# Measurement and verification for your store: reading path

> Reading path on measurement and verification for online stores: from Search Console and AI traffic to checking what was published, in order.

URL: https://clione.ai/learn/measurement-and-verification/
Lang: en

First what the search engines already tell you, then the visits, then your presence in the answers, and last the data that holds up everything before it. Each measure rests on the one before, and all of them rest on one thing: the published page says what you think it says. The path has five stretches.

1. **Steps 1 to 5 · What search engines tell you.** [Search Console](/glossary/google-search-console/) and [Bing Webmaster Tools](/glossary/bing-webmaster-tools/) are free and show how each search engine sees your site. Before you read their numbers, you need to know what a [search impression](/glossary/search-impression/) is, how [CTR](/glossary/ctr/) is calculated and what the [generative AI performance report](/glossary/generative-ai-performance-report/) adds, which only counts impressions.
2. **Steps 6 to 8 · Which visits come from AI.** [AI referral traffic](/glossary/ai-referral-traffic/) is people who click a link in an answer. [Attribution](/glossary/llm-attribution/) of the visits that come from an [LLM](/glossary/llm/) decides which ones get recognized and admits the ones that arrive with no trace of where they came from, and [assisted conversion](/glossary/assisted-conversion/) measures what a channel contributes without closing the sale.
3. **Steps 9 to 12 · How often you appear in answers.** It starts with [AI citation](/glossary/ai-citation/), the link to your page inside an answer. The next three measures, [AI visibility](/glossary/ai-visibility/), [citation rate](/glossary/citation-rate/) and [AI share of voice](/glossary/ai-share-of-voice/), have no standard formula: always read the method before the number.
4. **Steps 13 to 15 · What was saved is what was published.** [Publication verification](/glossary/publication-verification/) compares what you saved with what the page serves, and the study [from stored data to published data](/studies/stored-vs-published-data/) measures it on Shopify and BigCommerce. It closes with [data drift](/glossary/data-drift/): data that was published correctly and no longer is. Its usual causes sit outside the page, and the [publishing by platform](/learn/publishing-by-platform/) path explains where to look.
5. **Steps 16 to 19 · Checking the data with tools and with rules.** The [Schema Markup Validator](/glossary/schema-markup-validator/) and [Google's test](/glossary/rich-results-test/) for [rich results](/glossary/rich-results/) check the markup, and [the comparison of validating vs verifying](/comparisons/validate-vs-verify/) tells them apart from the previous step. [Catalog data coverage](/glossary/catalog-data-coverage/) puts a number on what is missing, and the [catalog audit](/glossary/catalog-audit/) turns it into a list of failures ordered by severity.

If you have not yet read [the path on AI in search engines](/learn/ai-search/), start there: what is measured here is explained there.