuery: 1 snapshot; use 3+ for monitoring you trust.
• Free Gemini tier has rate limits. 10 requests/minute, 250 requests/day on gemini-2.5-flash. The actor's maxConcurrency defaults to 4 to stay well under the per-minute cap. For higher volume, upgrade to Gemini's paid tier (still cheaper than any GEO SaaS).
• Google AI Overviews are not yet covered in this v0.1 build. Gemini grounded answers are a strong proxy (same underlying LLM and search index) but the literal SERP AIO block is a separate feature. v0.2 will add it via Apify's apify/google-search-scraper actor.
• Engines may shift their APIs. OpenAI's web_search_preview and Anthropic's web_search_20250305 are explicitly versioned tools. We pin sensible defaults; if a vendor breaks compatibility, the relevant adapter file is the only file that needs to change.

Roadmap

• v0.2 — Google AI Overview capture via the existing apify/google-search-scraper actor (chained, BYOK Apify proxy).
• v0.3 — Slack / webhook alerting on citation gains/losses.
• v0.4 — White-label CSV export with agency branding.
• v0.5 — Public weekly leaderboards (e.g. "Top 50 brands cited in ChatGPT for project management software, EN/DE/HU") generated from aggregated runs of consenting users — distribution / SEO play.

License

ISC.