| Quick answer |
|---|
| The best competitor analysis tools for AI search optimization are Gauge from $599 a month for daily competitor benchmarking, Ahrefs Brand Radar for the widest surface coverage — listed from $199 a month, with its seven-surface bundle reported at $398 — and Profound on a quoted Enterprise plan. Semrush now folds AI visibility into its SEO + AI Search plans, from $199 a month. |
| How we compare |
|---|
| Tools are judged on whether competitors run through the same prompt set you use, whether the cited sources behind a rival’s mentions are exposed, and what the entry tier really includes. Prices were read on vendor pages on 12 September 2026, with Profound re-read on 11 October 2026 after it withdrew its self-serve tiers, and labelled where only third-party figures exist. We ran no head-to-head lab test — no prompt set was scored across these tools. Every price was re-checked against the vendor’s own pricing page in September 2026, and figures available only from third-party trackers are marked as reported. No vendor paid for placement. |
Table of Contents
What competitor analysis means in AI search
In organic search, competitor analysis means comparing rankings and backlinks for a keyword. In AI search it means something narrower and harder: on this prompt, which brands did the model name, and whose page did it cite? That is exactly what AI search competitor analysis tools measure, and it is the lens to use whenever you compare AI search optimization tools. For the narrower job of benchmarking rivals inside the answers themselves, see our guide to competitor benchmarking in AI answers.
An AI answer typically names two or three brands, not ten, and there is no page two. Being fourth is identical to being absent, so the analysis is a binary: in the answer, or out of it.
Best competitor analysis tools for AI search optimization compared
| Tool | Entry price | Competitor feature | Citation sources exposed |
|---|---|---|---|
| Gauge | $99/mo | Competitor benchmarking, daily prompt tracking | Yes, citation analysis |
| Peec AI | EUR 85 (about $96)/mo | Brand rankings against a competitor set | Yes, citation sources |
| Profound | Custom quote; free 7-day trial | Comparison across engines on Enterprise | Yes, on higher tiers |
| Semrush SEO + AI Search | $199/mo Starter | Competitor and prompt research inside the suite | Yes |
| Ahrefs Brand Radar | From $199/mo plus base plan; $398 bundle reported | Brand versus brand across seven surfaces | Yes |
| Qwairy | €79 (about $89)/mo (€65 (about $73) annual) | Competitor benchmarking plus crawler analytics | Yes |
Three questions that separate these tools
- Can you define the competitor set yourself? A tool that picks your competitors by domain similarity will report on companies you do not sell against.
- Does it run competitors on your prompts? Some tools track your brand on your prompts and competitors on theirs. Those two numbers cannot be compared.
- Does it show the citation, not just the mention? A mention builds awareness. A citation sends a session. Tools that only report mentions overstate how well you are doing.
Ask all three in the trial; every vendor answers yes on the marketing page.
How to calculate AI share of voice yourself
The arithmetic is simple enough for a spreadsheet.
Fix a prompt set of 40 to 60 buyer-phrased prompts. Run each one and list every brand named in the answer. Your share of voice is your mentions divided by total brand mentions across the whole set. Record citation rate separately: the share of your mentions that carried a link to your domain.
Two numbers, one prompt set, frozen for a quarter — the same measurement discipline behind our LLMEO execution playbook. That is the entire model these platforms automate.
Share of answer, citation and mention: three ways to measure AI share of voice
Vendors use “AI share of voice” to mean three different numbers, and comparing tools only makes sense once you know which one each reports.
| Metric | What it counts | Answers the question |
|---|---|---|
| Share of answer | How often your brand appears in the answer text for your prompts | Are we part of the conversation? |
| Share of citation | How often your pages are linked as sources | Are we sending traffic and authority? |
| Share of mention | Your mentions as a share of all brand mentions, yours and competitors’ | Who is winning the category? |
Similarweb’s AI search product benchmarks against named competitors by topic and engine, and SEO suites such as Semrush now report share of voice next to classic rankings. Published benchmarks, such as category leaders holding around 28 to 35 percent share of voice, come from vendors’ own data, so use them as rough reference points and track your own trend instead.
What one tracked prompt costs, and what the next one costs
Competitor tools are sold on features but billed on prompts, so the comparable numbers are price divided by prompt allowance, then the marginal price of the next prompt. Neither is published, so both are computed below from figures the vendors do print.
| Tier | Published inputs | Cost per tracked prompt | Cost of the next prompt |
|---|---|---|---|
| Peec AI Starter | EUR 85 (about $96)/mo, 50 prompts | EUR 85 (about $96) ÷ 50 = EUR 1.70 | (205 − 85) ÷ 100 = EUR 1.20 |
| Peec AI Pro | EUR 205 (about $232)/mo, 150 prompts | EUR 205 (about $232) ÷ 150 = EUR 1.37 | (425 − 205) ÷ 200 = EUR 1.10 |
| Peec AI Advanced | EUR 425 (about $480)/mo, 350 prompts | EUR 425 (about $480) ÷ 350 = EUR 1.21 | — |
| Ahrefs Brand Radar, Select (reported) | $398/mo, 2,500 custom prompt checks | $398 ÷ 2,500 = $0.16 per check | Within the monthly allowance |
| Qwairy Starter | €79 (about $89)/mo, 100 prompts | 79 ÷ 100 = €0.79 | (199 − 79) ÷ 200 = €0.60 |
| Gauge | Prompt allowance not confirmed at the quoted price | Not computable | — |
Read the units before the numbers. An Ahrefs custom prompt check and a Peec daily-tracked prompt are not the same thing, so the sixteen cents means Brand Radar is priced for breadth and Peec for a curated set, not that Ahrefs is ten times cheaper. Inside one vendor the comparison is exact, and the curve bends sharply: Peec’s first fifty prompts cost EUR 1.70 each, prompts 151 to 350 cost EUR 1.10.
A 40 to 60 prompt set sits on the steepest part of every curve, so the entry tier is where you pay most per prompt and where unit price should count for least. Pick the entry tier on the three questions above, and start caring about per-prompt cost once the set passes a hundred.
The tools in detail
Gauge
Built around competitor benchmarking rather than bolted on to it, with daily prompt tracking and citation analysis. The self-serve Growth plan is $599 a month with multi-model coverage across Gemini, Perplexity and Copilot; Enterprise is quoted. Connects to GA4, Search Console and Semrush. Gauge’s pricing page did not load for us in September 2026, so these figures are carried over from August.
Profound
Profound’s pricing page moved to self-serve tiers in June 2026 and withdrew them in mid-September: as read on 11 October 2026 it lists a free seven-day trial and a custom Enterprise plan with up to nine engines. Competitor comparison needs several engines, because one engine is not a share of voice.
Ahrefs Brand Radar
Ahrefs lists Brand Radar AI from $199 a month; trackers report Select Platforms at $398 covering AI Overviews, AI Mode, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Copilot, Gemini and Grok with 2,500 custom prompt checks a month, and All Platforms at $699 with the full organic prompt pool. It requires an Ahrefs base plan from $129, so budget above $300 at minimum.
Semrush SEO + AI Search
Semrush sells AI visibility two ways. Its standalone AI Visibility toolkit is $99 a month per domain billed annually for 25 daily prompts, and the SEO + AI Search pricing page, re-checked on 12 September 2026, lists Starter at $199 a month ($165.17 billed annually) with 50 prompts tracked daily and one domain, Pro+ at $299 ($248.17) with 100 prompts, and Advanced at custom pricing with unlimited prompts. The bundles cost more than the toolkit, so they fit only if you want the SEO tooling too.
Peec AI
Priced by prompt volume, and Peec’s pricing page confirms the tier sizes: Starter EUR 85 (about $96) for 50 prompts, Pro EUR 205 (about $232) for 150, Advanced EUR 425 (about $480) for 350, with 15 per cent off annually. Extra engines are add-ons at roughly EUR 20 (about $23) to 30 each. Prompt-led pricing suits a wide competitor set on a narrow engine list.
Qwairy
Qwairy is a generative engine optimisation platform with competitor benchmarking, AI crawler analytics and Search Console integration, tracking ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini, Copilot, Grok, AI Overviews, Mistral and DeepSeek among ten-plus engines. Its pricing page lists Starter at €79 (about $89) a month (€65 (about $73) annually) with 2,500 credits, Growth at €199 (about $225) with 10,000 and Business at €449 (about $507) with 30,000, with no prompt cap on paid plans.
What competitor data does not tell you
Knowing a rival is named on a prompt where you are not is a diagnosis, not a treatment. The follow-up is always the same: find the pages the engine cited for them, and work out what those pages answer directly that yours answers vaguely.
Our guide to generative engine optimisation covers that page-side work, answer engine optimisation tools covers the wider tooling category, and AI search monitoring tools covers monitoring beyond the competitor angle. When the diagnosis points at one engine in particular, our guide to getting cited in ChatGPT is the narrower fix.
A competitive prompt set that works
Fifteen frozen prompts, split three ways, will out-perform a hundred generated ones.
- Five category prompts with no brand named: “best AI visibility tool for a small team”. This is where a list gets built and you are on it or not.
- Five head-to-head prompts: “[you] vs [rival]” and “[rival] vs [you]”. Order changes the answer, so run both directions and treat the difference as a finding.
- Five displacement prompts: “alternatives to [rival]”. If a rival owns the category, their brand name is a query you can rank inside. The tactics for doing that are set out in our LLM optimisation strategy guide.
- Record who was cited, not only who was named. Log the linked domain on every run — after a month you will have a ranked list of the pages actually standing between you and the answer.
Competitor benchmarking of AI answers: how to read published benchmarks
Industry averages circulate widely in this category and are easy to misuse. AthenaHQ’s State of AI Search 2026 report puts the average brand mention rate at 17.2 percent. A separate 2026 benchmark of 50 B2B SaaS firms by DerivateX reports an average AI Presence Score of 56.9 out of 100, with 44 percent scoring under 50.
Neither figure tells you whether your own number is good. Share of voice depends almost entirely on how many brands a typical answer names in your category: where an answer lists three vendors, the leader may hold 30 percent or more; where it lists twelve, the leader may hold far less. Benchmark against the named leader in your own prompt set and against your own previous period. Our guides to AI search monitoring tools and ranking in ChatGPT cover the measurement and the remediation sides, generative engine optimisation explains the discipline the numbers belong to, and optimising for Perplexity deals with the one engine that publishes its sources most openly.
Frequently Asked Questions
What are the best competitor analysis tools for AI search optimization?
Gauge at $599 a month is the most competitor-focused option, and Ahrefs Brand Radar — listed from $199 a month, with a $398 bundle reported — gives the widest surface coverage. Profound is quote-only, Semrush SEO + AI Search from $199, Peec AI from EUR 85 (about $96) for 50 prompts and Qwairy from €79 (about $89) for 2,500 credits. Only compare tools that run your competitors on the same prompts you do.
How do you pick the competitors to track in AI search?
Start with the three to five brands you actually lose deals to, then add any brand the engines already name on your category prompts, even if you never meet it in a sales cycle. Define the list yourself rather than accepting a tool’s domain-similarity suggestions, and keep it fixed for the quarter so share of voice stays comparable.
Can AI competitor analysis tools show which sources an AI engine cites for a competitor?
Yes, where the engine shows citations. Gauge, Ahrefs Brand Radar and Semrush all log the cited URLs and domains behind an answer, so you can see which pages are feeding a competitor’s mentions and go after the same sources. The limit is that citation behaviour varies by engine: Google AI Overviews and Perplexity link heavily, while an assistant answering from parametric memory may name a brand with no source at all. Google’s own documentation on AI features in Search is the reference for how links are surfaced on its surfaces.
How often should you re-run a competitor analysis in AI search?
Let the tool track daily or weekly, but review monthly and re-baseline each quarter. Answers vary between runs, so a single week rarely means anything; a month of samples on a frozen prompt set shows real movement, and the quarterly review is the right point to add or retire prompts and competitors.
How much do AI competitor analysis tools cost?
In September 2026: Gauge from $599 a month on its self-serve Growth plan, Profound quote-only since it withdrew its $99 and $399 tiers, Semrush SEO + AI Search from $199 a month, Peec AI from EUR 85 (about $96), Qwairy from €79 (about $89), and Ahrefs Brand Radar AI from $199 on top of an Ahrefs plan from $129, with $398 and $699 bundles reported.
What is AI search analysis software, and which tools count?
AI search analysis software is any tool that reads what AI answers say about a market, not just about you. Three jobs sit under that label and they are sold separately. Prompt trackers run a fixed question set through ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews and record who was named: Otterly.AI from $29 a month is the cheapest credible one. Citation analysers go further and name the source URL behind each mention, which is the part you can act on, and that is where Gauge at $599 and Qwairy from EUR 79 (about $89) sit. Suite add-ons bolt the same reporting onto an SEO platform you already pay for, as Semrush and Ahrefs do. The distinction that matters when you compare AI search analysis tools is whether the output is a chart or a URL: a chart tells you that you lost, a cited URL tells you which page to go and influence.
How do you measure share of voice inside an AI Overview?
Fix a prompt set, then count. For each prompt, record which brands are named and which are linked, and express your appearances as a share of all brand mentions across the set. Keep the prompt set unchanged between periods and count mentions and citations separately, because an answer can name you without linking to you.
What is a good AI share of voice benchmark?
Published benchmarks vary by source and category. Practitioner guidance commonly treats 10 to 15 percent as solid for an established brand and 25 to 40 percent as market-leading. Because the figure swings with how many brands an answer names, track your own trend against the same competitors rather than chasing an absolute number.
Should you benchmark mentions or citations against competitors?
Both, in separate columns. Mentions show whether engines treat a rival as part of the category; citations show whose pages feed the answer and earn the click. A blended score hides which of those two problems you actually have.
How do you compare AI search optimization tools?
Run the same trial on each: define your own competitor set, check that competitors are measured on your prompts rather than the vendor’s, confirm the tool shows citations and not just mentions, then divide the price by the prompt allowance. Those four checks separate AI search competitive analysis tools far better than feature lists.
Can AI search tools show which prompts make competitors appear instead of you?
Yes, if they run your competitors through the same prompt set as you. Prompt-level reports then show every answer where a rival was named and you were not, and tools that expose citation sources, such as Gauge, Peec AI and Ahrefs Brand Radar, show which pages earned the rival that place.
Can I benchmark against specific competitors instead of industry averages?
Choose a tool that lets you define the competitor set yourself. Tools that pick competitors by domain similarity often report on companies you do not sell against, which makes the share-of-voice figures meaningless for your market.
What is a good AI share of voice?
There is no official benchmark. Vendor data suggests category leaders hold roughly 28 to 35 percent share of voice, but methods differ. Track your own share of answer, citation and mention on a fixed prompt set over time, and compare against the same named competitors.
Conclusion
If competitor comparison is the reason you are buying, Gauge at $599 is the closest fit because benchmarking is the product rather than a tab inside it. Ahrefs Brand Radar earns its reported $398 bundle price when you need seven surfaces and thousands of prompt checks, and Semrush makes sense when the competitor set already lives in your account.
If this sits alongside the rest of a small marketing stack, our round-up of AI tools for marketers covers what else the same budget has to fund. Whatever you pick, insist on two things: you define the competitor list, and competitors run on your prompts. Without both, the share of voice number on the dashboard is a comparison between two different questions.
