AI search, analyzed
AI search analytics from crawl to citation to visit
AI search analytics measures how AI assistants find, use and send people to your site. Growth Radar keeps three stages apart: verified AI crawler hits show whether an engine can read a page, probes and Bing's report show whether answers cite it, and referred visits show whether anyone clicked. Where the chain breaks tells you what to fix.
What it measures, and how
Each stage has its own instrument and its own blind spot.
- AI crawler hits
- Server-side hits from GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot and Google-Extended, counted only when the request is verified as coming from the operator the user agent names. A request that merely borrows the name is dropped as an impersonator.
- Probe sweeps
- Each day, questions a site should answer go to Perplexity, ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude; the sites each answer cites are recorded. Each question counts once per sweep, as cited if any answer cited the site. Questions that name the brand are left out of the rate, because asking about yourself measures the question, not the market.
- Bing grounding citations
- Bing Webmaster Tools reports how many times Microsoft's AI answers cited the site and, for each question, the share of grounded answers that cited it. Of the five, it's the only citation count an engine reports to the site owner.
- AI-referred visits
- When someone clicks a cited link, the visit arrives with the assistant as its referrer. Growth Radar recognizes those referrers from published lists of AI assistant hosts and counts the visits in the site's own analytics over the last 28 days. A visit is proof that a citation existed.
- Competitors' AI readiness
- For each rival you name, or one Growth Radar discovers, a regular snapshot of its sitemap: how many pages, which are new this week, whether it serves llms.txt and structured data, and whether its robots.txt lets AI crawlers in.
Reading the chain
If crawls rise while citations stay flat, the engine reads the page but doesn't find it worth quoting: the problem is the passage, not access. Citations without visits mean the answer is enough on its own. Visits without probe citations mean people found you through questions the probe doesn't ask.
Growth Radar shows the three side by side for every site, with their dates, and sends a weekly email of what changed. A fix aimed at any stage is graded the same way as one aimed at clicks.
What it can't see
- AI-referred visits are a floor: copied links and some apps arrive with no referrer.
- Crawler hits need the site's server-side requests sent to Growth Radar; a JavaScript tag can't see crawlers, because they don't run it.
- A crawl isn't a citation. Hits only tell you whether the engine can read the page.
- Bing's AI citation report and Search Console's AI-features report are AI reports: they come with Pro and Agency, and with the 14-day free trial. Free keeps 1 site and no AI reports.
Growth Radar or another tool
Tools that bundle AI crawler analytics with prompt tracking, per their own pages: Checked October 28, 2026.
| Tool | Price | AI engines | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|
| Growth Radar | Free $0 (1 site); Pro $49 a month; Agency $199 a month; 14-day free trial, no card | Narrow: Perplexity, ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude, checked daily | Teams that ship SEO and GEO fixes as code on several sites and want each one graded win, loss or flat 28 days after merge |
| Profound | Free 7-day trial on 50 fixed prompts, then Enterprise at a custom price. The $99 Starter and $399 Growth plans listed on 14 September 2026 are gone. | Up to 9 on Enterprise; the trial covers ChatGPT, Gemini and Google AI Overviews | Enterprise brand teams that want panel-based prompt volumes, log-based AI crawler analytics and content agents under one contract |
| Goodie | Core $295 a month (110 prompts); Pro $999 (250 prompts) | 5 on Core, 8 on Pro | Teams that want tracking, crawler analytics, checks of AI claims against their own facts, and writing agents in one bundle |
| Scrunch | Starter $250 a month billed annually ($300 monthly), 350 prompts; Growth $417 ($500), 700 prompts | Not stated in the pages checked | Sites on Cloudflare, Akamai or Vercel that want AI bots served a lighter, script-free page at the CDN; Scrunch is now part of Sitecore |
Sources: Profound pricing · Profound pricing, archived 14 September 2026 · Profound Prompt Volumes · Goodie pricing · Scrunch pricing · Scrunch Agent Experience Platform · Sitecore acquires Scrunch
Common questions
What should AI search analytics measure?
Three things, separately: whether AI crawlers can fetch your pages, whether AI answers cite them, and whether people click through. Each fails differently, so a single number would hide which one is broken.
Why can't GA4 see AI crawlers?
GA4 counts visits by running a JavaScript tag in the browser. Crawlers fetch the HTML and never run it, so they are invisible to any tag-based analytics. Seeing them needs the server's own requests, checked against each operator's published IP ranges.
Why is AI referral traffic undercounted?
An answer that was read and not clicked leaves no trace, and links copied out of an answer or opened from some apps arrive with no referrer, so they look like direct traffic. What analytics records is the visible part.
What does it mean when AI crawls rise but citations don't?
The engine can read the page and is choosing other sources. Look at whether a passage answers the question in a few sentences on its own, and at whether the page is the most specific one on the site for that question.
Can I see what competitors do for AI search?
Growth Radar snapshots each rival's sitemap regularly: page count, new pages this week, llms.txt, structured data and whether robots.txt lets AI crawlers in. It also lists the new-page ideas a rival covers that your site doesn't.
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