The free audit asks Perplexity a handful of questions a buyer of yours might ask, and shows whether it cites you. It does not ask Google AI Overviews: that is measured in the product, on Growth and Scale.
Google says AI Overviews are only shown when its systems judge them additive to classic Search, and so often do not appear.
AI Overviews may use a query fan-out technique, issuing several related searches across subtopics and data sources to build a response.
Google says AI features show a wider and more diverse set of links than a classic web search.
To be eligible as a supporting link, a page must be indexed and eligible to show in Google Search with a snippet. Google adds that indexing and serving are not guaranteed.
Google says there are no extra requirements and no special optimizations: no new machine-readable files, AI text files, markup or schema.org structured data are needed.
Google names robots.txt rules for Googlebot as the control for how a site is crawled for Search, and nosnippet, data-nosnippet, max-snippet or noindex to limit what is shown.
Google-Extended does not affect a site's inclusion in Google Search and is not a ranking signal.
Traffic from AI features is reported in Search Console's Performance report, under the Web search type.
How we ask
We run each tracked question as a Google search through DataForSEO's SERP API, let the AI Overview load, and read the sources it lists. When no AI Overview appears, we record that there was nothing to measure, not a miss.
How often
Every 7 days per question, spread across that window so a domain's checks do not all land on one day. On trial accounts, scheduled checks pause after 14 days without a sign-in and resume on the next visit.
Each check records
| Plan | Tracked questions per domain | Checks a month, all engines |
|---|---|---|
| Growth | 100 | 1,200 |
| Scale | 100 | 4,000 |
Past the monthly budget, the questions checked longest ago go first and the rest wait for the next cycle.
Vendor sources checked 2026-09-24