| Quick answer |
|---|
| The best tools for tracking brand visibility in AI search results are Otterly.AI from $29 a month for small teams, Peec AI from about €85 for mid-market, and Profound at enterprise scale. Pick on how many engines the base plan tracks and how often the data refreshes. |
How this comparison works: tools are ranked on engine coverage in the base plan, published pricing, and whether the vendor states a refresh interval. Figures were checked against vendor pages and third-party pricing round-ups in September 2026. 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. Nothing here is a paid placement, and no vendor was given a review copy.
Table of Contents
Best tools for tracking brand visibility in AI search results compared
| Tool | Entry price | Engines on the base plan | Free option |
|---|---|---|---|
| Otterly.AI | $29/mo (Lite) | Four: ChatGPT, AI Overviews, Perplexity, Copilot. 15 prompts | No free plan reported |
| Peec AI | from ~€85/mo | Main assistants; several engines sold per-engine | Trial only |
| Profound | ~$99/mo (Starter) | ChatGPT only. Three engines on Growth (~$399/mo) | Demo only |
| Scrunch AI | $250/mo (Starter, billed yearly) | Seven engines, 350 prompts | 7-day trial, no card |
| AthenaHQ | $295/mo Starter; free tier | Broad coverage plus source-level citation data | Demo only |
| Semrush AI Toolkit | ~$99/mo add-on | Narrower than purpose-built trackers | With suite trial |
| Ahrefs Brand Radar | From $199/mo add-on, plus an Ahrefs plan | Mentions across the main assistants | Limited free view |
The number that decides your bill
Prompts tracked, not engines covered, is what you are actually buying. Otterly’s $29 Lite plan includes 15 tracked prompts; overages run at roughly $99 per 100 extra prompts. Profound’s Starter tier is cheap because it watches one engine. Otterly, and several competitors, bill Google AI Mode, Gemini and Claude as add-ons on every tier, so the advertised price and the invoice rarely match.
Work it out in this order: list the prompts a buyer would realistically type, count them, decide which engines matter, then price only that. A 40-prompt programme across two engines is a different product from a 15-prompt programme across six, and the second one is not automatically better.
A tracking method you can run without a subscription
Before you buy anything, run this manually for two weeks. It costs nothing, and it tells you whether a paid tracker would show you something you cannot already see. Every tool in the table above is an automated version of exactly this loop.
- Build a 15-prompt set. Five category prompts (“best X for Y”), five comparison prompts (“A vs B”), three problem prompts (“how do I fix Z”), two brand prompts (“is [your brand] any good”). Write them down once and never edit them mid-quarter — a changed prompt set destroys your trend line.
- Run each prompt in a fresh session. Signed out, no chat history, one engine at a time. Personalisation and memory will otherwise quietly flatter you.
- Record four columns per run: date, engine, brand named yes or no, and the domains actually cited. The cited-domains column is the one that pays for itself — it names the pages you have to outrank.
- Repeat every prompt three times. Answers vary between runs on identical input. One run tells you nothing; three runs tell you whether an absence is real or noise.
- Score weekly, on the same weekday. Presence rate is mentions divided by total runs. Share of voice is your mentions divided by mentions of you plus your two named competitors.
Two weeks of this produces a baseline no vendor dashboard can hand you, because it is built from your prompts rather than the vendor’s defaults. It also exposes the single biggest weakness of the category: run-to-run variance. If your presence rate swings ten points between identical runs, a tool reporting a single weekly number is smoothing over the thing you most need to see.
The seven trackers, one by one
Otterly.AI
Cheapest credible tracker. The $29 Lite plan covers 15 tracked prompts across four engines — ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity and Microsoft Copilot — with unlimited seats and daily tracking. Google AI Mode, Gemini and Claude are billed as add-ons on every tier, and extra prompts are sold in blocks of 100 at $99. Otterly’s pricing page lists Standard at $189 a month for 100 prompts and Premium at $489 for 400, with 15% off annual billing (checked 12 September 2026).
Peec AI
European mid-market tracker starting around €85 per month, aimed at teams running large prompt sets rather than a handful of head terms. Peec’s pricing page lists four tiers — Starter (50 prompts, three models, one project), Pro (150 prompts), Advanced (350 prompts, plus multi-country and Looker Studio) and Enterprise, which unlocks up to 12 models — all with unlimited users and daily tracking. The euro figures render in-browser rather than in the page source, so confirm the current amount on the page before budgeting.
Profound
The enterprise reference point. Profound’s pricing page shows Starter at $99 a month billed yearly, tracking ChatGPT only across 50 prompts; Growth at $399 widens that to three answer engines and 100 prompts; and Enterprise reaches up to nine engines with SSO/SAML and SOC 2 (checked 12 September 2026).
Scrunch AI
Starter is $250 a month billed annually ($300 monthly) for 350 custom prompts and three seats, per Scrunch’s pricing page. Scrunch was acquired by Sitecore in June 2026 and now sits inside a wider digital experience suite.
AthenaHQ
Starter is $295 a month for 3,600 credits, with a free Essential tier of 300 credits and quoted Enterprise pricing. Positioned around source intelligence — which specific URLs an engine draws on for a prompt — rather than mention counting alone.
Semrush AI Toolkit
A toolkit from an established SEO suite, listed at $99 a month per domain billed annually, or bundled into Semrush’s SEO + AI Search plans. Convenient if the rest of your reporting already lives there; narrower than purpose-built trackers.
Ahrefs Brand Radar
Brand Radar AI is listed from $199 a month on top of an Ahrefs plan from $129, with a limited free view. Useful if Ahrefs is already your backlink and keyword tool, since brand mentions sit next to the organic data rather than in a separate dashboard.
What a tracker will not tell you
These brand monitoring platforms measure; almost none of them fix. A dashboard showing that a competitor is cited on a prompt where you are absent is useful exactly once — after that it is a recurring bill for the same bad news. Closing the gap is page work: a direct answer in the first 50 words, a heading phrased as the question, specifics that survive being quoted out of context, and markup a crawler can read.
Our guide to AI search monitoring tools covers the wider monitoring category, and ranking in Google AI Overviews covers the page-side work these trackers can only measure. If you are picking a first subscription, answer engine optimization tools compares the optimisation side rather than the monitoring side.
Frequently Asked Questions
What are the best tools for tracking brand visibility in AI search results?
Otterly.AI at $29 a month is the cheapest credible tracker, Peec AI from about €85 suits mid-market teams, and Profound is the enterprise reference point. AthenaHQ ($295), Scrunch (around $250) and Ahrefs Brand Radar sit between them. Choose on base-plan engine coverage and refresh frequency, not headline price.
Can you track brand visibility in AI search for free?
Yes, by hand. Build a 15-prompt set, run each prompt three times in a fresh signed-out session, and log the date, engine, whether you were named and which domains were cited. Two weeks of that gives you a baseline; buy a tracker when doing it by hand costs more time than the $29 a month an entry plan costs.
Why does the same prompt give different AI answers?
Because answer engines sample: identical input can produce a different list of brands on each run, and location, personalisation and chat history shift it further. Run every prompt three times and report a presence rate rather than a single yes or no, or you will mistake noise for a trend.
What should a brand visibility report include?
Three numbers and one list: presence rate (mentions divided by runs), share of voice against your named competitors, citation rate (answers that link to you), and the domains each engine cited. The cited-domains list is the actionable part, because it names the pages you need to appear on or outrank.
Which AI engines should brand teams track first?
Track ChatGPT and Google AI Overviews first — between them they cover most of the assistant traffic reaching business sites. Add Google AI Mode and Perplexity next, and Gemini if your audience is Android-heavy or Workspace-based. Grok, Claude and Meta AI are usually add-ons you can skip until a real referral shows up in your analytics.
Do AI trackers see personalised answers?
Mostly no. Trackers run clean, signed-out sessions so results stay comparable, which means they report the default answer rather than what a logged-in buyer with chat history sees. Treat tracker data as the baseline and your own signed-in spot checks as the personalised view.
Conclusion
Run the 15-prompt method by hand for two weeks first. If it shows you nothing you did not already suspect, you do not need a subscription yet. If it shows competitors cited on prompts you assumed you owned, start with Otterly at $29, move to Peec when the prompt set outgrows 15 entries, and consider Profound or AthenaHQ only when someone is asking for share of voice in a board pack.
Whatever you buy, insist on two numbers before signing: how often the data refreshes, and how many prompts are included before overages start. Those two decide both the invoice and whether the tracking is fast enough to attribute a change you made.
