How to Track AI Search Visibility with Free Tools

Keep three kinds of evidence separate

Do not add these figures together to create an “AI audience”. Their units, coverage and collection methods differ. There is no useful combined total of impressions, citations and sessions.

Before you start

• Check that you can open the correct verified website in Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools, and the correct GA4 property. If access is missing, ask your site administrator to grant it.
• Check that GA4 actually collects visits and completed enquiries or purchases. Installing a plugin or creating an account does not automatically provide working conversion measurement.
• Choose a complete calendar month. For example, report on 1–30 September 2026 and compare with 1–31 August. Different month lengths and seasonal demand affect the comparison.
• Create one worksheet per month. Keep the property names, date ranges, filters, time zones and date of collection beside the figures. Save the reports you use.

Start with site-wide figures without country or page filters. If you later need a local market or service-page view, create a separately labelled section rather than silently changing the main report’s scope.

Step 1 Record Google AI search impressions

Google introduced dedicated Generative AI performance reports in June 2026 and completed the worldwide rollout in August. The Search report covers AI Overviews and AI Mode together. Its AI visibility is already included in overall Search reporting: it is a subset, not an additional audience. The documented report does not supply a separate AI clicks or conversion total.

Google’s announcement of Generative AI reporting

Open the report and collect your figures

Sign in to Search Console and select your website property. Open the Generative AI performance report for Search. The direct link below opens the report after sign-in; confirm that the selected property is yours.

Open the Generative AI Search performance report

Select the complete month. Record the chart’s impressions total and search-type filter, such as Web: text-based. Keep the filter unchanged next month. Search Console dates use Pacific Time; note your GA4 property’s time zone separately.

Inspect Pages, Countries and Devices. Note one relevant page, keeping this inspection separate from the site-wide total. Use Export to retain the chart and table.

Repeat for the previous month. Record overall Search impressions separately from Search results Performance, matching the dates and text-based or multimodal scope.

Check the limits before copying

Impressions count displayed links, not unique people or every brand mention. Search Labs experiments are excluded. A report can be missing when impressions are insufficient or the site is excluded from generative AI features.

Use the chart total rather than summing the Pages table: their aggregation can differ. Google also warns that unavailable values displayed as a dash or tilde export as zero. Check the screen before treating an exported zero as measured activity.

Google’s Generative AI Search report instructions and limits

If the report is unavailable, write “Unavailable” in the worksheet and note the reason if known. Do not infer AI traffic from a drop in ordinary search clicks.

Step 2 Record Bing AI citations

Open Bing Webmaster Tools, choose the verified website and open AI Performance. This public-preview report covers Microsoft Copilot, AI-generated Bing summaries and selected partner experiences. It is not a report of all AI platforms.

Set the reporting dates to the same month as your worksheet. Copy Total Citations into its own row. This counts displayed source citations, not visits or rankings. If useful, keep Average Cited Pages in a separate note: it is a daily average of distinct cited pages, not the total number of pages cited during the month.

Review the cited-page list. Note one URL that receives relevant citations. Grounding Queries show a sample of retrieval phrases used to find supporting material; they are not necessarily customers’ exact prompts.

Microsoft’s AI Performance introduction and dashboard

Compare like with like

Where available, use Compare to examine the previous period, checking its dates. Microsoft’s June preview update also added Intents and Topics to organise grounding queries. Treat these categories as context for a page review; preview classifications can be broad.

Citation Share is a percentage for a particular grounding query: your site’s citations relative to citations across the sites referenced for that query. It is not traffic share or a ranking score. It does not reveal competitor domains. Do not sum these percentages across queries.

Microsoft’s Compare and AI visibility insights

Retain the selected dates and the page or query you reviewed in your notes. If the interface offers a download, save it; otherwise record the totals and keep a dated screenshot for your own reporting file.

Step 3 Find recognised AI assistant visits in GA4

GA4 introduced its AI Assistant channel in May 2026. This classifies recognised assistant referrers, using an ai-assistant medium and an (ai-assistant) campaign value. The channel helps you find recorded assistant visits; it is not a complete record of AI influence.

Google Analytics product updates

Use the session report

• Open the correct GA4 property. Go to Reports, then Acquisition, then Traffic acquisition. If your organisation has customised the navigation, ask an administrator to locate or restore this report.
• Set the date selector to the complete reporting month. Use Session default channel group as the table’s main dimension. A dimension is simply the label used to group the rows.
• Find the AI Assistant row. Record Sessions. For visits, use this session-based report rather than User acquisition, which answers a question about how users were first acquired.
• Use the plus button beside the primary dimension to add Session source/medium when you want to inspect individual sources. Keep your monthly headline at the AI Assistant channel level.
• Repeat for the previous month. Record Organic Search sessions separately if you want the wider search comparison.

Sessions are visits, not unique customers. Missing referrer information and tracking gaps can leave some activity elsewhere or unobserved. Do not relabel all Direct traffic as AI traffic.

GA4 Traffic acquisition report instructions

Google AI Overviews and AI Mode are excluded from GA4’s AI Assistant channel. Their unpaid Google Search visits belong in Organic Search. Recognised referrals from the standalone Gemini assistant are a different category.

GA4 default channel definitions

If the row is absent, first check the dates, property, default channel dimension and underlying sources. Record what you can establish. An absent row is not proof that no customer used AI before visiting.

Step 4 Check completed enquiries and purchases

Choose a measured action that matters, such as a successfully submitted enquiry or a completed purchase. A click on a telephone number or the start of a form is useful diagnostic information, but does not prove that an enquiry or sale happened.

In GA4, important measured actions are called key events. To mark an existing event, go to Admin, then Data display, then Events. In Recent events, find the correct event and use its star to mark it as a key event. Ask your administrator for help if the setting is unavailable.

The event must already measure the intended action correctly. Merely naming an event does not make your form track it. Marking it as a key event applies going forward; it does not rewrite earlier months. Standard reports can take up to 24 hours to reflect the change.

Google’s instructions for marking key events

Submit a test enquiry and confirm successful delivery and one recorded completion. For a shop, check purchase value and currency as well. Ask your website manager to fix missing or duplicate measurement before drawing conclusions from the report.

Return to Traffic acquisition. In the Key events column, use the event selector to choose your completed-enquiry event rather than reporting all key events together. Record its count for the AI Assistant row. Keep a note of the event name and its counting setting.

Google’s instructions for reporting on a specific key event

An event count is not automatically a count of unique enquiries. Reconcile it with your inbox, booking system or customer relationship management system. Use those records to confirm genuine enquiries, qualified leads and paid sales, with a stated source-attribution rule.

For this simple worksheet, use the source recorded for the originating enquiry where it is available. If your records cannot connect a sale with that source, leave the AI-associated sales cell unavailable and report total business sales separately. Do not guess.

Step 5 Fill in the monthly worksheet

Copy this layout into a spreadsheet or keep it as a table in your reporting document. Replace each “Enter” with your value, a measured zero or “Unavailable”. Keep units and sources intact.

Report month: ______  Comparison month: ______  Collected on: ______

GSC property and search type: ______  Bing website: ______  GA4 property: ______

Filters and time zones: ______  Enquiry event and counting setting: ______

Business-record attribution rule: ______  Changes to tracking this month: ______

Page or topic to investigate: ______  Main limitation this month: ______

Next action: ______  Person responsible: ______  Review date: ______

Read the figures without inventing a funnel

Suppose your fictional September report shows 20,000 overall Google impressions, including 3,000 generative AI impressions, 120 Bing citations and 40 GA4 AI Assistant sessions. It also records two genuine assistant-associated enquiries, one qualified enquiry and no completed sales yet.

The Google total is still 20,000. The 3,000 AI impressions are already within it. You cannot divide 40 assistant sessions by 120 Bing citations to calculate a click-through rate: the reports cover different experiences and do not connect those individual journeys.

A useful conclusion is: “We recorded AI visibility and a small number of recognised assistant visits. One enquiry was suitable. We will clarify the quotation process on the relevant service page and review next month.” A claim that AI visibility generated 40 visits would go beyond this evidence.

Completed sales this month may come from older enquiries. To calculate a lead-to-sale rate, follow the same group of leads over a stated period instead of dividing this month’s sales by this month’s new leads.

Use Clarity for an optional behaviour check

Microsoft Clarity offers a separate view of visitor behaviour. Its documented AI Platform channel groups recognised organic referrals from standalone assistants; Paid AI Platform is separate. These labels do not have the same coverage as GA4’s AI Assistant channel.

In your Clarity project, open the Dashboard and find the traffic/referrer card. Select the Channel tab, labelled Channels in some instructions, then AIPlatform. Apply that selection as a filter and inspect associated recordings or heatmaps. Set the same reporting month first.

For example, a garden maintenance owner might review whether those visitors find the service area information and successfully reach the quotation form. A recording can suggest a usability problem; it does not establish that an AI citation caused the enquiry.

Clarity’s guidance excludes embedded assistants within Search or Office from this grouping. Hidden referrers can appear as Direct, and older data is not retrospectively recategorised. Use this as optional behavioural context, not another citation count to add to your worksheet.

Clarity’s AI channel instructions and screen examples

A checklist you can reuse every month

• Use complete months and the same website properties, filters and reporting scopes.
• Record Google AI impressions as a subset of overall Search, and Bing citations as a separate unit.
• Use GA4 session channels for visits. Keep AI Assistant and Organic Search separate.
• Check successful enquiry or purchase tracking; distinguish event counts from unique qualified enquiries and paid sales.
• Keep unavailable values, tracking changes and attribution limits visible. Retain your source reports.
• Review one relevant page or customer task. Set one action, a responsible person and a date to check the result.

This routine is useful even when the numbers are small. The aim is to learn whether useful visibility is accompanied by visits and worthwhile business activity, then improve what customers need next.

Sources and further reading

Google — Generative AI reporting announcement

Google — Generative AI Search report help

Microsoft — AI Performance public preview

Microsoft — New AI visibility insights

Google Analytics — Product updates

Google Analytics — Default channel definitions

Google Analytics — Traffic acquisition

Google Analytics — Mark key events

Google Analytics — Report on key events

Microsoft Clarity — AI channel group

Official documentation and Clarity’s published screen examples checked on 11 October 2026. Interfaces and preview features can change; use the linked instructions if a label differs.