Definition

Position tracking

Position tracking monitors where a page ranks in classic search results for a keyword, typically checked once per period per market.

It assumes near-determinism and a ranked list. AI answers have neither: there is no position two inside a paragraph, and repeats disagree.

The correct successor metric is citation share with an interval, reported alongside rank rather than replacing it.

Related terms

Citation share Non-determinism AEO (Answer Engine Optimisation)

Nostimates measures position tracking across twelve AI answer surfaces. Request access →

All terms

AEO (Answer Engine Optimisation)GEO (Generative Engine Optimisation)AI Overviews AI Mode Citation share n-sampling Query fan-out Grounding Share of voice (AI)Extraction success rate Surface Answer engine Citation Brand mention Mention rate Confidence interval Statistical significance Citation volatility Non-determinism Reproducibility Identity-free collection Personalisation Locale Residential proxy Bot detection Collection cost Credit Evidence retention Audit trail Parser version Canary prompt Data freshness Cadence Prompt set Head term Long-tail query Competitive set llms.txt robots.txt AI crawler Training crawler Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG)Hallucination Answer box Featured snippet Zero-click search Entity Entity salience Knowledge graph Structured data JSON-LD schema.org FAQ schema Answer-first content Chunk Embedding Semantic search Prompt injection Market coverage Sentiment analysis White-label data