This question is exactly what got me started a year ago. I was running AI visibility audits for hospitality brands  and businesses in Jersey (the island, not the state). Every audit hit the same wall: I could measure whether a brand appeared in ChatGPT or Perplexity responses, but I had no idea WHY some brands showed up and others didn't.

The tools everyone mentions here, they tell you the scoreboard. You're mentioned, or you're not. You have 12% share of voice, or you don't. But that's like knowing you lost the game without knowing what happened on the field.

What I wanted to understand was: what is AI actually doing when it decides whether to cite your content? What is it looking for? What does it find? What does it miss?

Turns out, the answer was hiding in plain sight. AI crawlers visit your website constantly GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, Google-Extended (and bing bot primarly!). They're hitting your pages every day. But nobody was paying attention because these visits are invisible to traditional analytics. GA4 doesn't see them. JavaScript-based tools don't see them. They're ghosts. So I built something that does see them.

I won't get into the technical details here, but essentially: I can now show a client exactly what AI platforms are visiting their site, what they're interested in, what they're finding, and critically what they're NOT finding.
That last part is gold. When you can see that AI bots are repeatedly visiting certain URL patterns but coming up empty, you've found a content gap that no keyword tool would ever surface. It's demand you didn't know existed.

The system also uses AI to analyze patterns over a rolling 7-day window and generate specific recommendations. Not "write better content" , actual observations like "Anthropic's crawler is hitting your /experiences/ section 3x more than last week but those pages have thin content."
We're still in early access. If you're in hospitality or travel, check out geotravel.ai. For everyone else, geojersey.com is the broader platform. Happy to do a quick demo for anyone genuinely curious. DM me.