How we get the data

If a visibility number isn't built on real AI answers, it isn't worth much. Here's what actually happens behind the scenes when AI Peekaboo checks whether your brand shows up.

Real answers, real sources

For every prompt you track, AI Peekaboo asks the question to five AI models: ChatGPT, Google Gemini, Perplexity, Google AI Overview, and Google AI Mode. These are live queries against real, current AI answers, not a simulation of what an answer might look like and not a guess based on training data. Each model is queried with real-time web search turned on, so the answer you see measured is the same kind of answer a real customer would get if they typed that question in today.

That matters because a lot of what AI models say depends on what they can find on the web right now. A static, offline API call to a language model won't reflect current web content, current competitors, or current news. AI Peekaboo's monitoring infrastructure is built specifically to capture live, web-grounded answers, including the sources each model cited to build that answer.

Model by model

• ChatGPT is monitored through dedicated infrastructure that gives it real-time web search and captures the sources ChatGPT cites while answering, since standard ChatGPT access doesn't reliably expose that on its own.
• Google Gemini is queried directly with search grounding enabled, so its answers reflect current web results.
• Perplexity is queried through its own native web search, which is core to how Perplexity already works.
• Google AI Overview and Google AI Mode are monitored through the same dedicated infrastructure used for ChatGPT, capturing Google's AI-generated answer summaries and conversational search results.

What happens if a provider has a hiccup

AI models and the infrastructure behind them aren't perfectly reliable 100% of the time. If the primary path for capturing an answer is temporarily unavailable, AI Peekaboo falls back to an alternate method to still get you a usable answer, rather than failing the check outright.

Why this method is more accurate

A lot of AI-visibility tools estimate results by asking a language model to guess what it would probably say, without actually running a live web-connected query. That approach can miss real, current answers entirely, especially for anything time-sensitive like new competitors, recent reviews, or seasonal content. AI Peekaboo checks real, current, web-search-enabled answers instead, so what you see in your dashboard reflects what a real person asking that question today would actually be told.