Google AI Overview Tracker: is your brand cited?

Give it a list of keywords. Get back, for each one, whether Google showed an AI Overview, the full text it wrote, every page it cited, and a straight yes or no on whether your brand or your domain is in it.

This is the question SEO teams started getting asked in 2025 and still cannot answer from a rank tracker: not "where do I rank", but "does Google's AI answer mention me at all, and who is it quoting instead".

Google now shows an AI Overview on roughly 43% of US searches (Similarweb, May 2026 — it was ~15% a year earlier). If your buyers see an AI answer before they see a single blue link, whether that answer cites you is not a curiosity, it is your visibility.

What it costs, next to the usual tools

Tool	What you pay	Notes
This actor	$0.03 per keyword checked, everything included	AI Overview text, cited sources and per-brand citation flags in one row; no subscription, no separate platform bill
Ahrefs Brand Radar	$50/month for 2,500 checks, up to $250/month	subscription add-on; ~$0.02 per check, committed monthly
Semrush AI Visibility Toolkit	from $99/month per domain	25–200 tracked prompts per day depending on tier
SerpApi	$25/1,000 searches (Starter), $10/1,000 (Production)	the AI Overview officially needs a second request cycle
DataForSEO	$1.20–4 per 1,000 with the AI Overview surcharge	raw SERP JSON — the parsing, brand matching and honesty logic are yours to build
Other Apify AI Overview actors	$0.003 to $0.05 per query	raw overview scrape; most report a plain false when they cannot read the page

Keywords that could not be checked are not charged. You pay for answers, not for attempts.

Pricing note: the all-in price above takes effect on September 5, 2026. Until then this actor charges $0.008 per keyword checked, with platform usage (the Google SERP proxy and compute, typically around $3 per 1,000 keywords) billed to your own Apify account — the free monthly platform credit covers hundreds of checks.

What you get per keyword

Field	What it tells you
query	the keyword you asked about
hasAiOverview	true, false, or null. Never a guess (see below)
aiOverviewStatus	present, absent, unknown or blocked
aiOverviewText	the full text Google wrote
aiOverviewWordCount	how long the answer was
sources	every cited page: position, title, url, domain
citedDomains	just the domains, deduplicated, for quick pivoting
sourceCount	how many pages it cited
brands	per brand: isCited, isLinkedSource, isMentionedInText, citedPositions, citedUrls
brandsCited	the subset of your brands that made it in
anyBrandCited	one flag for dashboards
detectionNote	plain English reason when there is no answer
charged	whether this row cost you anything
searchUrl	the Google URL, so you can check any row by hand

Cited is not the same as mentioned

Two things people mean by "am I in the AI Overview", kept separate because they lead to different work:

• isLinkedSource means Google cited one of your pages as a source. That is the one that can send you traffic.
• isMentionedInText means Google named you in the answer without linking you. Being recommended by name with no link is a real outcome, and a links-only tracker cannot see it.

isCited is true when either is.

The honest part: blocked is not the same as no

An AI Overview tracker that reports false when it simply failed to read the page is worse than useless, because the column looks fine and quietly tells you your visibility dropped. This actor cannot do that, by construction.

There are four states, not two:

• present: an AI Overview was there and it was read.
• absent: Google returned a normal results page with no AI Overview on it.
• blocked: Google did not return a readable page at all. blockReason says which wall it was. Not charged.
• unknown: the run could not confirm it is able to see AI Overviews at all, so a missing overview cannot be called a real absence. Not charged.

That last state exists because of something we measured rather than assumed: when Google decides not to show an AI Overview, it does not leave a placeholder. The page contains no AI Overview markup whatsoever. So a keyword with no overview and a keyword whose overview never reached us look identical.

To tell them apart, every run first checks a control keyword that is known to produce an AI Overview. If the control comes back with one, the run has proved it can see them and its false answers are trustworthy. If the control comes back empty, every false in that run is downgraded to unknown, and the run says so in its status message. You get a loud "could not tell" instead of a quiet wrong answer.

Who buys this

In-house SEO tracking AI visibility. Feed your money keywords weekly, watch anyBrandCited over time, and see which competitor domains Google keeps quoting in the answers you want to be in.

Content teams deciding what to write. sources is a list of the exact pages Google considers authoritative for a query. That is a content brief.

Agencies reporting to clients. One row per keyword, with the overview text attached, so a client can read what Google actually said about their category instead of taking your word for it.

Anyone auditing a traffic drop. If organic clicks fell on informational keywords, checking which of them now carry an AI Overview is the first thing to rule in or out.

Input examples

Check a handful of keywords and look for your brand:

{
  "queries": [
    "best crm for small business",
    "how to choose a project management tool",
    "what is technical seo"
  ],
  "brands": ["hubspot.com", "HubSpot"],
  "country": "us"
}

Just collect the overviews, no brand matching:

{
  "queries": ["best running shoes for flat feet"],
  "country": "gb"
}

Track English keywords in a non-English market:

{
  "queries": ["best erp for manufacturing", "sap alternatives"],
  "brands": ["odoo.com"],
  "country": "de",
  "language": "en"
}

Questions people ask

How often does Google actually show an AI Overview? Published studies through 2025 and 2026 put it somewhere between 15% and 45% of searches depending on who is measuring and what they sampled, and it moves: one large study tracked it rising to about 25% mid-2025 and settling near 16% later in the year. Informational and question-shaped keywords trigger them far more than navigational ones. Expect a good share of your list to come back absent, and treat that as data.

Why is hasAiOverview sometimes null? Because the run could not honestly say false. Either Google blocked that request, or the run's control check failed. Both cases carry a detectionNote explaining which, and neither is charged.

Do I need an API key or a SerpApi account? No. Nothing to sign up for, nothing to paste in.

Can it check Google in another country? Yes, pick the country in the input. The language follows it automatically unless you set one, which is what you want when you track English keywords in Germany.

Does it handle a keyword list from another actor? Yes. Paste an array, a single string, a comma-separated list, or pipe in a dataset of objects with a keyword or query field. Bad input never fails the run, it comes back with an explanation.

Does it click "show more" to get the full overview? It reads the overview Google delivers with the results page. Where Google truncates an answer behind an expander, the text you get is the part Google served, and aiOverviewWordCount tells you how much that was.

Is this the same as tracking ChatGPT or Perplexity? No. This is Google's AI Overview specifically, the block above the blue links on google.com.

Related actors

• Keyword Comparison and Seasonality: which of your keywords is actually bigger, and when it peaks.
• Google Trends Scraper: interest over time for the terms you are tracking.

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