Thursday Intelligence tracks AI visibility from data the platforms publish: Copilot citations, Google AI Overview impressions and ChatGPT visits. Here is how it works, why we retired simulated prompt scores, and what it cannot tell you.

How We Track AI Visibility: Measured Citations, Not Simulated Prompts

Most agencies will tell you they do GEO. Very few can show you data that a platform actually produced.

This article explains how Thursday Intelligence, our own reporting platform, tracks a business's visibility in AI search today, why we changed how it works in 2026, and what it can and cannot tell you. If you read an earlier version of this page, it described a different method. We retired that method, and this is why.

What we used to do, and why we stopped

Thursday Intelligence originally tracked visibility by running prompts through AI models and scoring the answers: a set of questions a client's customers might ask, checked against five engines, turned into a visibility score out of ten.

The problem was that the results were modelled, not observed. Two runs of the same prompt could differ. The score could not tell a client how many real people had seen their brand, which pages the AI had used, or what it had searched for. A precise-looking number was resting on an estimate.

So in September 2026 we retired the prompt score and rebuilt the platform around data the AI platforms publish themselves.

What we measure now

Microsoft Copilot citations. Bing Webmaster Tools now reports how often Copilot cited a site's pages as a source, which pages were cited, and the grounding queries: the searches Copilot ran behind the scenes before answering. It also shows the intent and topic of those searches and the site's share of citations. Microsoft samples the data, and we say so on every report.

Google AI Overviews and AI Mode. Google Search Console reports how often a site's pages appeared in Google's generative AI features, by page, country and device. It reports impressions only, so that is what we show; we never present a guess for clicks or positions.

ChatGPT visits. OpenAI publishes no citation data for websites. What can be measured is the result: visits arriving from ChatGPT, recorded by Google Analytics 4 as referral traffic from chatgpt.com, by day and by landing page.

AI readiness. For any site, the platform also checks the signals AI engines rely on: whether AI crawlers are allowed in, structured data, page speed from Google's own test, sitemap and entity clarity. That is an assessment of readiness rather than a measurement of citations, and it is labelled as such.

What we do not claim

No AI platform publishes a rank. There is no such thing as position three in ChatGPT, and we do not report one.

Perplexity and Claude publish no first-party visibility data at all. For those engines we can assess readiness and check citations by hand, but we cannot measure them the way we measure Copilot and Google, so we do not pretend to.

Where a figure is missing, our reports say not available rather than showing a zero. Where a platform samples its data, the report says so.

What clients see

Every client on a GEO programme gets a private portal with:

• A trend for each engine: Copilot citations, Google AI impressions and ChatGPT visits, month by month.
• Which pages each engine relies on. The first client we loaded showed Copilot leaning on their practical guides while Google's AI leaned on their seasonal weather guides. One score would have hidden that.
• What AI is searching for: the grounding queries behind Copilot's citations, in customers' own words.
• Actions tied to evidence: every recommendation starts from which page, which engine and which query, not from a general score.

Built on our own site first

The platform grew out of work we did on ourselves. We split our own agency's presence into two sites, one for search marketing and one for AI, ran our own agency through AI transformation, and rebuilt this reporting when we found our original method could not stand behind its numbers. We published what we learned, including the mistakes: how we rebuilt AI visibility reporting and how we built our CRM with AI.

The honest question to ask

If someone in your sector asks ChatGPT, Copilot or Google's AI which business to use, does your name come up?

Most businesses do not know. A free GEO audit shows you how ready your website is to be found and cited, with a scored report delivered automatically. Where you already have Bing Webmaster Tools and Search Console access, we can show you the measured picture too.