AI Visibility connector
AI search surfaces — Google’s AI Overviews, Perplexity, and ChatGPT search — now answer a growing share of queries by citing sources directly. The AI Visibility connector tracks whether your content is being cited on those surfaces and whether the crawlers that feed them can reach your site at all. It closes the loop between can AI read you (an audit concern) and is AI actually citing you (a measurement concern).
What you’ll need
Section titled “What you’ll need”- A project with at least one completed crawl, so VisibilityIQ knows your page inventory and AI-crawler access status.
- The set of tracked queries or topics you care about appearing for in AI answers.
- No OAuth for the citation-tracking side — it observes public AI surfaces. The crawler-access side reads what your own crawl already captured.
What it tracks
Section titled “What it tracks”AI citations — For your tracked queries, the connector records whether your domain appears as a cited source in:
- Google AI Overviews — the AI-generated answer block above traditional results.
- Perplexity — which lists numbered sources beneath each answer.
- ChatGPT search — answers that surface and link out to web sources.
For each citation it captures the query, the surface, the cited URL, and the position of your source relative to competitors. This normalizes into the internal AIVisibilityObservation model — the same model the audit engine uses — so citation data and crawler-access data live side by side.
AI bot access status — The connector reconciles citation results against the crawler’s AI-access findings for each bot:
| Bot | Surface it feeds |
|---|---|
GPTBot | ChatGPT / OpenAI training and answers |
OAI-SearchBot | ChatGPT search |
ClaudeBot | Claude (Anthropic) |
PerplexityBot | Perplexity AI |
Google-Extended | Google’s AI training (AI Overviews eligibility) |
If a bot is blocked in robots.txt, returns 403/429 at your CDN or WAF, or can only see a JavaScript-empty raw page, that’s the most likely reason you aren’t being cited — and the connector pairs the missing-citation observation with the access defect that explains it.
Why citation and access belong together
Section titled “Why citation and access belong together”A missing citation has two very different causes. Either an AI crawler can’t reach or read your page (an access problem you fix in robots.txt, your WAF, or by server-rendering content), or it can read you but chose a competitor (a content-quality or structure problem). Tracking citations without access status leaves you guessing; tracking access without citations leaves you unable to tell whether your fixes worked. This connector reports both so each missing citation points at the right remediation.
How it appears in findings
Section titled “How it appears in findings”When AI Visibility data is connected, AI-readiness findings gain a measured outcome. An “AI-unreadable content” finding on a key template now shows and that the page earns zero citations across all three surfaces — which raises its priority. Conversely, a page that’s fully readable but still uncited surfaces a content-structure finding (heading clarity, answer-block completeness, citation-worthy claims) rather than an access fix.
Sync cadence and limits
Section titled “Sync cadence and limits”Citation tracking syncs on a regular cadence per tracked query; AI surfaces are volatile, so a single absent citation is treated as a signal, not a verdict, until it’s observed consistently. Quota applies per tracked query — keep the tracked set focused on the queries that matter to your business.
Next steps
Section titled “Next steps”- AI crawler access checks — the audit side: which bots can reach your content
- Render-parity diff explained — why JS-only content is invisible to AI crawlers
- Bing Webmaster Tools connector — Bing’s index feeds several AI search products