How to compare search results with AI answers using SerpApi

You compare search results with AI answers by asking both the same question and lining up what comes back. For each buyer question, you record the pages Google ranks and their positions, then record the answer each AI assistant gives, which brands it names, and which pages it cites. The useful part is the match: for every page an assistant cites, you check where it ranks in Google, and for every page that ranks well, you check whether any assistant cites it.

SerpApi handles the Google half of that job. It's a search results API, so you send it a search and it returns what the search engine shows a real person as structured data. For a Google search, the organic results come back in order, each with its title, link, and snippet, and you can set the location, language, device, and Google domain so the search matches the market you sell into. SerpApi returns about ten results per page and up to a hundred with paging. It also covers Bing, DuckDuckGo, Yahoo, Google News, and Google's forum results, and it sells separate engines for Google's AI Overviews and AI Mode.

SerpApi stops at the search engine, though. It doesn't put your question to ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, or Perplexity, so you still need to collect those answers yourself, either by hand or through each company's API, and then write the code that matches cited links to ranked links. People who build this themselves usually end up with a spreadsheet that has one row per question and one column per engine, rebuilt by hand every time they want a fresh read.

A good result answers a practical question for each buyer query: is the problem that you don't rank, that you rank but the assistants ignore you, or that the assistants trust a kind of page you don't have? Each of those calls for different work, and knowing which one you face keeps you from rewriting pages that were never the problem.

Kite does the whole comparison for you. It runs the Google side through your SerpApi account, runs the AI side through its own tracking, matches the two, and then builds the pages and pitches the gaps call for.

Start by asking Kite for the comparison in plain words:

"Compare what ranks in Google with what ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and Claude cite for the questions our buyers ask. Use US results."

Kite is an AI marketer. It researches your business, builds a growth strategy, and ships the work that brings you new customers. You can work with Kite in your browser or in Slack. By the time you ask, Kite already knows your product, your competitors, and your market from its research on your business, so it proposes the buyer questions to compare, the competitors to watch, and the location and language to search in. Confirm that list or adjust it, and Kite starts.

You'll need to connect your SerpApi account by adding its API key, because SerpApi isn't one of Kite's built-in sources. Each search Kite runs uses one from your SerpApi plan, so the size of your plan sets how many questions and locations Kite can check in a month. The AI side needs no extra account, since Kite measures the four assistants itself.

Reading search results and AI answers is routine research, so Kite runs the comparison and reports back without stopping for approval. It asks before it publishes a page or sends a pitch.

Kite compares the questions your buyers actually ask, phrased the way they ask them, because the comparison only means something when both sides get the same question. It starts from the questions it already tracks for your AI visibility and the topics it built from your positioning, and it adds any wording you've told it to track. The set covers the problem a buyer has before they know your category exists, the category itself, and the specific things your product does, so you can see where in that path you drop out.

Some questions are worth more than others here. Kite favors questions with real search demand, and it pays special attention to keywords where its built-in keyword data shows Google already displays an AI Overview, since those are searches where Google itself is answering with AI. It keeps the questions unbranded, because a question with your name in it tells you nothing about whether an assistant would recommend you unprompted.

Kite runs each question as a Google search through SerpApi and reads the organic results in order. For every result it keeps the position, the page title, the link, and the snippet, and it reads past the first page when a question needs a deeper view. It sets the same location and language for every search in the comparison, so a buyer in one country isn't compared with an answer shaped for another. When a question has no fixed location, Kite looks up SerpApi's location options and picks the one that matches where you sell.

Kite takes each result's rank from its place in the list and keeps counting across pages. It skips ads and sponsored results, because the comparison is about what Google ranks on its own merits.

Kite runs the same questions through ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and Claude with its own AI visibility tracking. For each answer it saves the text, whether your brand appears, which competitors appear, and every page and domain the answer cites. It also measures your rank, your visibility, and your share of voice against the brands the assistants name, which tells you how often you come up compared with everyone else in your category.

Because Kite keeps these answers as a series, the comparison has a baseline. Each new run uses the same questions as the last one, so a change in the results reflects a change in the answers rather than a change in what was asked.

Kite matches the two sides by page and by domain, so a cited link to a blog post lines up with the same post in Google's results even when the two links are written slightly differently. For every page an assistant cites, Kite records where it ranks in Google or notes that it isn't in the results it pulled. For your own pages and your competitors' pages, it records both where they rank and how often they're cited.

Then Kite sorts each question into one of four situations:

• You rank and you're cited. Your page is doing its job in both places, and Kite watches it so you hear if that changes.
• You rank but you're not cited. Google trusts the page, but the assistants pass over it. That usually means the page doesn't state a clear, quotable answer to the question, or the assistants prefer a different kind of page, such as a comparison or a roundup.
• A competitor is cited without ranking well. The assistants found something on that page worth quoting, even though Google ranks it low. Kite reads the page to find out what that is.
• Neither side mentions you. You're missing from the conversation entirely, and the fix starts with a page that answers the question at all.

That sorting is the heart of the job. It turns a pile of links into a short list of problems, each with a known kind of fix.

Kite reads the pages the assistants cite to learn what earns a citation in your category. It looks for patterns across answers: the same roundups, comparison pages, product documentation, news stories, and community threads showing up again and again. Those recurring sources show you what kind of page the assistants trust for each question.

SerpApi helps Kite find more of those sources. Kite searches Google News for recent stories in your category and Google's forum results for discussion threads, with their titles, dates, answers, and vote counts. Threads where people ask for recommendations matter, because AI answers often lean on them. Kite can also read Google's "About this result" panel for a cited site, which shows the company details, social profiles, and outside mentions Google ties to it.

Kite turns each gap into specific work. Depending on what the comparison shows, it may propose a comparison or category page for a question where the assistants keep citing that kind of page, add a clear answer to an existing page that ranks but never gets quoted, improve the page's structured data, or pitch an outside source the assistants already trust. It ranks these by how many of your important questions each one would reach.

Kite writes the pages and publishes them on a site it hosts or through your connected CMS once you approve them. After they're live, it runs the same questions through Google and the AI assistants again and reports what moved. If you want the comparison kept current, ask Kite to repeat it on a schedule, such as every Monday, and it delivers each new read where you choose.

When Kite finishes, you have a clear picture of where search and AI answers agree about your category, where they split, and what Kite plans to do about each split.