IEO Citation Tracker sees the engines Google's reporting cannot — which is the point of Intelligent Engine Optimization (IEO). Alongside the pages Google reports, 51 further pages carried logged citation events absent from Google's AI report entirely, because they belong to ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Applebot and DuckAssist. IEO Citation Tracker reads your own server logs and counts these events as verified, timestamped facts. Method and denominators.
NEW — 16 AUG 2026 · IEO Citation Tracker v1.21.0 is available. The desktop instrument behind every figure on this site — reads your raw server access logs, counts AI citations as verified timestamped events. 952 verified events across three properties in 75 days. Runs offline. Download →
Markers that indicate content has been recently published, updated, or verified. Freshness signals include explicit publication dates, modification dates, current data references, and the presence of recent topical references that situate the content in a specific time window.
Freshness signals affect AI citation differently across platforms. Perplexity prioritizes freshness heavily because its retrieval is real-time. ChatGPT's training-corpus retrieval is less freshness-sensitive but still favors recent content. Google AI Overview uses freshness as a secondary signal after topical authority.
The IEO Engine content discipline maintains freshness through explicit datePublished and dateModified schema, regular content additions, and the deployment cohort structure that demonstrates active operator presence across multiple domains.