What is AI Visibility (AI Overview citation tracking)?

A Google AI Overview is the AI-generated summary that increasingly appears above the normal results — and it names its sources. Those citations are the new shelf space: if the AI answer to “best emergency plumber near me” cites two competitors and a directory but not you, you're invisible at the exact moment a customer is being handed an answer.

The page has three parts. The coverage stat is your headline — of the keywords whose citations we've resolved, how many cite you. The by-keyword table shows each keyword that triggered an AI Overview and tags who it cited: you, a competitor, or a third-party source. And “Where Google's AI reads for your market” aggregates the third-party sites cited most across your keywords — the directories and publications the AI leans on, which is exactly where getting listed can pull you into the answer.

It costs you nothing extra to watch: whether an AI Overview shows for a keyword at all rides the same Google scan we already run for your rankings. Who the overview cites is resolved when your dashboard first sets up (so it's populated from day one), then refreshed by a small dedicated monthly scan (see the mobile-only / cadence article for why).

When a keyword reads “AI Overview shown · citations from the monthly deep scan,” it means an AI Overview appeared but its sources haven't been resolved yet — Google served it asynchronously, and the monthly scan fills in who it cites. It does not mean you're not cited.