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Is AI search sending you visitors? How to check, for free

By Mohamed Hadri

When site owners across the Middle East and North Africa ask about Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) or Generative Engine Optimization (GEO), their practical question is simple: is anyone actually finding our site through AI tools, and are they clicking through?

Google, Microsoft and your own analytics already give you free data on this. Here is where to look, step by step.

1. Google Search Console: generative AI performance reports

Google announced these reports on 3 June 2026 for a first group of sites, and made them available to all sites worldwide from 31 August 2026. There are separate reports for Search and for Discover.

  1. Open Google Search Console and select your property.
  2. Open the generative AI performance report for Search. It shows your site’s impressions inside Google’s generative AI features, such as AI Overviews and AI Mode.
  3. Break the numbers down by page (which of your URLs appeared), by country, by device, and by date.

Two details matter. First, this dedicated view counts impressions: how often your URLs appeared in those features. Second, AI Overviews and AI Mode are also counted in your normal Performance report, under the “Web” search type, mixed in with the rest of your Google Search traffic. So clicks from those features are in your Search Console numbers, but you can’t pull them out on their own there.

Google also says there are no additional technical requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode: the page must be indexed and eligible to show in Google Search with a snippet.

2. Bing Webmaster Tools: AI Performance report

Microsoft added an AI Performance report, in public preview, to Bing Webmaster Tools in February 2026. It shows when your content is cited across Microsoft Copilot, AI-generated summaries in Bing, and some partner integrations.

  1. Sign in to Bing Webmaster Tools at bing.com/webmasters and select your verified site.
  2. Open the AI Performance report.
  3. Read what it measures:
    • Total Citations: how many times your pages were shown as sources in AI-generated answers during the selected period.
    • Average Cited Pages: the average number of unique pages from your site shown as sources per day.
    • Grounding queries: the key phrases the AI used when it fetched content that was then cited. Microsoft says this is a sample, not the full list.
    • Page-level citation activity: citation counts per URL, so you can see which pages are cited most.

The report also has a timeline, so you can see whether citations are rising or falling.

3. Your analytics: visits referred by AI assistants

Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools count impressions and citations. Your analytics tool counts actual visits: someone clicked a link in an AI answer and landed on your site.

In Google Analytics 4 (GA4), open the Traffic acquisition report under Reports > Acquisition > Traffic acquisition. Change the table’s main dimension to Session source / medium, then type each assistant’s domain into the search box: chatgpt, perplexity, copilot.

These visits only happen if the assistants can read your pages in the first place. OpenAI says sites that block OAI-SearchBot will not be shown in ChatGPT search answers, and Perplexity says PerplexityBot is the bot that surfaces and links websites in its search results.

If you share links to your site yourself, in a newsletter or on social media, add campaign parameters such as utm_source and utm_medium, so those visits don’t blur the picture.

What these numbers can and cannot tell you

Each report shows part of the picture. None of them shows all of it:

  • Answers without clicks leave no visit. An AI answer can summarise your page and cite your site, and the reader may never click. That shows up as an impression or a citation, never as a visit in GA4.
  • Impressions are not visits. Google’s generative AI report shows impressions; the clicks from those features sit inside your overall Search numbers. Analytics shows visits, but knows nothing about the times you were shown and not clicked.
  • Some data is partial. Microsoft says grounding queries are a sample. And some visits can arrive without any referral information, so analytics files them as direct traffic.

What our free scan checks

The reports above measure the outcome: whether AI tools cited your pages and whether people clicked.

The free Mariy AI scan checks something that comes first: readiness. Before an AI assistant can cite your site, its bots have to be able to reach your pages and read them.

The scan reads your home page and root files such as robots.txt. Among other things, it shows whether your robots.txt blocks AI search bots like OAI-SearchBot or PerplexityBot, whether the page has a clear structure of headings, and whether its metadata and structured data can be read.

It does not count visits, does not track AI citations, and does not predict your traffic. It tells you whether the doors are open; the reports above tell you who came through.

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