As more customers ask AI assistants for recommendations instead of scrolling Google, a new category of tool has appeared: AI visibility (or GEO - Generative Engine Optimisation) platforms that track whether ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Google's AI Overviews mention your brand. If you're weighing up the options, here's an honest overview of the main players in 2026 and, just as importantly, where it makes sense to start.
What these tools actually do
Most AI visibility platforms monitor a set of prompts across several AI engines and report back: does your brand get mentioned, how often, with what sentiment, and which sources the AI cited. Some add competitor benchmarking, prompt-volume research, and recommendations. They answer the question "are we showing up in AI answers?" - which is different from "can AI even read our site?" (more on that below).
The main options
Profound - An enterprise-grade answer-engine analytics platform. Tracks brand citations across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, and Google AI Overviews, with prompt-volume data and crawler analytics. Powerful, but priced and built for larger marketing teams (entry plans start around $99/mo and climb quickly).
Otterly.AI - More accessible than most, aimed at marketers and smaller teams. Multi-engine brand monitoring, prompt research, and a content-audit module, with entry pricing around $29/mo. A reasonable starting point if you specifically want ongoing citation tracking.
Peec AI - Self-serve AI monitoring across multiple engines with competitor comparison, positioned in the mid-market (roughly $200-300/mo).
AthenaHQ - A newer, venture-backed entrant leaning into revenue attribution - tying AI visibility back to analytics and outcomes rather than just mention counts.
Rankscale - Notable because it pairs citation tracking with an "AI Readiness" site audit (a couple of hundred checkpoints), making it the closest in spirit to a combined technical-plus-AI tool, at a lower entry price.
A pattern worth noticing: almost all of these are subscription products built for teams that already know they have an AI-visibility problem and want continuous monitoring. Pricing and positioning skew towards US enterprise. For a small business just asking "would I even come up?", that's a lot of tool - and cost - before you've checked the basics.
Start with the foundations (for free)
Before paying to monitor whether AI mentions you, it's worth checking whether AI can read and understand your site at all - because if it can't, no amount of monitoring will change the answer. The foundations that matter:
- Are AI crawlers like GPTBot, ClaudeBot, and PerplexityBot allowed to reach your pages? (They're often blocked by accident - see our AI crawler accessibility checklist.)
- Are your business profiles linked so AI systems can confirm who you are?
- Is your content structured and clear enough to be extracted and cited?
- Do you offer an llms.txt and have a clear AI-bot policy?
AuditCrow's free AI visibility check tests exactly these on the page you give it, as part of a broader 27-check audit that also covers technical SEO, speed, content, and accessibility - with a score out of 100 and plain-English fixes, no signup to see your results. It won't track your citations across engines the way the monitoring tools above do, but it will tell you whether your foundations are sound before you invest in one of them.
The honest recommendation
If you're an enterprise brand that needs continuous, cross-engine citation tracking, one of the monitoring platforms above will earn its place. If you're a small or mid-sized business trying to work out where you stand, start free: run an AI visibility check, fix what it finds, and revisit paid monitoring once your foundations are solid and you have a real reason to watch citations over time.
For the wider picture, see does ChatGPT recommend your business and why you might not appear in Google AI Overviews.