Editorial planning
SEO editorial plan: which AI engines RankAI tracks
Before you approve an SEO editorial plan, check which AI engines RankAI actually observes on the editorialPlan page, and which ones stay outside the picture.
You are about to approve an SEO editorial plan and you want to know which AI answers your decisions should rest on. The editorialPlan page in RankAI lists the AI engines it observes: ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Grok and Google AI. Claude and Grok are measured only after you connect them, and Gemini and Google AI Overviews are not the same observation. Knowing which engines stay outside the list keeps you from approving an SEO editorial plan on the assumption that it covers sources RankAI is not observing at that moment.
What the editorialPlan page shows you
The editorialPlan page is built for whoever approves a version of the plan: it shows which AI engines the answers you are reading are based on. RankAI's public pages name ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Grok and Google AI. That list is the declared scope: anything that does not appear on it is not observed on that page.
Two distinctions matter before approval. First, Claude and Grok are measured only after you connect them, so until the connection is active you cannot count on their answers. Second, Gemini and Google AI Overviews are not the same observation, even though both belong to the Google ecosystem. Treating them as a single source leads you to read as double confirmation what is in fact one observation.
How to read the engines before you approve
RankAI offers this as an operating method, not a universal standard: use it as a sequence of checks on the editorialPlan page, not as a guarantee about the outcome.
- Compare the list of engines with the sources you need. Verifiable criterion: every engine you want to base the approval on must appear among ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Grok and Google AI on the page. If it is missing, the plan does not cover that source.
- Check the connection status for Claude and Grok. Verifiable criterion: if the connection is not active, answers from these engines are not available and you cannot use them to justify the approval.
- Keep Gemini and Google AI Overviews separate. Verifiable criterion: count them as two distinct observations only if both appear on the page as separate entries; otherwise treat them as one source.
- Check the approval mode before you confirm. Verifiable criterion: the default is human approval of a version; automatic publishing is turned on per site and still goes through the checks. If it is active, confirm that it is the mode you want for that site.
The practical point is that the editorialPlan page does not answer the question "how many AI engines exist." It answers a narrower one: "which answers am I basing this approval on." Those are two different questions, and confusing them is the most common mistake when approving an SEO editorial plan. A plan can look solid because it cites several sources, while in reality two entries on the list describe the same ecosystem or an engine that is not connected yet.
Before approving, RankAI suggests writing down, for each decision in the plan, the engine that supports it. If a decision has no observed engine behind it, that part of the plan remains a hypothesis, not a data point. This does not tell you whether the plan will work: it only tells you which answers it is built on. It is a transparency check, not a ranking forecast.
A second precaution concerns the moment of approval. Because Claude and Grok are measured only after you connect them, the picture of the engines can change between one review and the next. Whoever approves should reread the list for every new version instead of trusting the one they saw last time. The page is the reference, not the memory of whoever approved before.
A limit to keep in mind
RankAI observes the engines listed on the editorialPlan page at the moment you consult it. We cannot tell you whether an engine outside that list answers your queries or not, and we do not measure it. That is why the approval should be read as a decision about the sources available on that page, not as full coverage of the AI landscape.
For the full context on how approval works and what the page contains, see the in-depth page.
SEO editorial plan: approve it with Google, Perplexity and Gemini