AI visibility

More people now ask an AI assistant instead of searching. When the assistant's answer links to your site and someone clicks, that visit is an AI referral. The AI visibility page has four tabs. Visits shows how many you get, which assistants send them, which pages they land on, and how those visitors behave compared with everyone else. Recommendations asks the assistants your customers' questions and records whether they name you. Readiness checks whether they can read your site at all, and What to change turns all three into fixes.

Where the numbers come from

AI referrals are read from Google Analytics, through the same connection as the Analytics page. Analytics files these visits under "Referral", next to every other site that links to you, so they are hard to spot there. RankGrep picks them out by their source:

ChatGPT also adds utm_source=chatgpt.com to the links it shows, and those visits are counted too. A site whose name only contains an assistant's name, such as a blog about ChatGPT, is not counted.

RankGrep reads the last 90 days the first time, then refreshes every morning with the rest of your Google data. Import from Analytics on the page runs the same import at any time.

Why it is a floor, not a total

Some AI visits reach your site with no record of where they came from. The ChatGPT and Claude apps on phones and desktops, and many in-app browsers, open links without sending a referrer, so Google Analytics counts those visits as Direct. Copilot answers shown inside Bing search arrive as ordinary Bing traffic. The real number of visits from AI assistants is therefore higher than the page shows. What the page does reliably show is the trend, and which assistants and pages are working.

Reading the page

• AI sessions compares the period with the one before it, once RankGrep has imported both. Until then it says no earlier period has been imported, rather than showing a rise from zero.
• Share of all visits is AI sessions as a share of every session in the same period.
• Engagement rate and Key events sit beside your site's own average. Visitors sent by an assistant have often been told your business is the answer already, so they tend to act more often than the average visitor. If yours act less often, the page they land on may not match what the assistant said about you.
• Landing pages lists where the assistants send people and which assistants send them. Those are the pages the assistants trust most.

Under the tiles, RankGrep writes up to three plain-language notes on what stands out. It only comments on rates once there are at least ten AI sessions in the period, because two visits that happened to convert do not tell you anything.

AI recommendations

Most people who ask an assistant for a business never click a link: they call the one it names. So RankGrep also asks the assistants directly.

How it works

You choose up to ten questions a customer might ask, such as "Who is a good plumber in Centurion for a burst geyser?" RankGrep suggests some from the searches that already bring you visitors in Search Console, and you can change them. Once a week, each question goes to ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Claude with web search turned on, from your website's country and town where the assistant accepts one. Ask now runs them straight away.

Tracking is off until you save questions. Each question costs 10 data credits a week across the four assistants, so five questions use about 217 credits a month. The page shows the total before you start, and saving an empty list stops tracking.

Reading the answers

Every answer gets one of three results:

• Recommended: the assistant named your business as one to use, either by name or as a listed business backed by your website. When it gave a list, #2 means you were second.
• Cited: the assistant used one of your pages as a source but did not name you as a business to call. For a question about prices or how to do something, that is a win. For "who should I call", it is a near miss.
• Not named: neither.

Click a question to read each assistant's full answer, the businesses it named, and what they searched for to answer it. Those searches are the questions your pages should answer. Recommended most often lists the businesses the assistants named instead of you, marking the ones you track as competitors.

Assistants do not give the same answer twice, so judge the share of answers that recommend you over several weeks rather than any one answer. The trend shows it week by week.

Google AI Overviews

Each night's rank check also records whether Google showed an AI Overview for the search and which sites it cited. This uses the same search, so it costs nothing extra. Sometimes Google fills the Overview in after the page loads. RankGrep then knows an Overview was shown but cannot see its sources, and says so rather than guessing.

AI readiness

An assistant can only recommend a page it is allowed to read. RankGrep checks this with every audit, once a week on its own, and whenever you press Check now.

Two kinds of bot

RankGrep checks the five assistants most people use every day: ChatGPT, Google (AI Overviews and Gemini), Microsoft Copilot, Perplexity and Claude. Each one is shown as a single row. If any of the bots behind an assistant is blocked, that row shows it.

AI companies send two kinds of crawler, and the difference matters:

• Bots that fetch pages for answers: OAI-SearchBot and ChatGPT-User (ChatGPT), Googlebot (AI Overviews and Gemini), Bingbot (Copilot, and ChatGPT search draws on Bing too), PerplexityBot and Perplexity-User, Claude-SearchBot and Claude-User. If one of these is blocked, that assistant cannot quote or link your site.
• Bots that collect pages for training: GPTBot, ClaudeBot and Google-Extended. Blocking these keeps your pages out of model training and does not remove you from answers. RankGrep lists what you have chosen in one line under the assistants and never counts it against you.

What is checked

When the robots.txt check fails, it raises an issue in Issues (High). Missing business structured data raises one too (Opportunity). Both close on their own once a later check passes.

Reading the results fairly

• If robots.txt is missing (a 404), every bot may read everything, and the check passes. If it errors (a 5xx), bots are expected to stay away, so RankGrep warns instead of guessing.
• The firewall check can raise a false alarm. Some firewalls refuse any request that only claims to be a bot, and let the real bot through by its network address. A warning there means "check the setting", not "you are blocked". On Cloudflare it is under Security → Bots ("Block AI bots" and Bot Fight Mode).
• When the firewall turns away browsers too, the audit's own firewall issue covers it and this check is skipped.
• For pages that answer questions, a heading only counts if it is a real question of four words or more. Calls to action ("Need a plumber?"), headings about the business itself ("Why choose us", "How we work") and headings repeated across most pages by the theme are left out.

What to change

The What to change tab turns the readings from the other tabs into changes. Nothing happens until you click, and every change has an Undo.

Let the AI search bots in

When robots.txt keeps out a bot that fetches pages for answers, RankGrep lists the bots and, with the connector 0.10.0 or later, adds the lines that let them in to the robots.txt WordPress serves. Each bot gets the same rules as WordPress's own default: the admin area stays closed and the rest is open. Training bots are never touched.

If robots.txt blocks a bot by name rather than through User-agent: *, the page warns you: someone may have chosen that on purpose. If the site has a robots.txt file of its own in the root folder, WordPress cannot change it, and the page shows the lines to paste in instead. The same happens when WordPress is set to discourage search engines.

Say who the business is

When no page carries Organization or LocalBusiness structured data, RankGrep drafts the details from your home page: the type of business from its name and title, the phone and email from the links on the page, and the social profiles it links to. Nothing is guessed. A street address the page does not link to stays empty for you to fill in. Check the form, then Publish on the home page. Without the connector, the page shows the code to add to the home page yourself or to paste into your SEO plugin's schema settings.

Questions answered without you

For each tracked question that the assistants mostly answer with other businesses, RankGrep shows how many answers named you, who they named instead, and the page on your site closest to the question. What the assistants searched for is folded under What the assistants searched for. Each question gets one change, depending on what happened. Rewrite the opening: the assistants read your page and still chose others, so make its opening say plainly that you do exactly this, where, and how to reach you. Add an answer: they never read it, so add a heading that asks the question and a first paragraph that answers it. Write a new page: no page on the site is close to the question yet. The AI Assistant can draft that section for you: ask it about the question.

Did it work?

After a fix is applied, RankGrep reads the live site again to confirm it took effect. If a page cache is still serving the old copy, the fix shows as Saved — confirming with a Check again button. Four weeks later, RankGrep compares the four weeks after the fix with the four weeks before. It uses the share of tracked answers that recommend you when there are enough of them, and otherwise the visits from AI assistants. The verdict is Worked, No clear change, Fell back or Too little data, and it is never a guess.

Getting recommended more often

Assistants repeat what they can read and check. What helps, roughly in order:

1. Let the answer bots in. Your robots.txt and any firewall must allow the crawlers that fetch pages for answers: OAI-SearchBot and ChatGPT-User (ChatGPT), PerplexityBot, Claude-SearchBot and Claude-User, and Bingbot. Blocking GPTBot, ClaudeBot or Google-Extended stops your pages being used for training, which is a separate choice and does not remove you from answers.
2. Be in Bing. ChatGPT search and Copilot both draw on Bing's index. Verify your site in Bing Webmaster Tools and submit your sitemap.
3. Say plainly who you are. Your business name, address, phone number, the areas you serve and your services should read the same on every page, and in your Organization or LocalBusiness structured data.
4. Answer the question in the first paragraph. Assistants quote pages that answer directly. Pages whose opening says what the service is, where, and for whom are the ones that get cited.
5. Keep the trusted pages current. Whatever the landing pages table shows as busiest is what assistants repeat about you, so keep its prices, hours and contact details accurate.

AI readiness checks the first three points for you, What to change applies the first and third with your approval, and AI recommendations shows whether they are working. See how a fix is applied.