AI Visibility Monitor

Use this Actor when you need to track whether your brand appears in AI answers (Google AI Overviews and Bing Copilot Search) for the questions your customers ask, and what changed since the last check.

Schedule it every day and get only what changed: is your brand in the AI answer, in which position, next to which competitors, and is your site cited?

For each of your questions (the prompts your customers type), the monitor checks the AI answer of Google AI Overviews and Bing Copilot Search, both without any login, and returns:

• whether your brand is mentioned (name, aliases or domain) and its position in the order of first mentions
• which competitors appear and in which order
• the sources the AI cited, and whether your own domain is one of them
• an answer snippet around your brand, plus the full answer text
• a change report vs. the previous run (brand appeared or disappeared, position moved, new or lost competitors, new or lost cited domains) and a rolling history per question

History lives in a named key-value store in your own Apify account, so every scheduled run compares with the last one. Changes can be pushed to Slack, Discord or any webhook.

Why this one

• Two engines in one run, one row per question per engine, with the same fields, ready for a share-of-voice sheet or dashboard.
• Built as a monitor, not a one-off scraper: change detection and history are built in, no extra database needed.
• Runs finish. Blocked or incomplete answers retry on a fresh residential IP with growing waits. In our launch tests (Oct 2026), 40 of 40 checks on real brand questions came back with an answer (20 on Google AI Overviews, 20 on Bing Copilot), and repeated runs flagged position and competitor changes correctly.
• Failures are free. A check that still fails comes back with an error field and is not charged.

How to schedule it

1. Fill in your brand, questions and competitors, save as a task.
2. In Apify Console, open Schedules, create one with @daily (or 0 8 * * *) and add the task.
3. Optional: put a Slack or Discord webhook URL in webhookUrl to get a message only when something changes. Turn on onlyChanges if you want the dataset to hold changes only.

Input

Field	What it does
brand	Your brand name as people write it
brandAliases	Other names that count as your brand (product names, abbreviations)
brandDomain	Your domain, like hubspot.com; tells whether the AI cites your site
questions	Questions or prompts, one per line; each is checked on each engine
competitors	Competitor names to find in the same answers
engines	google_ai_overview, bing_copilot (default both)
country, language	Search market, like us / en, gb / en, de / de
monitorId	Name of the stored history (defaults to the brand); use different names for separate projects
webhookUrl	Optional; each change is POSTed as JSON with text and content (Slack and Discord ready)
onlyChanges	Only write changed checks (and first checks) to the dataset

Output

{
  "brand": "HubSpot",
  "question": "best crm for small business",
  "engine": "google_ai_overview",
  "engineName": "Google AI Overview",
  "answered": true,
  "brandMentioned": true,
  "brandPosition": 1,
  "mentionOrder": ["HubSpot", "Zoho", "Pipedrive", "Freshsales"],
  "competitorsMentioned": ["Zoho", "Pipedrive", "Freshsales"],
  "brandCited": true,
  "sources": [{"url": "https://www.uschamber.com/co/start/strategy/low-cost-crm-tools", "domain": "uschamber.com"}],
  "sourceCount": 13,
  "answerSnippet": "Best Free & Inbound Option: HubSpot CRM offers a robust free tier for up to 2 users...",
  "answerText": "The best customer relationship management (CRM) software for small businesses depends on...",
  "checkedAt": "2026-10-26T03:10:00+00:00",
  "change": {
    "status": "changed",
    "summary": "brand position 2 -> 1; new competitors: Freshsales",
    "previousCheckedAt": "2026-10-25T03:10:00+00:00",
    "brandMentionedBefore": true,
    "brandPositionBefore": 2,
    "competitorsAdded": ["Freshsales"],
    "competitorsLost": [],
    "sourceDomainsAdded": ["zapier.com"],
    "sourceDomainsLost": []
  },
  "history": [{"checkedAt": "2026-10-25T03:10:00+00:00", "answered": true, "brandMentioned": true, "brandPosition": 2, "brandCited": true, "competitorsMentioned": ["Zoho", "Pipedrive"]}]
}

change.status is first-check, changed or unchanged. When Google shows no AI Overview for a question, the row says answered: false (that is a real result for visibility tracking, and it is charged as a check).

Pricing

Pay per event: $0.01 per check (one question on one engine). 10 questions on both engines every day is about $6 a month. Failed checks are free.

Engines

Engine	Status
Google AI Overviews	available
Bing Copilot Search	available
Perplexity	coming soon (logged-out Perplexity now asks visitors to sign up before answering; we do not bypass login walls)
ChatGPT search, Gemini	coming soon

Notes

AI answers change between runs even when nothing else changed, so look at the trend in history, not at a single run.

Brand and competitor matching is whole-word and ignores case, with one exception: a name you type with a capital letter does not match the same word written all in lowercase, so a brand called "Alto" is not counted when an answer says "alto" (Portuguese for "tall").

Google AI Overviews are read in English, Portuguese, German, Spanish and French. Outside English, Google often builds the overview only after the page loads; when it is still being built, the monitor retries up to three times on a fresh IP and then reports answered: false. Expect more answered: false rows in those markets than in the US, and use Bing Copilot as the second signal.