AI Overview Tracker: Presence, Cited Domains and Your Share

Your rank tracker tells you where you rank in the blue links. It usually doesn’t tell you whether Google answered the query with an AI Overview first, or whose pages that answer cited. This free Google Colab notebook checks both for any keyword list: whether an AI Overview appears, which domains and URLs it cites, whether your domain is among them, and each domain’s share of citations. It’s a simple, transparent form of AI rank tracking you can run yourself.

Who it’s for

SEOs, content leads and agencies who need to measure how AI Overviews affect their keyword set, report on AI visibility and AI share of voice, and find the queries where competitors are cited and they aren’t.

How to use it

1. Open the notebook in Colab and run it with USE_SAMPLE = True to see every output on three real SERPs, with no key and no cost.
2. Set MY_DOMAIN to your site and, if you like, list a few competitors.
3. Load your keywords from a CSV or paste them in. Check the worst-case cost estimate.
4. Add your DataForSEO login and API password as Colab secrets, set USE_SAMPLE = False and run the collection. The notebook asks DataForSEO to load asynchronous AI Overviews, so presence isn’t undercounted.
5. Read the presence table, the citation share chart, the gap list and the cited-vs-ranking comparison.
6. Export the workbook to Google Sheets, and run it weekly to build a history.

What you get

• A presence table: AI Overview yes or no, cited URLs and domains, whether you’re cited and at what position, and your organic rank
• Share of citations and keyword coverage by domain, with a chart that highlights your domain
• A gap list of keywords where an AI Overview cites others and not you
• Cited-vs-ranking per keyword: who is cited without ranking in the top 10, and who ranks without being cited
• A running history file and a Sheets-ready Excel workbook

Costs and limits

You need a DataForSEO account. At October 2026 list prices a Live call costs about $0.002 per keyword, plus up to $0.002 for loading asynchronous AI Overviews (refunded when there isn’t one), so 100 keywords cost at most around $0.40. Standard mode is roughly a third of that. A spend cap stops the run before it goes over your limit.

AI Overviews change from one pull to the next, so a single run is a snapshot: schedule it and read the trend. Each run covers one location, language and device. Citations show which sources Google displays, not how much of the answer each one shaped or whether anyone clicked, which matters in a zero-click world. AI Mode is a separate surface and isn’t covered here.

Read why this gap matters in Your rank tracker is lying to you about AI search, and learn how to close it in the AI Search Optimisation & Agentic SEO course.