Author
Ricardo is one of the founders and engineers behind its SERP and AI-search scraping infrastructure. Before cloro he scaled a financial comparison site to $7M ARR and ran the full-country operations of a unicorn to $65M ARR, then went back to building. He writes about search engine scraping, generative-engine optimization, and turning live search and AI-answer data into something teams can act on.
Across 200 dining prompts × 6 AI engines, Google's AI Overview triggered on just 3% of 'best restaurants' queries — it defers to the local pack. Perplexity answered 100% of them but returned zero citations. The picks come from Reddit (22%), Google/Maps (19%), OpenTable (13%), and local 'best-of' lists (TimeOut, The Infatuation, Eater) — almost never the restaurant's own site.
Across 40 major brands × 60 prompts × 6 AI engines, 31%–72% of triggered answers cited only third-party domains — never the brand's own site. On Perplexity, the brand's own domain is cited in ~0% of answers. Trustpilot, BBB, ConsumerAffairs, and Reddit narrate your brand when you're absent.
Scrape Grok three ways: xAI's official API, DIY web-UI automation, or a managed endpoint. Compare X-grounded sources, anti-bot risk, and cost clearly.
Across six AI engines and six verticals, citation depth varies ~20×: Google AI Mode averages 15–22 sources per answer, ChatGPT/Gemini/Copilot land around 4–8, and Perplexity ranges from ~4 down to literally zero depending on the topic. Reddit sits top-2 in every vertical. AI Overview decides whether to answer at all — 98% of shopping queries, 3% of dining.
There is no Google Alerts API and never has been. Here's why free alerting lags breaking news, plus a full build-your-own alerts pipeline in Python.
We ran the exact-phrase pipeline on 18 of cloro's own articles: 27.8% had a detected non-cloro copy, a copy outranked the original 22.2% of the time, and 39 distinct republisher domains showed up. Here's the build recipe — plus how to get copies taken down.
The cloro OpenClaw plugin adds seven AI search monitoring tools to your agent — check how ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini answer any prompt. Also connects over MCP.
SERP API reliability at 10k+ daily requests — uptime SLAs, latency under load, and concurrency across cloro, SerpAPI, DataForSEO, and Bright Data.
Most typosquat coverage stops at registration counts. In cloro's July 2026 study of 400 dnstwist-style permutations across 15 brands, 66% resolved to a live site — and of the resolving squats we checked, 53% were already Google-indexed. Registration isn't reach. Indexing is.
