If you publish research or open-source work, an increasing share of your audience meets your work through an AI answer, not a search result or a citation graph. Tracking that footprint means asking the same questions your audience asks and logging which platforms actually mention your name, project, or paper — and which cite a competing project instead.
What to track
- Direct name recognition — does the model know your project exists at all, unprompted?
- Comparative citation — when someone asks “what’s the best tool for X,” are you in the answer?
- Attribution accuracy — when you are cited, does the model get the details right?
Why this differs from academic citation tracking
Traditional citation tracking (Google Scholar, Semantic Scholar) measures who cited your paper in another paper. GEO tracking for researchers measures something else entirely: whether an AI answer engine surfaces your work when someone who has never read your paper asks a question your work answers.
Sourso’s Operate agents run this as a standing dashboard — visibility percentage, per-platform breakdown, and a ranking against comparable projects — so it’s a five-minute check instead of a research project of its own.
For the researcher track specifically, see Solutions for Researchers.