The 12 Best AI Visibility Tools: Brand Trackers and Platforms for AI Search (2026)

AI visibility tools compared

All twelve trackers follow the same routine. You write down prompts: the questions a buyer might type into an AI assistant. One of them, LLMrefs, writes the prompts for you from your keywords, the Google searches you want to appear for. The tracker sends them on a schedule to several AI engines, the assistants it questions: ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Microsoft Copilot, Claude, and Google's two AI surfaces. AI Mode is Google's chat-style search, a second surface beside AI Overviews. For each answer, the tracker records which brands the answer names and which pages it cites as sources.

The twelve are the trackers named by the lists that rank on Google for "AI visibility tools", most of them named by several lists.

The trackers differ in four ways: the number of prompts, the engines, how often they run and how they collect the answers. They also come from two kinds of companies. Seven are specialists that sell only this kind of tracker: Otterly.AI, LLMrefs, Peec AI, Rankscale, Scrunch, AthenaHQ and Profound. All these trackers are often sold as GEO software: GEO stands for generative engine optimization, the work of getting named and cited in AI answers.

The five others belong to companies with bigger products. Semrush, Ahrefs and SE Ranking make SEO suites: software for search engine optimization (SEO), the work of ranking in Google. SE Ranking sells its tracker under a separate name, SE Visible. HubSpot makes marketing software and calls its tracker AEO, for answer engine optimization, another name for GEO. Writesonic is a writing tool that added tracking.

Prices were read on 30 October 2026, in US dollars a month on monthly billing. They were read from a computer in France, with a browser set to answer as a visitor from the US, and most pricing pages then showed dollars. Semrush's and Ahrefs' pages choose the currency from where the computer really is, so they showed euros.

Semrush's dollar prices therefore come from its help center. Ahrefs' come from a copy of its page saved on 29 October 2026 by the Internet Archive, a non-profit library of web pages. SE Visible's page showed euros both from France and from a data provider's servers, so SE Visible's prices stay in euros. Some trackers bill in credits, units spent on each answer.

The "Answers a month" column counts the AI answers a plan collects in a month. Where the vendor states that number, the table gives it. Elsewhere it is computed: prompts × engines × runs in 30 days, at the frequency the vendor states, daily for Otterly.AI, HubSpot AEO, SE Visible and Semrush, weekly for LLMrefs.

The price of 1,000 answers makes plans comparable, because the more answers a tracker collects, the steadier its figures. On most plans priced in dollars on 30 October 2026, 1,000 answers cost from about $16 on Otterly.AI to $82 on AthenaHQ, five times more.

Two plans fall outside that range. Semrush reaches $132 per 1,000 if its 25 prompts cover only one engine, which makes 750 answers a month. LLMrefs comes near $3 only if it runs every prompt on all eleven engines it lists, which it doesn't say. SE Visible's Basic plan worked out at about €9 per 1,000 on the same date.

The answers are not all equal, though. Each AI assistant runs on an AI model, the program that writes its answers: ChatGPT's site, for example, runs a version of GPT-6. SE Visible says it reads the answers through a browser, the way a person sees them on the assistant's site. Other trackers may reach a model directly through its API, the paid access that programmers buy, and the model they pick may not be the one the site runs. The model a tracker queries changes which brands an answer names. In a test of one buyer question asked many times on 26 October 2026, an older model reached through OpenAI's API named content-writing tools that ChatGPT's own site never named.

Some comparison articles that come up on Google for "AI visibility tools" still print old prices. On 3 November 2026, the comparison by Exposure Ninja, a UK digital marketing agency, was one of the first results for that search. It still gave Profound a Starter plan at $99 and a Growth plan at $399. Profound removed both between 14 and 21 September 2026, according to PricingSaaS, a site that records changes to software pricing pages. On 30 October 2026, Profound's own page offered a free 7-day trial, then an enterprise contract on quote.

Prices also move within days. SE Ranking's SEO suite has plans of its own, apart from SE Visible, and they include some AI prompts. In a copy of the suite's pricing page saved on 26 October 2026, its Core plan ($129) tracked 100 prompts a day. In the copy of 29 October, the same plan tracked 25 prompts a day. SE Visible changed too: read from France, its page showed Basic at $99 for 200 prompts on 27 October, and at €80 for 75 prompts on 30 October.

Which AI visibility platform fits which situation

Three things decide the choice, and you can work them out before talking to any vendor.

How many prompts you need. List what you sell. For each product or service, write one or two prompts for each stage a buyer goes through: finding out what exists, comparing options, choosing. Three products, three stages and one or two prompts each make 9 to 18 prompts. That fits HubSpot AEO's 25 prompts, or Otterly.AI Lite's 15 if you keep to 15. Fifteen products make 45 to 90 prompts: about what Peec AI's Starter (50 prompts) or SE Visible's Basic (75) holds, or more.

Keep each prompt short. Nathan Gotch teaches SEO and owns Rankability, a tracker. In September 2026 he said that his team first tracked long prompts loaded with personal context, then compared them with short ones such as "best SEO tools for agencies". The same brands came back. An AI assistant breaks a long question into a few short searches before answering. So the long prompts brought nothing the short ones didn't, and the credits spent on them were wasted.

Variants that change the need itself do bring different brands. In his test on beef jerky, adding "with no salt" changed who was named. With 20 or 30 such variants, he says, you get a good view of who competes on a topic.

Nick Lafferty markets Profound. When marketers ask him which prompts to track, he sends them back to their own customers. In October 2026 he advised asking current customers how they would put the question to ChatGPT. He also advised adding a question to your contact or sign-up form: how did you hear of us, and, if it was through an AI assistant, what did you type?

Which engines matter. Search Console's free AI report shows how often your pages appear in Google's AI answers. Your analytics shows which assistants already send you visitors: ChatGPT, for one, adds a tag, utm_source=chatgpt.com, to many of its links. Asking new customers how they found you covers the rest. Track the two to four engines that come up, not every engine a tracker offers.

In some markets AI answers still play a small part. So check first that AI matters in yours. Greg Gifford runs SearchLab Digital, a local SEO agency: one that helps businesses come up when people nearby search for what they sell. Most of its clients are car dealers. In September 2026 he explained that buyers may start their research in an AI assistant, but when they choose a car and a dealer, they go to Google and to the dealers' websites. For those clients, AI answers carry a small share of the searches that lead to a sale.

How often you need a reading. For a tracker, the choice is between daily runs and weekly ones.

Kevin Indig writes the Growth Memo newsletter and advises companies on growing their traffic from search. In July 2026 he advised tracking weekly instead of daily: "daily prompt tracking is way too noisy", meaning the figures jump from day to day by chance. The daily figures would be averaged over the month anyway, he said, so those jumps add nothing. Instead, he runs each prompt three to five times in a row, once a week, to see how consistent one answer is.

That gives 12 to 20 answers per prompt and engine a month, against 30 for one run a day. The more answers a monthly figure pools, the narrower its range. The true share is the one you would see if the question were asked endlessly, and the range used here, a 95% range, is the band that contains it 95 times in 100. For a prompt that names you 30% of the time on one engine, 20 answers give a range of about 15% to 52%, and 30 answers 17% to 48%.

Runs in a row, minutes apart, are also asked at the same moment, with the same pages online, so they tell you less than as many answers on different days. And only some trackers let you choose the frequency. On their pricing pages (30 October 2026), Rankscale let you set any frequency from hourly to monthly, and Ahrefs daily, weekly or monthly per engine. Peec AI offered weekly runs only on its enterprise plan, without saying why. Otterly.AI, HubSpot AEO and SE Visible stated daily runs, and LLMrefs weekly ones.

Weekly runs give a wider range, but enough to follow a trend over a month. Daily runs are worth paying for when you need a tighter monthly figure, or must catch a sudden change, such as an AI assistant repeating your old price.

Prices in the table below were read on 30 October 2026.

AI Mode matters if your buyers use Google's chat-style search. SE Visible, Ahrefs, Peec AI, Semrush, Rankscale and AthenaHQ all track it. Otterly.AI adds it for $9 a month (30 October 2026), and HubSpot AEO doesn't track it at all.

If you already pay for an SEO suite, check what your plan includes before adding a second subscription. Semrush, for one, sells Semrush One bundles that include 50, 100 or 200 tracked prompts alongside its SEO tools. The suites themselves are compared in the best AI for marketing, by job, a guide on this site.

The twelve AI brand visibility tools one by one

Each entry gives the plan as read on 30 October 2026 and, where practitioners have written or spoken about their own use, what they found, with its date.

Otterly.AI. Otterly.AI is aimed at freelancers and small teams. On 30 October 2026, Lite ($29) covered ChatGPT, AI Overviews, Perplexity and Copilot daily, with unlimited users. Gemini and AI Mode cost $9 a month each on Lite that day, and Claude $29. Lite couldn't buy more prompts: a 16th meant moving to Standard, at $189. Standard also brought an API, a connection that lets other software, such as your AI agent, fetch the tracker's figures. It brought an MCP server too, the connection that lets an AI assistant such as Claude read the tracker's data directly.

Zilwaris, a one-person content agency that pays for Otterly.AI on client work, wrote in April 2026: "The dashboards aren't fancy and the reports are basic, but the data is real." Sean Begg Flint, founder of the SEO agency Position Digital, tested it for a review he updated in September 2026. He found a figure he couldn't trace back to an answer: Otterly's main dashboard counted a mention of the brand that the report for the prompt itself didn't show.

HubSpot AEO. HubSpot sells its tracker on its own, at $50 a month on 30 October 2026 ($45 a month on yearly billing), with no other HubSpot subscription needed. It runs 25 prompts daily on ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity: about 2,250 answers a month (25 × 3 × 30), under the 2,500 HubSpot states as its limit. It also suggests prompts from your company profile. The product is labeled beta, an early version that may still change, and its engines leave out Google's AI Overviews and AI Mode, Copilot and Claude.

LLMrefs. LLMrefs is the keyword-first tracker: you enter the keywords you already target in Google, and it writes the prompts. One plan at $79 a month on 30 October 2026, labeled "limited time", covers 500 prompts, run weekly, on the 11 engines it lists. LLMrefs doesn't say whether every prompt runs on every engine. You give up choosing the wording of each prompt in exchange for coverage and price.

Gareth James is an SEO consultant who sells link building, the work of getting other sites to link to yours. For a review he updated in May 2026, he opened a free account and ran LLMrefs on "freelance link builder", the service his own site sells. LLMrefs placed his business below FatJoe, a link-building company. That is what LLMrefs shows: how your brand compares with others across a topic, not how one particular question was answered.

Peec AI. Peec AI is a Berlin company focused on clean reporting rather than tools that write content for you. On 30 October 2026, Starter ($95) ran 50 prompts a day on three engines you pick from ChatGPT, AI Mode, AI Overviews, Copilot, Gemini and Naver AI (the AI answers of Naver, South Korea's main search engine), for one brand, which Peec AI calls a project. Perplexity was among the extra engines that day, at $35 a month on Starter ($30 on yearly billing). Claude was only on the enterprise plan. An MCP server came with every plan.

Exposure Ninja runs Peec AI on client campaigns beside Semrush and Profound. Its founder, Tim Cameron-Kitchen, likes Peec's "citation gap analysis" most (comparison updated in September 2026). This report lists the sites AI answers cite but where his clients never appear, which tells the agency where to seek a mention.

SE Visible. SE Visible is SE Ranking's separate AI tracker. On 30 October 2026 its page, seen from France, listed new plans in euros: Basic at €80 a month (€64 on yearly billing) for 75 prompts and Core at €169 for 200, on ChatGPT, Gemini, AI Mode and AI Overviews. Its FAQ, read on 30 October 2026, says it collects "real AI responses using a browser and graphical user interface, not simulated answers or API-based results": the same screens a person uses, refreshed daily.

SMA Marketing, an agency that partners with SE Ranking, set it up in April 2026. Checks then ran weekly and couldn't be started on demand, so the first figures for a new prompt took days to arrive. On 30 October 2026, SE Visible listed Claude as coming soon.

Semrush AI Visibility Toolkit. Semrush, owned by Adobe since 28 April 2026, sold the toolkit at $99 a month per website on 30 October 2026, with no free trial according to its help center. It tracked 25 prompts daily on ChatGPT, Google's AI Mode and Gemini. That day, 50 more prompts cost $60 a month, and each extra user $99. Its "AI Visibility Score" compares how often you are named with how often a typical one of your main competitors is named: the median, the one in the middle of the group. So it is not the share of answers that name you, which is what HubSpot reports.

Victoria Kurichenko, an SEO writer who runs the blog Behind Rankings, has used it for more than six months. She agrees with a Reddit user's verdict that the toolkit is "helpful directionally, but the data isn't fully precise": it shows which way your figures move, not their exact value.

Rankscale. Rankscale bills in credits. On 30 October 2026, Pro ($99) included 1,200 credits. One answer from ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity or AI Mode cost a quarter of a credit, so the plan bought up to 4,800 answers (1,200 × 4). A Claude answer cost 2 credits. Rankscale covers most engines, Claude included, audits pages and shares its results over MCP.

An Essentials plan, sold only by the year, showed $17 a month for 120 credits on 30 October 2026, about 480 answers (120 × 4). It is left out of the table because it can't be bought month by month. Budgeting in credits takes some arithmetic.

Writesonic. Writesonic is a content-writing platform that added tracking. On 30 October 2026, Starter ($99 a month, or $79 a month on yearly billing) tracked 50 prompts across ChatGPT, Gemini and AI Overviews. The plan collects 50 answers a day in all, for its 50 prompts on three engines: about one answer per prompt a day, not one per engine. The plan also included 15 AI-written articles a month. Zilwaris, writing in April 2026, used it for four months with three clients, then cancelled it: "The content generation is fine. The visibility tracking is fine. Neither is best in class."

Ahrefs Brand Radar. Ahrefs sells Brand Radar as two products, both available without an Ahrefs plan. The figures here come from a copy of its page saved on 29 October 2026. Custom prompts tracked your own questions, from $50 a month for 2,500 checks. A check is one answer from one engine, so that is about 83 answers a day, and a Claude answer cost 8 checks.

The second product, the AI Visibility Index, cost from $199 a month, or $699 for all engines. Ahrefs itself asks about 514 million questions, built from the keywords in its search database, and asks them again each month. You search the answers for your brand. Every paid plan of Ahrefs' SEO suite included a few custom prompts on that date: 5 a day on Lite ($129).

Style Factory, which publishes reviews of SEO and e-commerce software, compared Brand Radar with Profound in a video of June 2026. Because Ahrefs' index is collected in advance, you can look at a whole category at once, such as "email marketing tools", and find questions you would not have thought to track. An answer about knee pain while running, for instance, can name shoe brands. For following your own prompts over time, though, Style Factory found that Ahrefs' custom prompts gave "snapshots" rather than full monitoring.

Scrunch. Scrunch has been owned by Sitecore, a maker of website software for large companies, since June 2026, and still runs as a standalone product. On 30 October 2026, Core ($250) covered 125 prompts on ChatGPT, Perplexity, AI Overviews and Copilot, for 5,000 answers a month. Its distinctive feature is on the enterprise plan only: a stripped-down version of your pages served to AI crawlers, the programs AI companies send to read websites. Scrunch says it makes your pages easier for AI tools to read.

In April 2026, SMA Marketing ran the same 188 prompts through Scrunch as through the other trackers it reviewed. Scrunch's headline figure was a measure of its own, 32% "coverage". It also showed where the answers' citations about the agency came from. Only about 4% pointed to the agency's own site, and 96% to other people's pages.

AthenaHQ. AthenaHQ is a specialist tracker that also suggests what to change on your site and elsewhere. On 30 October 2026, Starter ($295) included 3,600 credits, one credit per AI answer, on eleven engines (ChatGPT, Perplexity, AI Overviews, AI Mode, Gemini, Claude, Copilot, Grok, DeepSeek, Meta AI and Mistral). A free plan gave 300 credits on five engines that day, enough for a first look.

Profound. Profound is a specialist aimed at large brands, and now presents itself as an "AI Marketer" that researches, writes and reports. On 30 October 2026, its page offered a free 7-day trial (50 prompts a day on ChatGPT, Gemini and AI Overviews). After the trial came an enterprise contract for as many as nine engines, with "Prompt Volumes", its estimate of what people ask AI assistants.

In Style Factory's June 2026 comparison, Profound was the better of the two for tracking your own prompts over time. Unlike Ahrefs, it also rated the tone of what AI answers say about a brand, and showed how products appear in AI shopping recommendations.

Outside the twelve, you can also buy raw figures instead of a dashboard. I get much of my search data from DataForSEO, a data provider for SEO software. DataForSEO also sells data on AI mentions. Its LLM Mentions API (LLM stands for large language model, the kind of AI model behind these assistants) searches a database of more than 280 million questions and answers from ChatGPT and Google's AI Overviews, and finds those that name your brand or cite your site. As with Ahrefs' index, those answers come from the provider's own collection, not from questions you choose.

On 3 November 2026, one search for your brand cost $0.10, plus $0.001 (a tenth of a cent) for each answer it returned, and its ChatGPT data covered the US, in English, only. It returns figures, not a dashboard: your AI agent can fetch them and put them in a spreadsheet for you.

Free AI search visibility tools to open before paying

Free sources now show part of what a tracker sells. Google's and Bing's own reports come first, because they measure real appearances of your pages, rather than answers to prompts you chose.

Google Search Console's generative AI performance report. Search Console is Google's free dashboard for site owners: it shows how your pages do in Google's results. Its generative AI report was announced on 3 June 2026. Since 31 August 2026, it is open to every site that appears often enough in Google's AI answers. It counts impressions, the times a link to one of your pages was shown in AI Overviews or AI Mode, by page, country, device and date. It shows no clicks and no queries.

These impressions are already part of the ordinary Performance report, the one that counts how often your pages appear and get clicked in Google's results. The two must not be added up.

The AI report appears only once a site has enough impressions in Google's AI answers, and Google gives no threshold. Its help page, read on 30 October 2026, says only that a missing report usually means the site "hasn't received enough impressions". If yours is missing, Bing's report, Ahrefs' free checker and a check by hand still work.

Bing Webmaster Tools' AI Performance report. Bing Webmaster Tools is Microsoft's equivalent for Bing. Its AI Performance report, launched in public preview (an early version open to all) on 10 February 2026, counts how often your pages are cited in Microsoft Copilot, Bing's AI summaries and some partner services Microsoft doesn't name. It lists the cited pages and shows a sample of "grounding queries": the searches the AI itself ran, in real conversations, before citing you. They are the best free start for a prompt list. It shows no clicks.

Setting both up. Neither dashboard shows anything until you add your site and prove you own it. In Search Console you choose "Add property", then verify. Google's help, read on 30 October 2026, lists several ways: a line of text (a record) added to your domain name's settings, at the company you bought it from, or a file or a tag added to your site.

Bing Webmaster Tools can import a site you already verified in Search Console. Microsoft says data usually appears about 48 hours after a site is added.

If an AI agent builds your site, or someone else runs it, hand over this request: "Add my site to Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools, verify that I own it, and show me the generative AI report in Search Console and the AI Performance report in Bing."

I use these two reports myself. In Bing Webmaster Tools I look at the citations in AI answers more than at the ordinary search figures, and I follow Search Console's AI report. Ahrefs shows me where my brands are mentioned. Its Web Analytics, free on 30 October 2026 for a site whose ownership you verify, counts the visitors who came from ChatGPT, Perplexity or Gemini.

The two official reports also came first in a Reddit discussion of October 2026. In a thread on r/GEO_optimization, a Reddit forum about AI search, someone asked which tracker people used and whether it was worth paying for. The most upvoted reply named only these two reports and added: "The rest is fuzz, buzz and nonsense."

Microsoft Clarity's AI Visibility dashboard. Clarity, Microsoft's free analytics tool, added two views. Citations, open to all since 13 May 2026, shows the grounding queries behind your citations. Topic Insights, added in July 2026, lets you enter your own topics, prompts and competitors for free.

Microsoft says Topic Insights sends your prompts to an OpenAI model, GPT-5.3, together with Microsoft's own web search, at "10 reports per week per project". Microsoft adds that the view "should only be used for directional monitoring and insights": for which way a figure moves, not for its exact value. So this view simulates answers rather than reading what ChatGPT users see.

Ahrefs' free AI visibility checker. On 30 October 2026, it took a brand name, needed no sign-up, and returned how often ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Copilot and AI Overviews mention the brand. It also showed the topics behind those mentions, and the five domains and pages cited most alongside it. The answers come from Ahrefs' own index of prompts built from search data, so a young brand that few people search for yet may barely show.

Amplitude's free AI visibility report. Amplitude, a company that sells analytics for websites and apps, offers a free report once you fill in a form. Read on 3 November 2026, its page lists what the report covers on ChatGPT and Google's AI Overviews: a visibility score, the tone of the answers, how you rank against competitors and the prompts behind that ranking, with suggestions on what to change. Amplitude's customers get the same product, AI Visibility, inside Amplitude, to follow those two engines over time.

Built into your website platform. If your site runs on Squarespace, a website builder, its paid plans include a tracker called AI Visibility in the site's dashboard. It writes questions a buyer might ask about a business like yours, runs them through AI search engines such as ChatGPT, and shows whether your site is named and which competitors appear instead.

On its pricing page, read on 3 November 2026, the cheapest plan gave 10 runs once, and the others 20, 40 or 120 a month. One run is one question asked once to one AI assistant.

If your site runs behind Cloudflare, the network many sites use to load faster and stay protected, its AEO Visibility Dashboard has been open in early access since 6 August 2026. It counts the AI answers that link to your site, the answers that name your brand without a link, and your share against competitors on the questions you follow. Cloudflare also sees real AI traffic: the AI crawlers and the visits from AI answers that pass through its network. You request access from the Cloudflare dashboard. Its launch announcement gave no price, so it may not stay free.

Trials and free plans. On 30 October 2026, HubSpot AEO's trial covered its 25 prompts for 28 days, and Profound's covered 50 prompts for 7 days. Scrunch and LLMrefs gave 7 days, SE Visible 10, and AthenaHQ's free plan included 300 answers.

One caveat applies to HubSpot's free AEO Grader, the one-time report several lists recommend as a first look. HubSpot's own FAQ, read on 27 October 2026, says that for ChatGPT and Gemini it reads "from training data": what the model learned before its cut-off. Only Perplexity searches the web live. For those two engines, the Grader shows what the models learned months ago, not the answers your buyers get today.

Your analytics. ChatGPT adds utm_source=chatgpt.com to many of the links in its answers. In 40 answers it gave to one buyer question on 26 October 2026, 566 of the 978 links, about 6 in 10, carried it. Visits from those links appear in Google Analytics, PostHog or any other analytics tool as coming from chatgpt.com.

The tag is how I saw visitors arrive from AI answers and become customers: the link they came through showed it. In my case, visitors from AI answers became customers much more often than other visitors. I put that down to the trust people place in the assistant that recommended me.

Other visits from AI arrive without the tag, so they are counted as direct visits, from people who typed your address. The co-founder of Sitefire, a start-up that sells AI visibility work, calls the count in analytics "a lower bound", an undercount, because these untagged visits are missing from it (on Hacker News, a forum for people in software, March 2026).

What an AI visibility score means

A tracker reports numbers such as "visibility 42%" or "position 2.3" (your average place in the answers that name you). Before paying for a tracker, it helps to see how far one AI answer can be trusted, and why two trackers rarely agree.

One question, asked 94 times

To see how far one answer can be trusted, one buyer's question was asked 94 times in all on 26 and 27 October 2026: "What generative engine optimization software do you recommend?" It went 40 times to ChatGPT's public site, logged out, from the United States, between 23:36 and 23:54 UTC. DataForSEO's ChatGPT scraper did the asking. That service loads chatgpt.com like a browser and returns the full answer. It reported the model as GPT-6.

The same question then went 54 times to two models through OpenAI's API, between 23:54 on 26 October and 00:32 UTC on 27 October. With web search, a model looks pages up before answering, as ChatGPT's site does. The first model, GPT-6 Luna, is one of the four GPT-6 versions the API sells: it got the question 20 times without web search and 8 times with it. ChatGPT's site doesn't say which GPT-6 version it runs. The second model, gpt-5.4-mini, is older and smaller: it got the question 20 times without search and 6 times with it.

Each tool was counted once in each answer whose text named it. A name that appeared only in a cited link or an image caption didn't count.

Four things stand out.

The core is stable, the order is not. Four trackers, Otterly.AI, Profound, Peec AI and Semrush, appeared in 39 or 40 of the 40 site answers. Yet the one named first was Profound 20 times, Peec AI 10 times and Semrush 10 times, and the first four names came in 13 different orders. A "rank 1" from a single check is a draw from that spread.

The edges keep moving. Scrunch appeared in 30 of 40 answers, and in 6 of the first 10. In all, 12 different tools were named across the 40 site answers, a list that differs from the twelve trackers compared here. Eight of them turned up in the first 20 answers. The other four, Moz, SE Ranking, Google Search Console and AirOps, appeared for the first time in answers 31 and 32: a check of 20 answers would have missed them.

The model matters more than the route, browser or API. Through the API, GPT-6 Luna without web search named Otterly.AI, Peec AI and Profound in all 20 answers. Take one of its answers and one site answer: on average, 71% of the tools they name are the same. For two site answers, it is 78%, so GPT-6 Luna came close. The older gpt-5.4-mini gave a different list. Content-writing tools appeared in up to 70% of its answers, and it shared only 43% of its tools with the site.

Even with GPT-6 Luna, the tools outside that core differ: Scrunch appeared in 9 of 20 answers against 30 of 40 on the site, Ahrefs in 4 of 20 against 26 of 40. Which exact GPT-6 version the site runs remains unknown. So ask a tracker that uses the API which model it queries.

On this question, the answer leaned on vendors' pages. Every site answer cited Profound's, Semrush's and Otterly.AI's own websites, and 39 cited Peec AI's. The next most cited were small "best tools" lists: byalkali.com in 22 answers, dupple.com and toolbistro.com in 14. Scrunch says openly why vendors publish such lists: "'Best AEO/GEO tool' content is regularly cited in AI search results for prompts that we care about."

On a question about marketing software, the vendors publish most of what there is to read. On other software questions, AI engines cite independent sites far more, according to a 2025 study from the University of Toronto.

The 40 ChatGPT answers of the test came from one place, logged out, within twenty minutes, which is how many trackers collect them. Real users see more variety. An older study, from January 2026, measured how much. It was run by SparkToro, an audience research company, and Gumshoe, an AI-tracking start-up. They asked 600 volunteers to put 12 prompts to ChatGPT, Claude and Google's AI, with their own accounts and settings. The volunteers ran them 2,961 times in all.

Two answers to the same prompt named exactly the same brands in fewer than 1 case in 100, and in the same order in about 1 case in 1,000. The leading brands still came back in most answers. Rand Fishkin, SparkToro's co-founder and a long-time skeptic of AI rank tracking, concluded that "visibility % across dozens to hundreds of prompts run multiple times is a reasonable metric". A tool giving a "ranking position in AI", he added, is "full of baloney".

Why two trackers give two different scores

The test above came from a single source of answers. Trackers each pick their own, count in their own way, and practitioners who compare them find gaps on each of these points.

They collect answers differently. Some read the consumer app through a browser, others call the model's API. Surfer, a content-writing tool that also sells a browser-based tracker, compared both on 1,000 prompts across five AI products in August 2026. Depending on the product, only 15.5% to 23.8% of the brands named were the same both ways. ChatGPT's API named 13.8 brands per answer, against 7.9 on ChatGPT's site. The API cited 3.1 sources per answer, against 12.1 on the site.

Surfer collected one answer per prompt, and says itself that part of the gap is ordinary variation. In the test above, an API model from the same family as the site's came close to the site's list, while an older one did not. Which model a tracker reaches may explain much of the gap between browser and API answers.

What vendors say about their own method doesn't always match what reviewers find. Semrush's help center says its answers are captured "from real requests and not via any APIs of LLMs", the large language models behind these assistants. Position Digital's review describes Semrush's collection as official APIs supplemented by third-party providers that capture what users see.

They define the score differently. HubSpot counts the share of answers that name you. Semrush's AI Visibility Score compares your mentions with the median of your top competitors. In April 2026, SMA Marketing loaded the same 188 prompts about its own agency into several trackers. Three of them gave it a visibility score. Surfer gave 32%. SE Visible and keyword.com, a rank tracker that added AI visibility, gave 27% and 35%, though the video doesn't say which gave which. Keyword.com and Surfer are not among the twelve, and SE Visible has changed its plans since.

SMA Marketing doesn't say how many answers stood behind each score, or exactly what each tool counted, so the spread itself may be partly chance. What it does show is that each tool picks its own engines, runs and definition. Each produces a number that can't be set beside another tool's. Compare a tracker with itself over time, never with another tracker.

They don't agree on which page is cited. Victoria Kurichenko tracked her blog, Behind Rankings, in Semrush and in Bing's free report from January to March 2026. Bing's report named her post on Substack alternatives as her most-cited page. Semrush named her list of the best SEO tools. Each tool sees a different set of answers, so each finds a different top page. Her conclusion: she "honestly" doesn't pay much attention to her AI visibility figures, checks Semrush's report now and then, and keeps to her SEO content plan.

None is fully accurate. Sean Begg Flint tested fifteen trackers for his agency's review. He found the most reliable figures in Trackerly, a smaller tracker that shows the exact model and version behind each answer, and even those were not fully accurate. His verdict: "No tool today can show you a perfectly accurate picture of your brand's presence in AI search."

Trackerly is not among the twelve compared here. On 3 November 2026, none of the four lists at the top of Google's results for this search, Zapier's, Exposure Ninja's, Profound's and AccessibilityChecker.org's, named Trackerly.

Its price is why it is among the picks by situation, as the cheap option for daily ChatGPT answers. On 30 October 2026, its page offered 4,500 credits for $27 a month, with a 7-day free trial. A ChatGPT answer cost 2 credits and an AI Mode answer 5, so about $12 per 1,000 ChatGPT answers: among the lowest prices for daily answers found here.

Because each tracker has blind spots, some practitioners run several trackers at once. Lily Ray, an SEO consultant who founded the agency Algorithmic, uses Peec AI, Profound, Waikay (another tracker), Semrush and Ahrefs Brand Radar on client work, because "some of them have different methodologies for how they collect this data" (April 2026).

A citation is not a recommendation. Graphite, a growth agency, studied nearly half a million AI shopping answers. Cassie Clark, an AI search visibility consultant, reported on that study in October 2026 on Found in AI, the podcast she hosts. Large and small retailers each made up about 38% of the stores the answers cited. Yet large retailers were the top recommendation about two and a half times as often as small ones.

A tracker that counts citations alone would score the two groups the same. Ask whether yours keeps apart a link to your page, your name in the answer, and your brand as the pick.

"Prompt volume", a tracker's count of people asking a question, is an estimate. Only the AI companies see what people actually type, and they don't publish it. Devesh Khanal co-founded the SEO agency Grow and Convert, which sells its own tracker. In September 2026 he said that Profound's Prompt Volumes and similar features rely on clickstream panels: people who installed a browser extension that records their browsing. Buyers such as a large company's technology chief are unlikely to be in them.

Nathan Gotch goes further: no prompt volume can be pulled from ChatGPT, and the panels are too small a sample to rely on. The vendors build their figures in different ways. For its topic volumes, Semrush says it combines "third-party data on real AI interactions" with its own estimates. Ahrefs builds the prompts of its index from the keywords in its search database, and Peec AI scores each prompt's demand from 1 to 5.

Check a tracker against your own count during its trial

Rand Fishkin suggested on the No Hacks podcast in March 2026 that buyers ask vendors about their method first. In plain terms:

1. Where do your prompts come from, and how do you check they resemble what real people type?
2. How many times do you run each prompt per check?
3. Do you read the consumer app or call the API, with which model, logged in or out, from which country?
4. Have you published how much your numbers vary from one run to the next?
5. Do your prompts ask for a fixed number of answers ("give me 10 tools")? Real users rarely do, and it makes lists look steadier than they are.
6. Do you report a "rank" or "position" as if it were stable?

Then check the answers yourself. Your own count is a fair comparison where another tracker's is not, because you can count exactly what the tracker counts. Several practitioners in the r/GEO_optimization thread gave the same advice.

Pick ten questions your buyers ask. Run each one five times in new chats, on one or two of the engines the tracker covers (50 answers per engine): logged out, in a private window, or in ChatGPT's temporary chat. Count the answers that name you, the way the tracker counts a mention. Then load the same questions into the tracker's free trial.

With 50 answers, a count of 15 (30%) has a 95% range of 19% to 44%: from 11 points below your count to 14 above. A tracker figure inside that band is near enough, roughly 12 percentage points either way: you are paying for the time saved and the history it keeps.

A much wider gap suggests the tracker measures something other than what your buyers see. Open the full answer behind a few of its figures too: a number you can't trace back to an answer can't be checked.

How many answers before a change means something

A share of answers is a proportion, and the range around a proportion from a small sample is wide. The 95% range, the band that contains the true share 95 times in 100, shows how wide.

Scrunch was named in 30 of the 40 site answers above: 75%, with a range of 60% to 86%. From the first 10 answers alone (6 of 10), the range would have been 31% to 83%, too wide to say anything. Now picture a tracked prompt that names your brand in 9 of 30 monthly answers, then 12 of 30 the next month. The ranges run from 17% to 48% and from 25% to 58%. They overlap almost entirely, so the "progress" may be chance, what statisticians call noise.

Three habits make readings usable:

• Keep branded prompts apart. Branded prompts name you ("Stillbook reviews", for an invented app used as the example just below) and test whether the facts about you are right. Unbranded prompts don't name you ("best booking app for yoga teachers") and measure whether you get recommended. Aleyda Solis, an SEO consultant, has seen trackers' set-up screens suggest prompt sets that were 80% branded. That makes visibility look far better than it is, because an answer to a question that names you nearly always names you.

An example list for Stillbook, an invented one-person booking app for yoga teachers, shows the split (Mindbody is booking software for fitness studios):

Unbranded: is Stillbook recommended?
1. best booking app for yoga teachers
2. cheapest way to take bookings for private yoga classes
3. simple alternative to Mindbody for one teacher
4. how do I sell a 10-class pass online
5. how can students book and pay for yoga online

Branded: does AI get the facts about Stillbook right?
6. Stillbook pricing
7. Stillbook reviews
8. Stillbook vs Mindbody

Branded prompts need no statistics: one answer with a wrong fact is enough to act on. If the answers to "Stillbook pricing" keep quoting last year's price, put the current price in plain text on the pricing page today.

• Pool before you judge. A tracker running ten unbranded prompts daily on four engines collects about 1,200 answers a month (10 × 4 × 30). Say your mentions move from 84 to 120 in a month, from 7.0% to 10.0%. The ranges are 5.7% to 8.6%, then 8.4% to 11.8%. They barely overlap, so that is closer to a real change. The monthly check by hand, 100 chats on two engines, gives a range about 18 points wide for a 30% share (22% to 40%). That is enough to see whether you are named often or rarely, not a change of a few points.
• Ask each question several times. In the monthly check by hand, the five chats per question show how consistent the answer is, the job Kevin Indig gives his runs in a row.

Answers to the same question tend to resemble one another, whether minutes or days apart. So they carry less information than as many separate questions. Take these ranges as the narrowest the uncertainty can be.

What gets your brand named in AI answers

A tracker shows whether you appear. Whether anything you do can change that is a question for research, and the paper that gave GEO its name measured something narrower than most buyers assume.

The name comes from a paper by researchers at Princeton University and the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi. It was posted in November 2023 and published at KDD 2024, a major conference on data mining. It reported that some edits to a web page raised its "visibility" in AI answers by up to 40%.

It measured share of an answer, not recommendations. The authors built their own answer engine. For each query, it fetched Google's top five results, and GPT-3.5 wrote the answer from them. A page's "visibility" was the part of that answer taken from the page, weighted more when that part came early.

Adding quotations, statistics or cited sources to a page raised its share by about a third, 30% to 40% more than before. Keyword stuffing, repeating the words of the query, did worse than nothing: on Perplexity, which the authors also tested, it left the page 10% below its unedited version.

The gains were taken from the other pages. With "cite sources" applied, the page ranked fifth gained 115%, while the page ranked first lost 30%. The test never asked whether a brand gets named when a buyer asks for recommendations, which is what AI visibility trackers count.

A later benchmark found that edits barely changed a page's place in the answer. A benchmark is a standard test that others can run again. Researchers at Parameter Lab, NAVER AI Lab (in Korea) and three German universities built this one, C-SEO Bench, and presented it at NeurIPS 2025, a leading AI research conference.

They applied the same kind of edits to pages in six fields. Three held product descriptions (retail products, video games, books), for questions asking which product to choose. Three held pages for ordinary questions: everyday web questions, news and debates. Four AI models then wrote answers from those pages, and the researchers counted where each page landed in them.

Most edits did nothing that chance couldn't explain. The paper counts 54 cases, each an editing method tried in one field. In only 3 of the 54 did pages move up by more than chance could explain. Adding statistics even lowered a page's place: it was tested on each of the four models in each of the six fields, 24 pairs, and it lowered pages in 19 of them. Putting a page first among the sources handed to the model beat every rewrite. The gains also shrank as more competitors used the same trick.

AI answers lean on what others say about you. In the University of Toronto study, the researchers compared web-enabled AI engines with Google on 1,000 "rank the best" prompts in 2025. For software in the US, 72.7% of the domains the AI engines cited were independent publications and review sites, and 26.7% the brands' own sites. In Google's top 10, the split was 45.4% and 43.7%.

A brand's reputation also shapes what the model searches for. Before answering, ChatGPT runs a few searches in the background: 80 in the 40 answers of the test above, about two per answer. In 60 of those 80 searches, the model had already added tracker names, although the question named none: it searches for the brands it already associates with the category. Graphite, the growth agency behind the shopping study, counted the same pattern in 59.6% of about 957,000 such searches in 2026.

Mentions go with being named, links much less. Across 75,000 brands, in a 2025 study, Ahrefs looked at what goes together with being named in ChatGPT, AI Mode and AI Overviews. Brands mentioned more in YouTube videos and on other websites were named most often. Links from other sites went with it weakly, and the number of pages on a site barely at all. Things that go together don't prove that one causes the other, and Ahrefs sells data on brand mentions.

Google asks for nothing special. Its guidance, updated on 10 December 2025, says: "There are no additional requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode, nor other special optimizations necessary", and "You don't need to create new machine readable files, AI text files, or markup to appear in these features." A page has to be in Google's index and allowed to show a text excerpt in ordinary results.

So a tracker measures, but it doesn't get you recommended. As far as the evidence goes, three things move the number: being written about on the sites and in the videos the engines read, ranking in ordinary search for the background searches they run, and, for what AI says about you, stating the facts plainly on your own pages.

That is also how I work. I don't split my time between SEO and GEO, because working on my sites' rankings in Google is working on their place in AI answers. Which of these signals counts most, I can't say precisely. With this much research under way and no settled result, I don't think anyone can yet. How AI assistants pick their sources, and what GEO adds to ordinary SEO, is the subject of this guide to GEO vs SEO.

When an AI visibility tool isn't worth paying for

When the free reports show nothing. If Search Console's AI report, Bing's citations and a free trial all come back empty, a paid tracker will record that zero every day. Spend the month getting mentioned and answering your buyers' questions on your own pages, then measure again.

When you have one brand and a handful of questions. Track by hand: once a month, put your ten most important unbranded prompts to each engine your buyers use, five times each, in a session that carries no history.

That means logged out, in a private browser window, or, in ChatGPT, a temporary chat set to Unpersonalized. OpenAI says such a chat "Does not use memory, custom instructions, or plugins", and memory and past chats are part of what makes one person's answers differ from another's. Search Google itself the same way for AI Overviews and AI Mode.

Record one row per answer in a spreadsheet: date, engine, prompt, run number, whether you were named, who else was, which pages were cited. Then count.

Ten prompts run five times make 50 answers per engine a month, 100 on two engines. That is roughly two to three hours of work, at about a minute and a half per chat to ask, read and log (an estimate). It is enough to tell a brand named in most answers from one named in few, not to measure a change of a few points: pool engines and months before judging a change.

I also type a question into ChatGPT myself now and then, to see what comes out and to understand why the answer names what it names. A look like this shows what one answer says. Only a count, like the one above, shows how often you are named.

Practitioners who track by hand keep to a few dozen questions. Zilwaris described its routine in April 2026: every priority prompt three times on each of four engines, about 30 minutes per client per month. It advises buying a tracker only once you manage four or more brands. Gareth James keeps the same kind of log, with 20 to 30 buyer questions a week, and searches the saved answers for his brand name.

Nathan Gotch, who sells a tracker, says the same about small jobs. For one small campaign, manual runs are enough, and a tool earns its price with many clients or many prompts.

When AI plays a small part in how your buyers choose. Greg Gifford spoke about this in September 2026 on Let's Chunk, a show produced by SE Ranking, which sells a tracker. He has heard of several CMOs, the heads of marketing at large companies, dropping trackers they had spent a lot on, after six months or a year. The data hadn't helped them make any business decision.

He sees a tracker as "a directional signal", not "a KPI of success", the figure a business judges its marketing by. His advice: look at your own traffic first, and go all in on AI visibility only if your traffic is falling and much of the drop seems to come from AI answers.

When an agency already tracks your AI visibility. Ask for the share of answers that name you on a fixed list of prompts before and after its work, per engine, with the number of answers behind each figure, rather than one overall score.

When someone sells you a place in "best tools" lists. Such lists, often written by a company that ranks itself first, do get cited for now. Lily Ray said in April 2026 that she had already seen "about 20 or 30 sites" that relied on such lists lose much of their visibility in Google within three months, so a paid place in one may not last.

To follow AI search without a tool, Kevin Indig's Growth Memo is the pick among four AI marketing newsletters sorted by job and reading time.