Setup Guide: AI Visibility Tracker

Why you need your own key. Asking six AI platforms the same question hundreds of times a month costs real money. Rather than mark that up and bill you, the tool runs on your own account: you see exactly what you spend, and you can leave at any time without losing anything.

Step 1 · Create a DataForSEO account

Go to dataforseo.com and sign up. It's pay-as-you-go with no subscription, you top up a balance and draw against it. The minimum top-up is small, and a typical brand uses a few dollars a month.

Step 2 · Find your credentials

In the DataForSEO dashboard, open API Access. You'll see an API login (your email) and an API password: a generated string, not the password you log in with.

You need them joined by a colon:

your-email@example.com:a1b2c3d4e5f6g7h8

Step 3 · Add it here

Open Settings in the app, paste it into the key field, and save. We check it against DataForSEO before storing anything, so a typo fails immediately rather than halfway through your first run.

The key is encrypted before it's written to the database and never shown again, only the last four characters. You can revoke it whenever you like.

Step 4 · Add a brand and some questions

A brand is a name, a domain, and optionally a city. The domain is how we tell "cited" from "merely mentioned", so get it right. Leave the city blank for national tracking.

Then add the questions you want tracked, or have five generated and edit them.

Step 5 · Run it

Before anything is spent you'll see an estimate broken down by surface. Turn off the ones you don't care about: that's the biggest lever on cost. Then run, and the results fill in as they arrive.

Optional: OpenAI and Anthropic keys

You don't need these. They only change how answers are read and scored, not how they're collected. Adding them makes scoring slightly faster and a little cheaper, and keeps it working if DataForSEO has a bad day. Without them, scoring is routed through DataForSEO using the same models.

If something goes wrong

Symptom	Usually
Key won't validate	You used your account password instead of the API password from API Access.
Every call on one surface fails	Insufficient DataForSEO balance, or that surface is temporarily down at their end. The run continues on the others and the errors are recorded per call.
Nothing was found for your brand	Often correct, and the finding. But check the prompt is one a real customer would type: a question with your brand name in it will nearly always find you.
Sources show as Google redirect links	Gemini only. We resolve what we can; some stay opaque at Google's end.

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