How trackers measure rank
They query Google from clean, location-pinned sessions (no personalization), parse the SERP, and log your URL's position per keyword per day. The tweet's "AI visibility" tracking does the same for AI Overviews and chatbots: does the model cite or mention your brand?
The CTR curve
Click-through falls off a cliff: roughly #1 ≈ 28%, #2 ≈ 15%, #3 ≈ 10%, #5 ≈ 6%, #10 ≈ 2.4%. Moving from #8 to #3 can quadruple traffic with zero extra searches — which is why rank tracking, not just traffic tracking, matters.
Volatility is normal
Rankings wobble daily from index refreshes, competitors publishing, and personalization noise. Trackers smooth this with 7-day averages. A real core update (the ⚡ button) reshuffles whole ledges at once — watch competitors jump.
AI SEO is a second SERP
LLMs pick citations by entity clarity, structured data, and being referenced on pages they trust. You can rank #4 in Google but be the only source an AI Overview cites — that's the new position zero.