Search is splitting into two channels. Google is still where most commercial queries start, but a growing share of decisions are made inside ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Claude before anyone clicks a search result. A 2025 Pew study showed that on Google pages with an AI Overview, only one in twelve users clicked a traditional result. The way customers find businesses is being rewritten in real time, and most business owners have no idea whether they show up in the new channels at all.

The tooling market reacted by splitting in two. Tools like Ahrefs and Semrush kept tracking Google but bolted AI tracking on as expensive add-ons. New tools like Profound, Otterly and Peec built AI-only trackers but skipped traditional Google rank tracking entirely. Both options sit at enterprise pricing: USD$129 to USD$699 a month is the going rate for the same feature set.

A small business with one location and twenty keywords needs both kinds of tracking, in one place, for less than a daily coffee. That is the gap Cluo fills.

Cluo Portal is a daily-updating dashboard that shows you four things in one view.

AI search visibility tracks whether your brand appears when someone asks ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Copilot or Claude for a recommendation in your category. We test the prompts you care about (and suggest variations), score how prominently you appear, and surface which competitor brands appear in the same answer.

AI traffic tracks the actual humans landing on your website from AI search engines. Real referrals, pulled live from your Google Analytics, broken out as their own channel alongside Google Organic and Paid Search. ChatGPT, Perplexity, Copilot, Gemini, Claude, Grok, Meta AI, You.com and Phind are all auto-detected.

Google keyword rankings track your live position on traditional Google for every search term you care about. Daily updates. Country-level filtering. Competitor tracking included.

Google AI Overviews tracking shows you when the AI summary at the top of a Google search results page features your business, what it says, and which sources it cites.

Everything lives at one URL. Everything updates every day. There is one price, AU$50 per month, and you can cancel from inside the dashboard with no contract or call required.

There is a difference between knowing whether ChatGPT mentions your brand and knowing whether real people clicked through to your site because of it. Most AI tracking tools only do the first.

The first is a projection. A vendor runs a prompt against ChatGPT once a day, scores whether your brand appears, and tells you your AI ranking. Useful, but it does not prove a single human visited your site.

The second is the truth. When someone asks ChatGPT for a plumber in Bondi and clicks the link in the answer, their visit lands in your Google Analytics with chatgpt.com as the source. That is the moment AI search converted to a real customer interaction. Until you see it in your own analytics, AI ranking data is theory.

Cluo Portal connects to your GA4 property and surfaces those actual AI referrals as their own channel, alongside Google Organic and Paid Search. Every AI source we know about is auto-detected and grouped under an AI Search filter, so you can compare what AI is actually sending you to what your other channels are doing. The list updates as new engines launch.

This is the part most AI tracking vendors skipped because it requires a real integration with the customer's analytics rather than a stand-alone scraper. We built it because the projection alone is not enough to make a budget decision.

We wrote a separate piece on how this works in practice and how to set up the same tracking yourself in GA4 (free, takes about fifteen minutes): AI rankings and AI traffic explained.

Cluo is built the way the people who use it would build a product if they had the time.

We ship every week. The portal you log into on a Friday is almost never the portal you logged into the previous Monday. Bug fixes ship in hours. Small feature requests ship in days. Larger requests ship in two-week cycles. There is no annual roadmap PDF and no quarterly product release - the build is continuous and the changelog is public.

Customer feedback is the roadmap. We do not run product committees. We watch what customers ask for in their portals, in support messages, and in the consulting calls Karl runs every week, and we ship the most common request next. When a roofer in Perth asks "can I see which page ChatGPT linked to when it mentioned my competitor," that becomes the next feature. When an agency owner in Auckland asks "can I get a white-label PDF for my clients," that becomes the feature after.

We use the product ourselves. Karl runs Cluo Portal for every Cluo client and every consulting client he works with. If a chart is hard to read, he sees it before customers complain. If a tracker breaks, he notices in the morning. The team that builds the product is the team that uses it on real client work every day.

We assume small business reality. The customer is a plumber, a lawyer, a roofer, a real estate agent, a clinic, an agency. They do not have a marketing team. They cannot read a 200-page Semrush onboarding doc. Every feature we ship has to earn its keep in plain English, on a phone screen, in under a minute. If it cannot, we cut it.

Most of what wins in AI search also wins in Google. About seventy percent of the work is unchanged from the SEO playbook of the last fifteen years - clear page structure, strong topical authority, real-world authorship signals, fast and crawlable pages, structured data on every page. The other thirty percent is genuinely new - making your site readable by language models, adding llms.txt files, allowing AI crawlers explicitly, optimising for citation rather than click, and tracking which AI engines mention you and which do not.

We call this the 70/30 rule, and it is the framework behind every recommendation Cluo Portal makes. We focus you on the seventy percent of work that helps both channels first, because that is where the compound returns sit. We only push AI-specific tactics once the foundations are in place. That ordering is why a Cluo customer paying AU$50 a month often outperforms a competitor paying ten times that to a dedicated AI search vendor.

There are about a dozen tools in the AI search visibility space right now. Most are excellent at one thing and expensive. Cluo is the only one that combines the two channels at a small-business price.

Profound is the enterprise leader for ChatGPT-only tracking, starting at USD$99 per month for a single LLM. It is deep, but it does not track Google rankings, and its full feature set starts at USD$399 per month.

Otterly tracks the AI engines well at USD$29 to USD$189 per month, but Gemini and AI Mode are paid add-ons and traditional Google tracking is not included.

Peec offers strong AI tracking from EUR89 per month with unlimited team seats, but again no Google rank tracking, and the higher tiers price out small business.

Semrush is the most established SEO platform, but its AI Visibility Toolkit is a USD$99 per user per month add-on on top of a USD$139.95 base plan. The combined cost is over five hundred dollars a month for a single seat with both tools.

Ahrefs Brand Radar tracks AI mentions, YouTube and Reddit alongside its existing SEO platform, but the useful tier costs USD$699 a month on top of a USD$129 base.

Cluo combines what these tools do, at AU$50 per month, for the businesses none of them were built for.

Cluo is built in Sydney, Australia. The product is used by businesses in every Australian capital city - Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Perth, Adelaide, Hobart, Darwin and Canberra - and across regional Australia, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States. Country-level filtering is built into every tracker, so the same dashboard works whether you are tracking a Bondi cafe or a London law firm.

Local language and locale matter for AI search results. When a Sydney plumber asks "what does ChatGPT say about plumbers in Parramatta," the answer is different from "best plumbers in the UK." Cluo tests prompts with the country and language settings of the market you care about, not the default location of the server the LLM happens to run on.