Something happened to search in 2024 that most SEO practitioners I spoke to were slow to acknowledge and faster to dismiss than they should have been.
People started asking ChatGPT where to buy things.
Not as a novelty. As a first instinct. "What is the best CRM for a five-person sales team?" asked to ChatGPT returns a specific set of recommendations. Those recommendations are influenced by what the model learned during training, what appeared in its web search results (for models with browsing), and increasingly what appears in AI Overviews on Google for the same query. The recommendation is not a ranked list of ten blue links. It is a confident answer naming two or three specific products.
If your product is not in that answer, you are invisible to a category of searcher that is growing quickly and skews toward exactly the high-intent buyers who know what they are looking for.
In early 2025 I started asking clients whether they knew if ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, or Gemini mentioned their product when relevant questions were asked. Every single one said they had no idea. Most had never thought to check. The ones who had checked had done so once, manually, and had no baseline to compare against.
Traditional SEO tools — Ahrefs, Semrush, Moz — track Google and Bing rankings with precision. They have no capability to tell you whether an AI engine is recommending your brand. They were not built for a world where a significant fraction of product discovery happens through a conversational interface rather than a search results page.
The SERP + AI Visibility Tracker was built to close this blind spot.
The actor takes your domain name, an optional brand name, and a list of keywords as input. For each keyword, it runs two separate checks. The first check is traditional SERP: it queries Google and Bing and records your domain's ranking position, whether you have a featured snippet, and whether an AI Overview is present. This replaces the basic rank tracking function of tools like Ahrefs for the keywords you care about.
The second check is AI search visibility. For each keyword, it queries ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, and Gemini (for whichever you have API keys configured) and analyses whether your domain or brand name appears in the response. It records whether you were mentioned, the context of the mention, and whether a direct URL citation was included. If your competitor is mentioned but you are not, that appears clearly in the output.
The output for a keyword like "best CRM for small UK businesses" might look like: Google position 4, no AI Overview, no featured snippet. ChatGPT: not mentioned. Perplexity: mentioned in second paragraph, no URL cited. Claude: mentioned as top recommendation, URL cited. Gemini: not mentioned. That is a complete picture of your search visibility across both traditional and AI search, in a single actor run.
The business case for tracking AI visibility alongside traditional rankings is straightforward. Research published in 2025 suggests that AI-generated answers now influence purchasing decisions for a meaningful percentage of users who interact with AI search tools. That percentage is growing. The brands that understand where they stand in AI recommendations — and invest in the content signals that influence those recommendations — are building an advantage that traditional SEO practitioners are not yet measuring.
Ahrefs charges £129 per month for rank tracking. The Perplexity AI monitoring it does not offer would require a separate tool at additional cost. The SERP + AI Visibility Tracker charges £0.004 per keyword for traditional SERP checking and £0.012 per keyword for AI search visibility checking. A startup tracking twenty keywords across Google and two AI engines pays approximately £0.64 per weekly run — under £2.80 per month.
The question I now ask every founder I work with is simple: search for what your ideal customer would ask when looking for what you do. What does ChatGPT say? Do you appear?
If you do not know the answer, this is the tool that finds it.