Finding out what keywords and prompts your website ranks for
The site’s rankings and visibility matter, whether you do client SEO as an agency, work as an in-house SEO expert, or you’re just improving your own site. But now this goes beyond Google’s ten blue links as users turn to AI-powered systems like AI Overviews, AI Mode, ChatGPT, Perplexity, and others to find answers.
That’s why understanding where your website and brand stand today requires both traditional search engine keyword rank tracking and AI search prompt monitoring.
How do you do that? With the right tools and knowledge. This article includes both.
We’ll look at how you can find keywords and prompts a site ranks for, guide you on how to plan your next move using Google Search Console and the SE Ranking SEO platform, and share tips to find out which keywords your competitors are ranking for.
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To find out what keywords and prompts your website ranks for, use SE Ranking’s keyword and prompt tracking tools. For organic keyword data, you can also use Google Search Console.
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SE Ranking allows you to track keyword rankings and prompts for your site and competitors. It helps you analyze search intent and discover opportunities to improve your SEO and AI search performance.
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Google Search Console provides insights into the keywords your site ranks for, along with data on clicks, impressions, average CTR, and position. However, it doesn’t allow you to select specific keywords to track or analyze competitors. It also doesn’t show AI prompt data.
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SE Ranking’s Competitive Research Tool enables you to perform competitor analysis in both traditional and AI search, discover keyword overlaps, and track competitor keyword rankings and brand mentions to refine your SEO strategy.
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To improve your overall SEO efforts, utilize keyword and prompt data for on-page optimization, quality content creation, internal linking, backlinking, and PPC advertising.
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SE Ranking offers advantages over Google’s tools and other free tools: real-time keyword rankings, prompt tracking for AI search engines, the ability to choose specific keywords and prompts to track, and comprehensive competitor analysis features.
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By tracking both traditional keywords and AI search prompts, you can understand your full search visibility, drive targeted traffic, and stay ahead of your competitors.
What tools can help you find keywords your website ranks for?
SE Ranking
SE Ranking is probably the easiest and quickest way to get the right data for both traditional keywords and AI search prompts in one place:
- Analyze essential metrics, identify ranking opportunities, and understand search intent to create the most relevant content and improve your SEO and AI visibility performance.
- Find the keywords and prompts any website ranks for, whether it’s yours or a competitor’s.
- Track ranking dynamics in classic search and monitor AI search visibility across platforms like Google AI Overviews, AI Mode, ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini.
Google Search Console
GSC is a foundational tool for any SEO specialist. It detects keywords that your website ranks for in Google organic search results, along with data on clicks, impressions, CTR, and average position.
But it has limitations:
- It doesn’t have a filtered view for AI-generated results like AI Overviews or AI Mode answers.
- GSC won’t let you analyze your competitors, but it does contain useful keyword overview data to help you boost your strategy.
- You can’t select specific keywords to monitor within GSC.
Find keywords and prompts: Full workflow with SE Ranking
SE Ranking gives you several ways to understand your search visibility:
- Competitive Research for finding any domain’s keywords and AI prompts.
- Keyword Research to expand your keyword list with the right queries.
- Rank Tracker to track your performance in organic search.
- AI Search Toolkit for ongoing AI prompts monitoring.
Here’s how to combine them in a complete workflow:
Audit your current visibility
Start with Competitive Research to get a complete snapshot of where your site stands and what keywords and prompts it ranks for. Once you enter your domain, you’ll see a summary of organic, paid, and AI search activities.
Go to the Google search tab to see the keywords your website ranks for in Google. Switch between Organic or Paid reports, and you will be redirected to the detailed report on such keywords.
To see AI prompts your website or brand shows up for, go to the AI search tab. Here you can choose between AI Overviews, AI Mode, Gemini, ChatGPT, and Perplexity to see which AI prompts trigger your website link, brand mention, or both.
This is useful for:
- Initial audits: Understand your baseline before starting optimization work
- Client onboarding: Quickly assess a new client’s organic footprint
- Content gap identification: Spot keywords where you rank on page 2 or 3 and could push higher
Discover new keyword opportunities
By clicking on any keyword from the Competitive Research list, the service will redirect you to the Keyword Research tool.
Here you can get the full list of websites that are ranking for the selected keyword, both in organic and paid search. Plus, you can also find similar, related, low search volume keyword suggestions along with search engine autocomplete suggestions.
After identifying all the keywords you’re ranking for and evaluating the competition, select specific keywords to target in a particular search engine and location.
Get more data on competitor keywords
This time, enter your rival’s website into the Competitive Research tool for analysis and repeat the actions from analyzing your site. The tool will provide you with a list of keywords that your competitors use in their organic and paid campaigns as well as AI prompts that trigger their website links or brand mentions.
In SE Ranking, you can get a comparison of all the keywords that are targeted by your website and its top direct competitors. That way, you’ll discover keywords that are unique for you and your digital rivals, and will be able to further expand your keyword list. Just add several websites for Competitor Comparison to see a set of All, Common, Missing, and Unique keywords.
This data gives you the opportunity to take your competitors’ top keywords and use them in your own keyword list.
Add keywords and AI prompts for tracking
After identifying keywords and prompts worth ongoing tracking, add them to your SE Ranking project:
- For queries, click on Use keywords and choose Add to project.
- For AI prompts, select the ones worth tracking and press Track prompts.
Track your keyword rankings over time
SE Ranking’s keyword rank tracking tool provides high-speed data that allows users to get real-time website rankings. Besides providing rankings data, you can immediately see each keyword’s search volume and ranking dynamics. You can also find out if the keyword is displayed for any Google SERP feature, like featured snippets.
Rank Tracker empowers you to:
- Group keywords from the same cluster into folders
- Tag keywords to highlight important queries, target keywords, etc.
- Add target URLs to detect keyword cannibalization.
- Compare rankings by different dates via the calendar feature.
- Analyze ranking dynamics to spot ranking drops and jumps.
- And much more.
If you want to see dynamics, open the calendar and select a specific timeframe. The tool will show you keyword position changes day by day.
Discover effective techniques for assessing your website’s performance on search engines by checking out our guide on tracking search engine rankings. Use these valuable insights to optimize your SEO strategy accordingly.
Tracking competitor keyword rankings
SE Ranking’s keyword rank tracking tool also tracks keyword rankings for up to 20 competitor sites at the same time. This data shows your current standing and performance, allowing timely adjustments to your SEO strategy. You can easily add them when setting up the project or at any other time.
This will let you see how competitors rank for your target keywords. You can compare data and analyze where your competitors outperform you and how you can improve your keyword positions.
Monitor your AI search visibility
For AI search, use SE Ranking’s AI Search Toolkit. It includes AI results Tracker that lets you monitor how your brand appears in AI responses across Google AI Overviews, AI Mode, ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini.
You can:
- See which of your tracked prompts surface your brand in AI answers and which don’t.
- Compare your AI visibility to competitors in your space.
- See who else is appears in AI search and where you can focus your efforts.
Tracking prompts alongside keywords gives you a complete picture of how users discover your brand, whether through traditional search results or AI-generated responses.
Find out what keywords your website ranks for using Google Search Console
Google is the number 1 place people go to to get this information. To learn more about your site’s organic search performance and the keywords it ranks for, set up Google Search Console and make use of its reports.
Note: Several weeks need to go by at the very least for you to have enough data from Google to work with. Thus, make sure to have it all in place as soon as possible.
To use GSC to find the keywords your website ranks for, go to Performance → Search Results → Queries.
Here you’ll find the Google Search Console Performance report that shows all the different keywords your site ranks for in Google. You’ll also see the data on total clicks, impressions, average CTR and position.
By the way, clicking on Average CTR and Average Position at the top of the page will add respective data to the table below.
There are plenty of ways you can use this data. Maybe you want to see all of your keywords that are ranking on page 2 of Google and beyond, but are getting more than 30 clicks each month. Such keywords are working for you, but your competition is doing a much better job. If you do some optimization work to web pages that target such keywords, you’ll be able to get on Google page 1. As a result, this will skyrocket your site traffic.
Note that unlike paid SEO tools, Google Search Console does not give you the option to select the keywords that you want to track. Here you’ll find a list of all the keywords and search phrases that your site is displayed for in search. It is usually very long and contains a significant amount of non-targeted searches. If you go for a manual method, check the ranking position of each keyword separately with the help of the “Query” filter. Just click + NEW above the widget.
Why choose SE Ranking’s keyword rank checker?
Google Search Console is essential for organic search basics, but it has clear limitations. Here’s how SE Ranking goes further for both classic keyword tracking and AI search visibility:
- Real-time data, on your schedule: GSC data comes with a delay. SE Ranking gives you data daily or lets you set up automated checks at the frequency you need (daily, every few days, or weekly).
- Track exactly what matters: GSC shows every query your site appeared for, but you can’t select specific keywords to monitor. In SE Ranking, you create projects with precisely the keywords and prompts you want to track and ignore the noise.
- Richer metrics for better decisions: GSC provides core organic metrics (clicks, impressions, CTR, position). SE Ranking adds CPC, competition level, search intent, SERP features, traffic potential, and historical trends. This gives you the full picture for prioritization and reporting.
- Competitor tracking built in: GSC only shows your own site’s data. SE Ranking lets you analyze any competitor’s keyword rankings and AI search visibility, compare keyword overlaps, and track how you stack up over time.
- AI search visibility: GSC doesn’t show AI Overviews or AI Mode data. SE Ranking’s AI Search Toolkit tracks your brand’s presence across Google AI Overviews, AI Mode, ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini, so you can monitor prompts alongside traditional keywords.
- API access for custom workflows: Need to integrate data into your own dashboards or reporting systems? SE Ranking offers API access for both keyword and AI search data:
- You can pull keyword rankings for any domain. This applies to both organic and paid results and supports different filtering options.
- Retrieve AI search prompts where a specific domain, subdomain, or URL appears in AI search results.
- Retrieve AI search prompts where your brand is mentioned in AI search results.
Over to you
Tracking only traditional keywords isn’t enough anymore. To stay competitive, you need visibility into both classic search rankings and AI-generated responses.
The tools and workflows we covered in this article help with this. Use GSC for your organic search foundation, then go deeper with SE Ranking to track the keywords and prompts that matter, monitor competitors, and understand how your brand shows up across Google, ChatGPT, Perplexity, and other AI platforms.
Start with your own site: audit your current keyword rankings, identify where you appear in AI search results, and spot the gaps. From there, build a strategy that covers how people find you. Ready to see where you stand? Try SE Ranking with a 14-day trial!
