How to track local results in Google AI Mode

Google AI Mode answers in prose. For a local business that changes what "ranking" means: you're named in the answer, cited in its sources, or absent. This guide is about measuring that, per location, in a way you can trust next month. It isn't an optimization guide. Fixes are only worth testing once the measurement is clean.

Why your own searches don't count

Run a prompt in AI Mode from your office and you get one answer, shaped by where Google thinks you are and by your own account. That's a sample of one. Tracking AI Mode locally means asking the same prompt from a fixed location, on a schedule, without your history in it.

Pick the location grain

In Promptwatch, AI Mode is one of the engines monitored through its real interface, and location is set on the monitor. For AI Mode two grains are useful.

City-level tracking tells AI Mode the user is in a given city. It's on Business ($579/mo) and every agency plan, from Kick-off at $199/mo.

Coordinate targeting (Promptwatch calls it Local GEO/SEO targeting) pins the monitor to a latitude and longitude with a radius of 20 m, 50 m, 100 m, 500 m, 1 km or 5 km. AI Mode is one of three engines that answers as if asked from that exact spot. The other two are ChatGPT and Google AI Overviews. It's on Business, Agency Scale ($799/mo) and Enterprise.

Use a city monitor when customers come from across the city and you want one number per market. Use coordinates when the store itself is the point: a single shop, a clinic, a franchise with several branches in one city. Two branches in the same city get the same city-level question, so only coordinates can tell them apart in AI Mode.

The point is fixed once a monitor is created, so settle the pin and radius first. Our coordinate setup guide covers that step, and choosing a radius covers the radius.

Put AI Overviews in the same monitor

Both Google surfaces honor coordinates, so put AI Mode and AI Overviews in one monitor with the same prompts. You get two Google answers to the same question from the same spot. They don't always agree, and the gap is worth knowing about. We compared how the two cite sources in AI Mode vs AI Overviews citation share.

ChatGPT also honors coordinates, so it belongs in this monitor too. Keep Perplexity, Gemini and Copilot in a separate city monitor, since they don't use the pin and would quietly answer a different question.

Write prompts for AI Mode

AI Mode takes a full question, so add the longer versions alongside short ones. "Dentist near me" sits next to "dentist near me that takes walk-ins on Saturday". "Restaurant near me" sits next to "kid-friendly restaurant near me with a garden".

Leave the city out of the text when the monitor sets location. Tag local prompts so you can filter to them, and keep branded checks ("is [name] open late on Fridays") apart from discovery prompts using Promptwatch's prompt types. Fifteen to thirty prompts per location is enough to start.

What to record from each answer

For every local prompt, track these over time:

Whether you're named, and where. Promptwatch reports Visibility Score and Position in Answer per prompt and per model.
Who else is named. Competitor visibility and share of voice show which local businesses AI Mode names for which questions, and auto-discovered competitors catch names you didn't add yourself.
What the answer cites. Citation analytics lists the pages and domains behind each answer. For local prompts, check whether your location page appears or whether the answer leans on directories, review sites, local news or Reddit. Citation Trends classifies every citation by content type and source type, and directories are one of the source types.
Whether the facts are right. Sentiment is scored per response from 1 to 100, but a score won't flag wrong opening hours or a closed branch. Read a sample in the Responses tab for that.

Give the monitor two weeks of daily runs before reading trends. A single day of AI Mode answers tells you little.

Read it next to Google Search data

AI Mode sits beside classic Google results, so compare the two for the location page. Promptwatch's Search Insights, part of 360 Insights on paid brand plans, overlays Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster traffic on AI crawls and citations per page. A location page that gets Google clicks but never shows up in AI Mode citations has a different problem from a page Google barely shows at all.

Other tools that track AI Mode locally

BrightLocal Local AI Visibility tracks up to 20 prompts per location on ChatGPT, AI Mode and AI Overviews, with weekly, monthly or on-demand runs, and it's included in BrightLocal's Track, Manage and Grow plans. Local Falcon sends the same prompt from every point of a grid around a location, and AI Mode is one of the platforms it lists. Both suit teams already on those products. Neither catalog entry documents AI crawler logs or AI-referred conversions.

The setup we'd run

One Promptwatch monitor per location with AI Mode, AI Overviews and ChatGPT on coordinates, a city monitor for the other engines, Ads Radar on the same prompts, and two weeks of baseline before anyone edits a page. That's Business for a brand, or Agency Scale for an agency that needs coordinates. Agencies on Kick-off or Growth can run AI Mode at city level with Ads Radar included, which is a reasonable first step. Plans are on promptwatch.com.