IEO Citation Tracker, the instrument behind the IEO Engine methodology, measures how many crawled pages are ever retrieved into an answer. Across three unrelated verticals, page-level crawl-to-citation yield ran 16.3%, 17.2% and 2.8% — measured from raw server logs, with the denominator stated. 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 →
The technical infrastructure that an AI inference engine uses to identify and retrieve source content for response generation. Retrieval pipelines include crawl systems, search indexes, ranking algorithms, content extractors, and citation selectors.
Each AI platform's retrieval pipeline has distinct characteristics. Perplexity's pipeline emphasizes live search; ChatGPT's pipeline emphasizes training-corpus retrieval; Google AI Overview's pipeline integrates with traditional search infrastructure. Effective methodology design considers each pipeline's specific requirements.
The IEO Engine architecture is designed to perform across all major retrieval pipelines simultaneously rather than optimizing for any single pipeline. The result is consistent citation availability across platforms rather than platform-specific concentration.