AI SEO Mastery: Part 6 – How to Track Results and Prove It’s Working
TLDR: This post shows you how to report on AI SEO the right way, by tracking visibility inside AI tools, not just traffic and rankings. You'll get a step-by-step monthly system anyone can run, using tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Screaming Frog, and Google Sheets. Learn how to log prompt inclusion, check AI crawler access, audit schema across your site, compare structured content performance, and publish a visibility report that actually reflects how modern search works.
Finished the other parts?
Part 5 gave you the no-code tools to structure, check, and optimise your AI SEO system. This final part shows you how to track its impact without needing a data analyst. If you're presenting outcomes to your manager, your board, or just yourself, this is the part that tells you: Is it working? Should we keep going? What’s next?
Stop reporting on what’s easy or what you have for the last decade and start tracking what matters. Most SEO dashboards still track impressions, traffic, bounce rate, and backlinks. These are easy to measure but increasingly disconnected from AI-first visibility.
Here's what actually matters now:
- Is your content being retrieved by AI platforms?
- Are crawlers reaching your site—including AI crawlers?
- Are AI tools reusing or paraphrasing your content?
- Does your structure align with the way people ask questions?
- Can you show improvements in AI citations or prompt presence?
What modern SEO reporting looks like
The KPI model we believe you should be moving toward introduces three tiers of tracking:
- Access and structure
- Retrieval and reuse
- Performance and outcomes
Let’s walk through each with exact tools and steps for each one.
1. Access and structure
Goal: Ensure your content is visible, accessible, and understandable to machines.
What to track:
- Schema presence on key pages
- Robots.txt rules for AI crawlers (GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot)
- Crawl rate for these bots
- Broken or missing markup
What to use:
- Screaming Frog SEO Spider: crawl your site and filter by schema coverage
- Google Rich Results Test: validate key pages manually
- Server logs or Cloudflare Bot Analytics – check if AI bots are hitting your site
robots.txt review and manually confirm AI access is not blocked
How to report it:
- Schema coverage: % of site with valid markup
- Bot access: list of bots, hit count per month
- Pages with errors or blocked access: fixed vs outstanding
2. Retrieval and reuse
Goal: Know whether AI platforms are referencing or using your content.
What to track:
- Prompt results for target queries
- Brand or phrasing reuse in ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Copilot
- Paraphrased inclusion (even if not directly cited)
- FAQ and snippet presence
What to use:
- ChatGPT with browsing, Perplexity, and Copilot – test 5–10 queries weekly
- Log whether your site appears, is paraphrased, or omitted
- Use Mention or manual tracking if needed
How to report it:
- Weekly visibility log: platform, prompt, result
- Screenshots of inclusion with date
- Tracking sheet for trends (e.g. increase in paraphrased references)
- Share key queries that trigger your presence
3. Performance and outcomes
Goal: Track how your structured SEO work leads to better AI visibility and lower workload.
What to track:
- Number of content pieces needed to generate same traffic
- Time to rank / time to AI visibility
- Featured snippet win rate
- Organic traffic per page (especially those with schema and structure)
What to use:
- GA4 and Search Console – for traffic and indexing
- SE Ranking / Semrush – track SERP features like snippets and questions
- Your own publishing tracker of some kind so you can log when structured pages go live and what happens next
How to report it:
- Show content efficiency: fewer pages, more visibility
- Compare structured vs unstructured content performance
- Track traffic lift across topic clusters, not just keywords
- Measure AI-specific wins (prompt presence, paraphrase reuse, snippet capture)
The 4 Week AI SEO Rhythm
This 4-week rhythm helps you monitor what matters in AI SEO: presence in prompts, schema structure, crawler access, and performance of structured content. You can do it with tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Screaming Frog, Google Sheets, and Search Console. That’s it.
Week 1 – Check your presence in AI tools
- Goal: Confirm whether your content appears in AI answers for key queries.
- Identify 10–15 high-value prompts based on your core services or content themes.
- Run those queries in ChatGPT (with browsing), Microsoft Copilot, and Perplexity.
- Log whether your site is cited directly, paraphrased, or ignored.
- Save screenshots for examples that show inclusion.
- Record results by platform, prompt, and date in a visibility tracker.
AI tools now act as search engines. If your brand or content doesn’t appear, you’ve got a structural problem—not a traffic problem.
Week 2 – Audit schema and site structure
- Goal: Make sure your content is machine-readable and eligible for inclusion.
- Use Screaming Frog SEO Spider to crawl up to 500 URLs for free.
- Filter pages missing Article, FAQ, or Organisation schema.
- Validate key pages using Google’s Rich Results Test.
- Identify broken or duplicated schema entries that block visibility.
- Update or assign fixes based on traffic and business relevance.
Schema gives structure to your content. AI tools can’t interpret your page if they don’t understand what it is.
Week 3 – Compare structured content performance
- Goal: Measure how structured content performs versus unstructured.
- In GA4 or Search Console, filter pages with valid schema.
- Compare indexed status, impressions, and traffic with pages that have no schema.
- Track how quickly new structured pages get indexed and appear in snippets.
- Map visibility outcomes to topic clusters—see what’s pulling its weight.
AI SEO rewards structure. If structured content consistently outperforms other pages, you now have a business case for scaling it.
Week 4 – Report what changed and what worked
- Goal: Build a repeatable snapshot of visibility, outcomes, and decisions.
- Compile citations, prompt outcomes, schema fixes, and traffic highlights.
- Include screenshots that show inclusion in AI tools or featured snippets.
- List resolved issues (e.g. schema errors fixed, crawler blocks removed).
- Add one experiment or test to try next month based on what’s working.
- Save this in a one-pager. Use Docs or Sheets. Share or reflect.
AI SEO momentum fades without visibility. A structured monthly review stops that from happening and gives you proof it’s working.
AI SEO Takeaway
Most AI SEO wins aren’t dramatic—they’re quiet and structural. A page gets cited more. A new answer appears in Perplexity. Fewer content pieces drive more traffic. But you won’t notice unless you’re looking.
Ensure you are tracking the right things: AI prompt presence, crawl success, schema quality, and content performance tied to actual visibility. Get that rhythm in place, and you’ll stop guessing whether your AI SEO works. You’ll know.
FAQ
Q: Do I need a data analyst to do this?
A: No. Prompt logs, crawl checks, schema audits, and traffic comparisons can all be done manually.
Q: What’s the minimum I should check each month?
A: Prompt presence (in AI tools), schema coverage (on key pages), and AI crawler access.
Q: Is this type of reporting useful beyond marketing?
A: Yes. Visibility in AI systems affects brand perception, support answers, and even recruitment visibility.
Q: What’s the biggest mistake people make?
A: They report what’s easy (rankings) instead of what matters (retrieval and reuse).
Want help turning these checks into a strategic system?
The AI Strategy Roadmap helps teams move from guesswork to structure using AI visibility as a real business asset, not just a dashboard number.
That wraps up the series parts 1 to 6!