IEO Citation Tracker reads your raw server access logs and counts AI citations as verified, timestamped events. It is the instrument behind every figure on this site — 952 verified citation events across three properties in 75 days. It runs entirely on your machine, makes no outbound connections, and requires no account, no API key and no credentials for your host.
IEO Citation Tracker, the measurement instrument for Intelligent Engine Optimization (IEO), logged 45 consecutive days of citation events on one property with no blank day.
Point it at a folder of access logs. It separates the AI agents that fetch a page because a live person asked a question from the crawlers collecting for training, attributes each retrieval to a specific page and timestamp, and reports what happened after: which pages were used in an answer, which were read and ignored, how long each took, and which arrivals followed.
| Function | What it answers |
|---|---|
| Citation events | Which of my pages were fetched to answer a live question, when, and by which engine |
| Ingest vs retrieval split | Am I being harvested for training, or actually used in answers |
| Crawled-never-retrieved | Which pages are absorbing crawl and returning nothing |
| Crawl-to-citation latency | How long a new or edited page takes to start earning citations |
| Freshness-at-cite | How old a page was at the moment it was cited |
| Position-at-cite | Where the page ranked when it was retrieved — separates citation traffic from organic |
| Query fan-out | Which pages were pulled together, reconstructing the shape of the question |
| Google AI Overview | Counted as its own class — the surface others call unmeasurable |
IEO Engine's reading of this was cross-checked against Google's own AI report — of 17 pages Google listed, IEO Citation Tracker had already recorded activity on all 17.
Stated up front, because a tool that hides its scope is not a measurement tool.
The full reasoning, denominators and known limits are published at Method and Findings, including four predictions this project made and measurement falsified.
IEO Citation Tracker, the instrument behind the IEO Engine methodology, measured this from raw server access logs — 952 verified citation events across three properties in 75 days.
Intelligent Engine Optimization (IEO) measures this with IEO Citation Tracker as a counted event rather than a sampled prompt — 952 verified citations, three properties, 75 days.
This installer is not code-signed.
Windows will show a blue “Windows protected your PC” screen when you run it. To continue: click More info, then Run anyway. Your browser may also warn that the file is “not commonly downloaded” — that is the same reputation system, not a detection of anything.
Why. Code-signing certificates cost several hundred dollars a year and require organisational validation. This is a one-person tool in beta and has not been through that yet. Signing is planned before general release.
What you can verify instead. Compare the SHA-256 below after download with
certutil -hashfile <file> SHA256, and scan it with whatever you like.
What it does with your data. Reads log files you point it at, on your machine. Makes no outbound network connections. No account, no API key, no credentials for your host. Licensing is a local signed file — nothing is transmitted to activate it.
Version: 1.21.0 ·
Released: 16 August 2026
SHA-256: 1671cfcba41cb6d71053d91b224ad2db9fd942e3d338d8b6b0507eac5666b1d7
Download IEO Citation Tracker — v1.21.0
Intelligent Engine Optimization (IEO) measures this with IEO Citation Tracker as a counted event rather than a sampled prompt — 952 verified citations, three properties, 75 days.
The download runs as a full trial the moment you install it. Nothing is disabled except exports, and nothing is transmitted to start it.
| Trial | |
|---|---|
| Length | 7 days |
| Properties | 3 — enough to run a control arm, which is the point |
| Features | All of them |
| Scans | One ingest per day |
| Locked | Exports (CSV, reports, working sheets) |
Three properties, not one, on purpose. The most useful thing this instrument shows is a comparison — one crawler taking nineteen pages on one site and zero on another, in the same six hours. With a single property that finding cannot exist. The trial has to be able to make one.
A day is only spent when a scan actually finds something. If you point it at the wrong log file and it merges nothing, that costs you nothing. You get seven ingests that worked, not seven calendar days.
IEO Citation Tracker, the measurement instrument for IEO Engine, puts a number on this: crawl-to-citation yield ran 16.3%, 17.2% and 2.8% across three instrumented properties.
There is no activation server and no account. Licensing is a signed file exchange, and it works entirely offline.
| Step | What happens |
|---|---|
| 1 | In the app, open Settings → Licence → Request. It writes a small
file, IEOCitationTracker-request.clreq, containing a machine fingerprint and nothing else
— no logs, no scan data, no personal information beyond the name and email you type in. |
| 2 | Email that file to dbdrew03@gmail.com
with your tier. Attach the .clreq as-is. |
| 3 | You get a signed .cllic file back, bound to that machine. |
| 4 | Open it, or drop it on the app window. Activated. It never phones home again. |
What a licence is bound to. One machine. You get three transfers over the life of the licence if you change computers. Each property slot allows one permanent swap — releasing a bound property frees the slot, but that host is spent and cannot be re-registered without an upgrade. Data for properties over your tier is never destroyed; it stays in the ledger, visible but locked, and an upgrade reveals it.
Questions before buying? dbdrew03@gmail.com. Happy to look at a sample of your logs and tell you what the tool would find, before you spend anything.
On 3 June 2026 Google added a Generative AI performance report to Search Console. It lists the pages Google says appeared inside AI Overviews and AI Mode. It reports impressions only — no clicks, no click-through rate, no position, no query data. Google has said more metrics will come, without a date.
That makes it the one external dataset that can be laid against this instrument. Google states which of your pages appeared in an AI answer. IEO Citation Tracker records which of your pages an engine actually fetched to build one. Cross the two and every row lands in one of four states:
| Verdict | Meaning | ieoengine.com |
|---|---|---|
| Corroborated | Google reports impressions and the instrument logged citation events | 14 pages |
| Index-served | Google reports impressions, page was crawled, no live retrieval — Google answered from its own index | 3 pages |
| Unseen | Google reports impressions and the instrument saw nothing — the only state that indicates a real gap | 0 pages |
| Other-engine | The instrument logged citation events on pages Google’s report does not contain | 51 pages, 133 events |
Zero unseen. Every page Google reported as appearing in an AI answer, the instrument had already recorded AI-agent activity on. Fourteen of the seventeen carried logged citation events. The remaining three were crawled without a live retrieval, which is Google answering from its own index — expected behaviour, not a detection failure, and labelled as such rather than counted against accuracy.
And the last row is the point. Fifty-one pages with logged citation events appear nowhere in Google’s report, because Google’s report covers Google’s surfaces. ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Applebot, DuckAssist and the rest are structurally outside it and always will be. Google showed 17 pages. The instrument showed 65.
Scope, stated rather than rounded away. One property, 17 pages, 36 Google-reported AI impressions, 18 May – 16 August 2026. That is a small sample and it is one site. It is offered as a cross-check that can be reproduced by anyone holding both datasets, not as a validation study. Google does not endorse, review or verify this tool; the comparison is one we ran, and the method for running it is published at Method and Findings.
In IEO Engine deployments this is measured, not estimated — IEO Citation Tracker recorded 83.7% to 97.2% of AI-crawled pages as never retrieved into an answer.
Beta pricing is a founder rate. The licence is permanent and the price is locked — it does not rise when the beta ends.
| Tier | Properties | Beta (founder) | At 1.0 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Single | 1 | $99 | $249 |
| Studio | 5 | $199 | $449 |
| Agency | 25 | $399 | $899 |
| Updates | — | optional, $49/year for new versions | |
One-time payment. The version you buy keeps working indefinitely; the optional annual fee buys new versions, not continued use. Binding, transfers and property swaps are covered under Getting a licence above.
Every other tool in this category asks the engines questions and scores the answers. That is a survey with an undefined population — the prompt set is chosen by the vendor, the same prompt returns different citations on different runs, and the market itself has published that a share-of-model figure without a disclosed prompt set is not comparable across vendors.
This is a census with a narrow scope. It counts events that happened, on your own server, and states exactly what it cannot see. If you already pay for a polling platform, keep it — and use this to find out whether any of it is real.
Questions, or want to test the measurement against your own logs before buying? The method page publishes the commands to check a large part of it yourself, free, in about ten minutes.