Measure impressions and citations, not only clicks. Four sources are dependable:
Google Search Console 1 . The Generative AI performance report, open to all sites since August 31, 2026, shows impressions in AI Overviews and AI Mode by page, country, date and device.
Bing Webmaster Tools 31 . AI Performance, in public preview since February 2026, counts citations per URL in Microsoft Copilot 6 and Bing 31 's AI summaries, with sample "grounding queries".
Server logs. They show which pages each AI crawler fetches; check hits against the IP ranges the operators publish, since user agents are easy to fake.
Analytics referrals. Visits from assistant domains such as chatgpt.com, perplexity.ai and copilot.microsoft.com appear as referral traffic when the browser sends a referrer.
grep -oE 'GPTBot|OAI-SearchBot|ChatGPT-User|ClaudeBot|Claude-User|PerplexityBot' \
/var/log/nginx/access.log | sort | uniq -c | sort -rnFor assistants without publisher reports, ask a fixed set of real customer questions each month and record whether your pages are cited. Answers vary between runs, so track trends; commercial trackers automate this without any inside access to the models.
Start with the basics that serve every engine: server-render your content, keep crawlers you want unblocked, publish first-hand information others cannot copy, and review these reports every month.