What the engine searched before it wrote the answer

No. Gemini and OpenAI through a direct key return the queries they ran; others disclose nothing, and the panel says which is which rather than guessing on their behalf.

Because it is the wording the machine chose, not the wording a tool estimated. A query the engine ran on its own is the closest thing there is to a brief, and an untracked one can be promoted to a tracked prompt in a click.

AI visibility is how often, in which position and with what tone a brand appears in the answers generated by assistants such as ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews. It is not a search ranking: a brand is either named inside the answer text or it is absent from the decision entirely. Rixe measures all three dimensions daily and reports them as one visibility score per category.

An SEO tool measures where a page ranks on a results page. Rixe measures whether a brand is named inside an AI-generated answer, which position it holds among the brands mentioned, and which sources the model used to build that answer. The two rarely agree: a page can rank first in search and never appear in the AI answer to the same question, because the model draws on third-party sources such as review sites, forum threads and comparison articles.

Rixe runs a defined set of category prompts through each engine's live interface once a day and parses the answer that comes back. For every run it records whether the brand was named, its rank among the brands mentioned, the sentiment of the sentence around the name, and every source the answer cited. No score is published from a single run: below five runs a prompt is marked insufficient sample, and every score ships with a Wilson confidence interval.

Rixe tracks ChatGPT (GPT-5 Search), Gemini, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, Google AI Mode, Microsoft Copilot, Yandex Neuro, Grok, Claude Sonnet 4, DeepSeek, Qwen and Mistral. Every plan covers every engine — the limit is the number of prompts tracked, never the number of engines.