Can we even track whether AI engines cite us?

What this checks

Whether AI mentions and citations can be tracked on your account, today — and if not, exactly what is missing. It does not measure how visible you are; that is a different question and a different answer.

Five conditions have to hold before any AI-visibility number is worth reporting:

1. A prompt panel exists. There is no Search Console for chat answers. A fixed set of questions, asked repeatedly, is what a measurement means here.
2. Mention and citation are logged apart. Being named in an answer and having a page of yours cited are different events, and collapsing them makes a flat quarter read as growth.
3. The runs retrieve rather than recall. An engine answering from training data tells you what it remembers about your brand, not what it cites.
4. The prompt list is frozen and yours. A number moves either because the answers changed or because someone changed the question. Only owning the list rules out the second.
5. The referral leg is wired. Some AI exposure reaches analytics as a referral — but most never sends a click, so this corroborates and never measures.

When to ask this

Any time, including on a brand-new account. This is the one AI-visibility answer that does not need a measurement first — an account with nothing set up gets the complete answer, with the single missing piece named, rather than a thin one.

When this refuses

It does not refuse. Where a condition cannot be checked it says which and what would settle it, but the headline answer — whether tracking is possible — is always given.

The one thing it will not do is let an ungrounded run pass as tracking. If your engines answered without retrieving, that is reported as a failed condition rather than a footnote: every cell still fills, which is exactly why it is easy to miss.

How to ask it in chat

"is it technically possible to track whether chatgpt or perplexity mention us"

What you'll get back

A direct answer computed from measurements already on file — no extra cost, no new data is purchased to answer this. Where the panel does not exist yet, the answer is the panel to create and the reason not to buy a tracker before it.