How to monitor your AI presence

As of 2025, it's estimated that more than 5% of the search traffic comes from answer engines such as Perplexity or ChatGPT according to different studies from Opollo and SparkToro, reflecting a significant shift in users browsing habits. Even Google is integrating AI more deeply within the search experience with Google AI overview.

Image from Rand Fishkin

Unlike traditional search, answer engines will alter your website content to answer questions asked by the user, models might have some bias in their knowledge base or struggle to find relevant content about your brand.

That is why it's becoming incrasingly important to understand and monitor how your brand is perceived by AI.

What is AI presence

AI presence is composed of multiple levels, but first it's important to understand how most answer engines work before optimizing for them.

Most answer engines are built from a combination of a model which has been trained over a very large amount of textual data gathered across the web, this is the knowledge base and it's fixed in time. The second part is a set of tools which the model can access if it deems necessary, the main tool being search engine giving web access to the model in order to find up-to-date information.

When trying to understand your brand's AI presence you need to understand it at multiple levels:

AI Awareness: The first level consists of checking whether the model even knows your brand exists without having to use external search tools.
AI Bias: The second level consists in understanding how your brand is perceived by the model, whether your value proposition and brand values are reflected accurately, if your brand has a bad perception online this is the level at which it would surface.
AI agent compatibility: Finallyl the third level consists in understanding how easy it's for answer engines to find content about you and most importantly content that you control so it can accurately represent your brand to the user.

What affects your AI presence

Several factors influence your presence in AI responses :

Popularity : your brand is more likely to be included directly within the knowledge base of answer engines, notably if mentioned within User Generated Content (UGC) platforms like Reddit or Medium as they are a huge source of training data for AI, thus leading to a more profound knowledge of your brand by the model.
Relevance : unlike classic search engines, ChatGPT and others have a deep understanding of the user's intent and will only provide product suggestions when the product provides an actual solution to the user's problem.
SEO : Many models now have the ability to search through the web, most of them using the Bing index, so it's natural that Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) is built on top of SEO.
Crawlability : Obviously your website needs to be AI agent friendly so that agents can easily retrieve and understand your content in a minimal amount of requests.

Start monitoring your AI presence

AI presence can be understood through multiple aspects, let's dive into the most common ones to get a deeper understanding of the approaches, their strengths and weaknesses.

Evaluating ranks through targeted prompts

The idea behind this approach is simple yet efficient but has its limits. Basically the point is to define a set of prompts (e.g: "What is the best EV car?") in multiple languages, across different regions, and monitor periodically how the results are ranked.

While giving an interesting insight, this approach alone is insufficient to understand the full picture, indeed the model weights are fixed, in theory querying the same prompt over and over should yield similar results with added randomness from model temperature, at best when used alone this becomes a proxy for SEO at worst this gives you a false sense of understanding leading you to take bad decisions.

It's also important to note that while you get a general picture of your brand's perception through this, you will never mimick the exact prompt and situation of an user because with answer engines queries are much more granular and detailed (e.g: "As a dad of 3 living in Oregon and owner of a Toyota Rav4, what is the best EV car in a 20000$ budget knowing I'm not a fan of Hyundai?")

In short this approach needs to be coupled with other methods to get a complete picture.

Crawler activity analysis

What if I told you that you could get the actual traffic from anwer engines on your website and know what they're crawling in order to present the user with the most relevant results?

Through server-side request analysis it's possible to detect AI crawlers, allowing you to understand how AI agents are interacting with your website, thanks to this you can know whether your website has been included in training datasets, or whether users are finding out about your brand through interacting with an answer engine.

Doppler provides you with easy to plug SDK to start tracking crawler activity on your website in a matter of minutes.

User-Generated Content mentions

According to a study by SERanking, ChatGPT tends to include much more UGC in its response with Youtube & Reddit combined representing more than 18% of the total content. Other models also rely on User Generated Content, for example Grok uses X.com as a privileged source of information to stay-up-to-date, with each user query it always checks for latest posts on X.

The reason for this is that User Generated Content composes a large part of the training data of AI models, so it's deeply ingrained within the model's knowledge base thus the more your brand is mentioned on platforms like Reddit the more likely it is to be thought of by the model.

It's also why it's a must to control the narrative around your brand on those platforms, any bias from users might cause some long term consequences as models will tend to reflect the negative bias that users have towards your brand.

Conclusion

AI presence is a crucial aspect of your brand's online presence, it's important to understand how your brand is perceived by AI and how it can be improved.

While there are many ways to monitor your AI presence it's necessary to combine them to get a complete picture and take the right decisions.

Doppler provides you with a complete toolkit to monitor your AI presence and take the right decisions to improve it.