Mindcase for SEO and Search Visibility Research

"How do we rank on Google" used to mean one thing: a position in ten blue links. It doesn't anymore. A brand can show up as an AI Overview citation without holding the top organic spot, get picked up by a news outlet without ranking for its own name, and lose a shopping comparison to a reseller charging less for the same product — three separate outcomes, three separate surfaces, and none of them visible from checking rank alone.

If you're an agent (or building one) reading this rather than a human, the full machine-readable schema for every endpoint below lives at mindcase.co/skills.md.

What does "search visibility" actually cover now?

Three surfaces, each with its own logic:

• Organic search. Where a query's results page puts a brand — the classic definition — plus whether Google's AI Overview cites it at all, which is a separate outcome from rank and doesn't require the top position to happen.
• News. Whether a launch, an announcement, or a controversy is actually getting picked up by outlets Google indexes, and how fast.
• Shopping. Where a specific product listing sits against every other merchant selling it — price, rating, and position, not just "is it findable."

A brand can win on one surface and be invisible on another. Checking only rank misses the other two entirely.

How do you pull organic rank and AI Overview presence for a brand?

Say you're tracking a running-shoe brand's visibility for the query "best trail running shoes 2026" — both where it lands in the results and whether Google's AI Overview names it at all.

curl -X POST "https://api.mindcase.co/v1/data/google/search/run?wait=true" \
-H "Authorization: Bearer $MINDCASE_API_KEY" \
-H "Content-Type: application/json" \
-d '{
  "params": {
    "queries": "best trail running shoes 2026",
    "maxPages": 1,
    "country": "us"
  }
}'

# $0.001 per page (~10 results per page)

Google Search API returns 11 fields per result: rank, title, link, domain, snippet, publishedDate, and — the part that matters here — aiAnswer and aiAnswerSources. That second pair is Google's AI Overview text and the specific sources it cited for this query. A brand can appear in aiAnswerSources while sitting at rank 6 or lower, which is a genuinely different (and increasingly more valuable) outcome than the top organic spot. Add site: "yourbrand.com" to check whether your own domain specifically made either list, instead of scanning the full result set by eye.

This is a single snapshot, not a tracker — for scheduled rank monitoring against a keyword list over time, see Automate Google Search Rank Tracking.

How do you check if a launch is actually getting news coverage?

Same brand, checking whether a new shoe launch got picked up by any outlet in the last week:

curl -X POST "https://api.mindcase.co/v1/data/google/news/run?wait=true" \
-H "Authorization: Bearer $MINDCASE_API_KEY" \
-H "Content-Type: application/json" \
-d '{
  "params": {
    "query": "Trailhead running shoe launch",
    "maxResults": 20,
    "timeframe": "7d"
  }
}'

# $0.002 per article

Google News API returns title, source, articleUrl, publishedAt, and imageUrl — six fields per article, scoped to a timeframe window (1h through 1y, or all). Zero results inside a 7-day window after a launch date is itself the finding: it means the story didn't clear Google's news index, whatever the brand's own PR recap claims.

How do you see where a product ranks in Shopping listings?

Same brand, now checking the specific shoe model against every other listing for it:

curl -X POST "https://api.mindcase.co/v1/data/google/shopping/run?wait=true" \
-H "Authorization: Bearer $MINDCASE_API_KEY" \
-H "Content-Type: application/json" \
-d '{
  "params": {
    "queries": "Trailhead Ridge 2 trail running shoe",
    "maxResults": 30,
    "country": "us"
  }
}'

# $0.003 per result

Google Shopping API returns title, merchant, price, priceValue, rating, reviewCount, and position — 10 fields per listing. position is the shopping-results equivalent of organic rank: where this specific listing sits against every other merchant selling the same product, including resellers the brand doesn't control. A brand's own site landing at position 8 behind six resellers and a marketplace listing is a pricing or feed problem, not a visibility one — and it's invisible from the organic search results entirely.

What can't you get from Mindcase?

Two cases.

None of these three calls tell you why. A missing AI Overview citation, a zero-result news window, or a position of 12 each describe an outcome, not a cause. Diagnosing a ranking drop or a feed rejection means going to Search Console or the merchant account directly — Mindcase returns what's publicly visible on each surface, not the account-level diagnostics behind it.

Regional and language coverage varies per endpoint. google/search supports 240 countries and 35 languages, google/shopping supports 58 countries and 32 languages, and google/news supports 84 region-language pairs — three different coverage maps, not one. Check each endpoint's own option list (GET /v1/data/<endpoint>?expand=options) before assuming a market is covered everywhere.

Which endpoint should you use for which job?

FAQ