Almost every week, a business owner asks me some version of this: “Which tool will tell me if ChatGPT recommends my brand?” Most of them have seen a demo with a big “AI visibility score” and assume one number will tell them whether they are winning in AI search. It won’t, and the tool market is now crowded enough that picking the wrong one is easy.
There are SEO suites that bolted AI tracking onto their existing tools, startups built only for AI answers, free checkers, and a few reports that Google and Bing now give you at no cost. They measure different things, run prompts in different ways, and price their plans in very different ways.
In this guide, I will explain what these tools actually measure, the criteria I use to compare them, what each well-known option does according to its own website, and which type of tool fits which kind of team. I am not ranking them from “best” to “worst”. I don’t think that is honest, because the right pick depends on your budget, your markets and what you will do with the data.
What an AI visibility tool actually counts
Let me start with the basics. An AI visibility tool sends a list of questions, called prompts, to AI assistants such as ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity or Google’s AI Overviews. It then reads the answers and records what it finds. Some tools run your own prompts. Others also keep a large ready-made library of prompts they run for everyone.
From those answers, most tools report some mix of the following:
- Mentions: your brand name appears in the answer text.
- Citations: a page from your website is linked as a source.
- Position: where your brand appears in the answer, for example first or fourth in a list of recommendations.
- Sentiment: whether the answer describes you positively, neutrally or negatively.
- Share of voice: your mentions compared with competitors across the same set of prompts.
- Sources: which other websites the AI leans on when it answers questions in your category.
Some tools go further and look at your own website: which AI crawlers visit, which pages they read, and how much human traffic arrives from AI assistants. That is a different job from tracking answers, and it matters when you compare tools.
One distinction deserves special attention. A mention and a citation are not the same thing. In a June 2026 study, Semrush logged 3,981 domain appearances across 115 prompts in ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Gemini and AI Mode. It found that 61.7% of appearances were citations where the brand was not named in the answer at all. Only 13.2% were both cited and mentioned.
“being cited is not the same as being mentioned”
— Semrush, Why 62% of AI citations don’t lead to brand mentions
So if a tool only shows you one blended “visibility” number, ask how it treats these two. I have written more about this gap in my guide to AI mentions that come without links.
The six questions I use to compare AI tracking tools
Before looking at any vendor, I suggest you write down what you need. Here are the criteria I use. They also form the backbone of every comparison in this article.
| Question | Why it matters | What a good answer looks like |
|---|---|---|
| Which AI platforms are tracked? | Your buyers may use ChatGPT, Google’s AI features, Copilot or Perplexity. Each one cites different sources. | The platforms your customers actually use, not just the most famous one. |
| Whose prompts are used? | A ready-made prompt library shows the market quickly. Your own prompts show your real buying questions. | Both, or at least the option to add your own prompts. |
| How often are prompts run? | AI answers change daily. One run is a snapshot, not a trend. | Daily or weekly runs with history you can export. |
| Are mentions and citations separate? | They measure different outcomes: brand awareness versus a possible click. | Separate columns for each, plus the source URLs. |
| Can you filter by country, language and topic? | Answers differ a lot by market. | Filters for country, prompt tags and competitors. |
| Can you get the raw data out? | You will want to join AI data with traffic and sales data. | CSV export, an API, or a connector for your reporting tool. |
If you want a longer checklist of questions to ask a sales rep before you sign anything, read my AI visibility tool buying guide. This article and that one are meant to work as a pair: that one helps you interview vendors, this one shows you what is on the market.
SEO suites that added AI answer tracking
If you already pay for an SEO platform, check what it now includes before buying anything new. Several large suites have added AI tracking, and the big advantage is that your AI data sits next to your keyword, backlink and ranking data.
Ahrefs Brand Radar
According to the Brand Radar product page, the tool has two modes. Custom Prompts lets you choose your own buyer questions and run them daily, weekly or monthly on each platform. The AI Visibility Index lets you look up any brand or category instantly from a large pre-collected prompt dataset, with no setup. It reports mentions, citations, AI share of voice against competitors and estimated impressions based on search volume.
The page lists AI Overviews, AI Mode, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Copilot in its prompt indexes, with Claude added for custom prompts. It also tracks YouTube, TikTok and Reddit visibility, and an AI Analytics section shows which of your pages get AI traffic and which pages AI crawlers visit.
Semrush AI Visibility Toolkit
Semrush offers a free AI Visibility Checker that covers ChatGPT, Gemini, Google AI Mode and AI Overviews. You enter a domain and get a 0 to 100 AI Visibility Score, mentions and citations, top cited pages, best-performing topics and a competitor comparison. You can run it three times a day without an account. The same page describes the paid toolkit as adding prompt tracking, sentiment, citation and source-page analysis, and benchmarking against competitors you choose.
Mangools AI Search Watcher
The AI Search Watcher page says it runs each prompt several times to calculate average positions and visibility scores, which is a sensible way to deal with the randomness of AI answers. It lists ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, AI Mode, Gemini, Claude, Grok, Mistral and Llama. It also shows how models describe your brand and offers a side-by-side competitor view. The page invites you to start for free with no credit card.
In brief, the suite route makes sense when your SEO team will own AI visibility and you want one login and one bill.
Dedicated AI visibility platforms built only for answer engines
The second group is made of companies that do nothing but AI search. They usually move faster on new features, track more platforms and offer deeper analysis of sources and prompts. The trade-off is another subscription and another dashboard.
Profound
The Profound features page describes Prompt Volumes (estimates of the questions people ask AI tools, with trend tracking), Answer Engine Insights (visibility scores, citation sources and sentiment against competitors), Agent Analytics (which AI crawlers visit your site and which pages they read), a Shopping module for ChatGPT Shopping results, and Agents for content workflows with human review. It lists ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini, AI Overviews, Copilot, Grok and DeepSeek. The page notes that its free trial tracks only ChatGPT, Gemini and AI Overviews.
Peec AI
The Peec AI homepage organizes everything around three metrics: visibility (the share of AI chats that mention you), position and sentiment. It suggests prompts, shows search volume data, tracks which URLs AI cites, and lets you filter by model, country and prompt tags such as funnel stage or persona. Each prompt runs once every 24 hours. For reporting, it lists CSV exports, a Looker Studio connector, a REST API and MCP (a standard way to connect data to AI assistants such as Claude).
Otterly.AI
The Otterly.AI homepage lists prompt research, AI search analytics, a content audit that checks crawlability and citation potential, GEO recommendations, agent analytics, ChatGPT ads tracking, an MCP integration and a public API. It tracks ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, AI Mode, Gemini, Copilot, Perplexity and Claude.
Scrunch
Scrunch positions itself as an Agent Experience Platform. Its 2026 announcement describes three layers: observing how AI agents represent your brand (Signals, Explorer, Agent Traffic and AI Referrals), understanding how agents access your site (Site Optimization), and delivering agent-ready content, including serving lightweight HTML pages to AI agents. That last part goes beyond tracking into changing what agents see, which is a bigger technical decision.
Ahrefs’ own roundup of AI visibility tools covers more niche players too, such as tools that check facts AI states about a brand and tools focused on entity associations. Louise Linehan’s framing there is worth repeating:
“We're moving from chasing traffic, to competing for brand visibility.”
— Louise Linehan, Ahrefs, 15 of the Best AI Visibility Tools
Free AI visibility checks to run before you pay anyone
I always suggest starting with the free options. They won’t give you everything, but they will tell you whether a paid tool is worth it yet.
- Run a free checker. The Semrush checker mentioned above gives you a quick baseline across four platforms with no sign-up.
- Open Bing Webmaster Tools. Bing’s AI Performance report shows how often your pages are cited in Microsoft Copilot, AI summaries in Bing and some partner integrations. Practical Ecommerce reported in June 2026 that the improved report shows grounding queries (the phrases the AI used to fetch your content), their intent and topic, citation share, and the specific pages cited. It does not show clicks. If you haven’t set it up, follow my Bing Webmaster Tools setup guide.
- Check Google’s own reporting. Google’s guide to generative AI features in Search (updated July 2026) points site owners to the Generative AI performance report in Search Console to measure visibility.
- Look at AI traffic in GA4. GA4 has had an “AI Assistant” default channel since May 2026. My guide on tracking ChatGPT and AI traffic in GA4 shows how to read it.
- Keep a manual prompt sheet. Pick 20 real buyer questions and ask them in two or three assistants once a month. Record mentions, citations and the sources named. It is slow, but it teaches you how these answers behave.
Note that the Google guide also warns you to be skeptical of third-party tools claiming access to Google’s internal ranking or AI systems. No tracker has that. They all observe answers from the outside, just like you do in step 5, only at scale.
Why one AI answer tells you almost nothing
This is the part most tool demos skip, and it changes how you should read any dashboard.
AI answers are not stable. In a study published in September 2026, Otterly.AI ran 520 prompts daily across seven AI answer engines for 40 to 91 days, collecting 252,407 answers. Across six engines, 12% to 19% of brands showed up on only one day in a 30-day window. For cited sources it was worse: between 26% and 67% of sources appeared on a single day. Google AI Mode had the most turnover.
The same study found that going from 10 prompts to 100 prompts cut the variation in brand coverage by about 73%. With 10 prompts, the likely range of a brand’s coverage was 39% to 71%. With 100 prompts, it narrowed to 51% to 60%.
“One AI answer is an observation. A pattern across your data is a signal.”
— OtterlyAI, AI Search Visibility: How Stable Are Brand Mentions and Citations?
What this means in practice:
- Don’t judge a tool by a screenshot of one answer. Judge it by how many prompts it runs and how often.
- Track enough prompts. For most small businesses, I suggest at least 50 to 100 prompts that cover your main services and buying stages.
- Look at trends over weeks, not days. A one-day drop is usually noise.
Also remember that different platforms lean on different sources. I covered how little overlap there is in my piece on source overlap between AI platforms, which is one more reason to track more than one assistant.
A worked example: what 60 prompts across four assistants really cost you in data
Let me make this concrete with a hypothetical example. Imagine a dental clinic group with three locations. It wants to know whether AI assistants recommend it for local dental questions.
Example setup (hypothetical):
- 60 prompts: 20 about implants, 20 about Invisalign-style aligners, 20 about emergency dental care.
- 4 platforms: ChatGPT, AI Overviews, AI Mode and Gemini.
- Daily runs.
That is 60 × 4 = 240 answers per day, or about 7,200 answers in a 30-day month. Many tools price by the number of prompts or answers, so this is the number to bring to a sales call.
Now suppose that after a month the data shows the following (again, invented numbers for illustration):
| Brand | Answers that mention the brand | Share of voice | Answers that cite the brand’s site |
|---|---|---|---|
| The clinic group | 1,080 | 1,080 ÷ 3,600 = 30% | 540 |
| Competitor A | 1,620 | 45% | 360 |
| Competitor B | 900 | 25% | 720 |
| Total brand mentions | 3,600 | 100% | — |
Here, share of voice is each brand’s mentions divided by all brand mentions among the tracked competitors. The clinic is mentioned in 1,080 of 7,200 answers, so it appears in 15% of all answers, but it holds 30% of the competitive conversation.
Notice the story the citations column tells. Competitor B gets cited more than anyone but is named less. That suggests its pages are being used as sources (maybe a strong FAQ or price guide) without the brand being recommended. Competitor A is named most but cited least, which often points to strong reviews and third-party mentions rather than great on-site content. Turning these patterns into actions is the subject of my guide on turning AI visibility data into action.
How AI visibility tools price their plans
I won’t quote prices here. They change often, many vendors only quote on request, and I only want to share what I could confirm. What I can do is describe the pricing patterns I saw on vendor pages in October 2026, so you know what to ask.
| Pricing pattern | Where I saw it | What to watch for |
|---|---|---|
| Free checker with daily limits | Semrush’s free checker (three uses a day, no account) | Great for a baseline, but no history or custom prompts. |
| Free start or free trial | Mangools (“Get started FREE”), Peec AI (free trial), Otterly.AI (free trial, no credit card), Profound (trial limited to three platforms) | Check which platforms and how many prompts the trial includes. |
| Published entry plan | Otterly.AI’s FAQ says pricing starts at $29 a month | Entry plans usually cap prompts. Do the 240-answers-a-day maths before you commit. |
| Add-on to an SEO suite | Ahrefs Brand Radar, Semrush AI Visibility Toolkit | AI indexes or platforms may be priced separately from the core plan. |
| Sales-led or enterprise | Platforms with agent analytics, shopping and content workflows | Ask what is included per seat, per brand and per market. |
The three cost drivers are almost always the same: number of prompts, number of platforms and how often they run. Extra brands, extra countries and API access usually come next.
Which type of AI visibility tool fits which team
Here is how I would match tool types to teams. Use it as a starting point, not a verdict.
| Your situation | Tool type to start with | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Small local business, no SEO tool yet | Free checks plus a manual prompt sheet | You need to learn how answers behave before paying for scale. |
| In-house SEO team already on a big suite | The suite’s AI add-on | One login, and AI data sits next to rankings and backlinks. |
| Brand or PR team focused on reputation | A dedicated platform with sentiment and source tracking | You need to know what AI says and which sources shape it. |
| Ecommerce brand | A platform with shopping tracking | Product tiles in AI assistants are a separate surface from text answers. |
| Agency managing many clients | A tool with multi-brand workspaces, exports and an API | Reporting time adds up fast across clients. |
| Enterprise with many markets | A dedicated platform with country filters and agent analytics | Answers vary by country, and crawler access issues scale with site size. |
Whichever you pick, here is a simple process I suggest for the first 90 days:
- Write 50 to 100 prompts in your customers’ own words, tagged by service and buying stage.
- Add three to five real competitors, not just the biggest names in your industry.
- Run the prompts for at least four weeks before drawing any conclusions.
- Separate mentions from citations in every report.
- List the top 20 third-party sources the AI cites for your topics. These are your PR and outreach targets.
- Pick three actions, make the changes, and compare the next four weeks with the first four.
For the factors that tend to move these numbers, see my breakdown of what drives brand visibility in AI answers. And if you want to understand why one prompt pulls in sources you never expected, read about how ChatGPT fans out a query into many searches.
Questions people ask about AI visibility tools
Can any tool show the exact prompts real users type into ChatGPT?
No tool sees private conversations. Some tools estimate prompt volumes or use large prompt datasets, but these are estimates or samples. Treat them as direction, not exact demand.
How many prompts should a small business track?
Start with 50 to 100. The Otterly.AI study showed that moving from 10 to 100 prompts cut variation in brand coverage by about 73%, so very small prompt sets can mislead you.
Do I need to track every AI platform?
No. Track the platforms your customers use. For most businesses, that means ChatGPT and Google’s AI features first, then Copilot, Gemini or Perplexity depending on your audience.
Is an AI visibility score the same in every tool?
No. Each vendor calculates its own score from its own prompts and platforms. A 40 in one tool and a 60 in another can describe the same reality. Compare trends inside one tool rather than scores across tools.
Can these tools tell me how much revenue AI brings in?
Not on their own. They measure visibility. For traffic and conversions, you need analytics, such as GA4’s AI Assistant channel, and ideally CRM data joined to it.
Where to start with AI visibility tracking this month
In brief: run the free checks, write your prompt list, and only then pick a paid tool that fits the platforms, markets and reports you actually need. Separate mentions from citations, track enough prompts to see a pattern, and judge results over weeks, not days.
If you would rather have someone set this up for you, build the prompt list, and turn the data into content and PR work, our team can help as part of our SEO services. Tell us about your business on our get a quote page, or request a custom quote for ongoing AI search work.
Further reading on ai visibility tools
- How ChatGPT Turns One Prompt Into Many Web Searches
- Too Much AI Visibility Data? A Framework for Deciding What to Act On
- Do LLMs Flatten Original Ideas? Keeping Your Brand's Point of View in AI Answers
Sources for this AI visibility tools comparison
- Ahrefs: 15 of the Best AI Visibility Tools
- Ahrefs: Brand Radar product page
- Semrush: Free AI Visibility Checker
- Mangools: AI Search Watcher
- Profound: Features
- Peec AI: AI Search Analytics for Marketing Teams
- Otterly.AI: AI Search Monitoring Tool
- Scrunch: Agent Experience Platform
- OtterlyAI: How Stable Are Brand Mentions and Citations? (September 2026)
- Semrush: Why 62% of AI citations don’t lead to brand mentions (June 2026)
- Practical Ecommerce: Bing’s improved AI Performance section
- Google Search Central: Optimizing for generative AI features
