Guide

The best AI search visibility and monitoring tools

Compare 9 AI search visibility tools spanning free crawlability checks to brand mention trackers like Profound, Otterly and Peec. Honest pricing and limits.

By Sunny Patel · Updated 2026-08-23

AI search visibility tools tell you how your brand shows up in answers from ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Copilot and Google AI Overviews. The category is new and already crowded. This guide covers what each tool actually does and what it costs where pricing is public.

This guide does not cover normal Google rank tracking. This is not that category. A standard rank tracker such as the ones inside Ahrefs or Semrush covers classic SEO positions. The tools below measure something different: whether AI assistants mention, cite or recommend you when they answer questions.

The category also splits into two distinct jobs. Mixing them up wastes money. Most tools here track brand mentions inside AI answers. They run prompts against the AI engines, record whether you appear, measure your share of voice against competitors and show which pages got cited. That is the reporting layer. The other job comes first: checking whether AI crawlers can read your site at all. GPTBot or PerplexityBot may be blocked in your robots.txt. Your content may also be buried behind rendering and structure problems. A mention tracker reports zeros in both cases without telling you why. Check crawlability first. Decide next if you need paid mention tracking.

sitemap.digital (free crawlability check, not a mention tracker)

sitemap.digital does the prerequisite job rather than the reporting job. It is a free instant scanner with no signup. It crawls your site: 20 pages free, 50 with a free email unlock, and small sites crawled to completion. It scores every page 0 to 100 for AI crawlability. Content quality carries 50 points. Structure, access, metadata and schema make up the rest. It checks your robots.txt against the major AI crawlers including GPTBot, ClaudeBot and PerplexityBot, checks for llms.txt, and finds orphan pages, broken links and click-depth problems. It then generates done-for-you fix files: an llms.txt, robots.txt snippets, schema stubs and redirect maps. You can also compare two sites side by side, rank up to five in a leaderboard, or fire a completion webhook for CI use.

The limit is plain: it does not track brand mentions in AI answers. It tells you whether AI systems can read your site rather than what they say about you. Treat it as the free first step before paying for any tool below. Note the scanner measures robots.txt permission rather than real crawler traffic.

See how your own site scores against these checks.

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Profound

Profound is the enterprise end of mention tracking. It monitors how a brand appears across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and AI Overviews. It measures citations, sentiment and share of voice against competitors. It layers content tools on top of the reporting. It is built for large brands and agencies with budgets to match. Self-serve plans start at 99 dollars a month billed yearly, the Growth plan runs 399 dollars a month for 3 engines and 100 prompts, and third-party reviews put enterprise deployments at 2,000 dollars a month and up. Enterprise teams that need board-level AI visibility reporting get the most from Profound.

Semrush AI Visibility Toolkit

Semrush sells its AI toolkit as an add-on at 99 dollars per domain per month billed annually. The base tier covers 25 prompts, one domain and one user. Extra prompts, domains and users are priced separately. The Semrush One bundle folds it in with the classic SEO toolkit from 199 dollars a month. The obvious fit is teams already inside Semrush who want AI answer tracking in the same dashboard as their existing rank tracking. The 25-prompt base allocation is small. Cost climbs if you track many queries.

Ahrefs Brand Radar

Brand Radar takes a different approach from prompt-by-prompt trackers. It is powered by a large database of search-backed prompts (Ahrefs cites over 346 million monthly prompts) across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and AI Overviews. You can search any brand or topic, see share of voice over time, see which domains get cited most, and cross-reference AI mentions with Ahrefs backlink and search data. It is bundled into standard Ahrefs plans rather than sold separately. Prompt volume scales by tier. Teams already paying for Ahrefs get the most value here. It also suits anyone who wants breadth of prompt data rather than tracking a hand-picked prompt list.

Peec AI

Peec is an AI search analytics platform aimed at marketing teams and agencies. It tracks brand performance across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and other models, lets you compare visibility by model, region or audience, and tracks which sources the engines use at domain and URL level. Pricing starts at 95 euros a month for 50 prompts and three models. Higher tiers run 245 and 495 with add-on engines priced separately. Agency plans exist for multi-brand tracking. Agencies that need clean per-client AI visibility reporting get the most value here.

Otterly.AI

Otterly is one of the more affordable entry points into mention tracking. The Lite plan is 29 dollars a month for 15 search prompts, Standard is 189 dollars for 100 prompts and Premium is 489 dollars for 400. Every plan includes ChatGPT, AI Overviews, Perplexity and Copilot. Some engines are sold as add-ons. Every tier gets unlimited seats and daily tracking. A 7-day free trial is included. Small teams and solo marketers who want to track a shortlist of prompts without a large commitment get the most value here.

ZipTie.dev

ZipTie was built by the team behind Onely. Onely is a well-known technical SEO agency. It monitors AI Overviews, ChatGPT and Perplexity using real browser automation. This captures the actual rendered answer, the inline citations and a screenshot of what a user would see. It then turns visibility gaps into page-level content briefs. Pricing starts at 69 dollars a month with a Pro tier at 159 dollars and a 14-day free trial. SEO practitioners who want evidence of exactly what the AI answer showed rather than an API-derived approximation get the most value here.

Knowatoa

Knowatoa is the rare mention tracker with a genuinely useful free plan: 0 dollars gets you unlimited sites, 10 tracked questions, unlimited seats and the ChatGPT engine. Paid tiers run from 59 dollars a month up to a 749 dollar agency plan with up to 1,500 questions across all major engines. Its AI Search Console feature also checks whether firewalls or security plugins are actively blocking AI crawlers. This overlaps slightly with the crawlability job. Anyone who wants to start mention tracking at zero cost and scale up only if the data proves useful gets the most value here.

HubSpot AI Search Grader

HubSpot's AI Search Grader is a free one-time diagnostic rather than an ongoing tracker. You enter your brand. It returns a snapshot of how ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity currently represent you. The snapshot scores sentiment, share of voice and brand recognition. No account or card is required. It will not monitor changes over time. Treat it as a quick baseline check before deciding whether continuous tracking is worth paying for. HubSpot sells an ongoing AEO product separately.

How to choose

Match the tool to your situation rather than buying the biggest platform.

  • Just starting: check crawlability free first. Run a sitemap.digital scan and fix any robots.txt blocks, missing llms.txt or structure problems before spending anything. Use Knowatoa's free plan or the HubSpot grader next to see if AI engines mention you at all.
  • Small site or solo marketer: Otterly at 29 dollars or Knowatoa at 59 dollars covers a shortlist of prompts without a heavy commitment.
  • Agency reporting: Peec or ZipTie give per-client dashboards and evidence you can put in front of clients. Clients already on Ahrefs or Semrush keep everything in one login with Brand Radar or the Semrush toolkit.
  • Enterprise: you need both jobs done. Use Profound or Brand Radar for breadth of mention data. Add a crawlability audit in CI so a bad deploy never silently blocks AI crawlers. sitemap.digital's completion webhook exists for exactly that.

This category moves fast and prices change often. Confirm current pricing on each vendor's site before buying. Any tracker you pick can only report on what AI systems can read. Crawlability is the floor everything else stands on.

Frequently asked questions

What is AI search visibility?

AI search visibility is how often and how favourably your brand or site appears in answers generated by AI assistants such as ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Copilot and Google AI Overviews. It covers whether you get mentioned, whether your pages get cited as sources, and how you compare with competitors for the same questions. It is measured differently from classic SEO rankings because AI answers are generated per query rather than listed as ten blue links.

How do I track my brand in ChatGPT?

Use a mention tracking tool that runs prompts against ChatGPT and records the answers. Knowatoa tracks ChatGPT on its free plan. Otterly includes it from 29 dollars a month. Platforms like Peec, ZipTie, Profound, Semrush and Ahrefs Brand Radar track it alongside other engines. You define the questions your customers ask. The tool runs them on a schedule. You see whether your brand appears and which pages get cited.

Are there free AI visibility tools?

Yes. sitemap.digital scans your site free with no signup and shows whether AI crawlers can read it. This includes robots.txt access and llms.txt checks. Knowatoa has a free plan that tracks 10 questions in ChatGPT. HubSpot's AI Search Grader gives a free one-time snapshot of how AI engines represent your brand. Free tools cover the basics well. Paid tools mainly add more prompts, more engines and tracking over time.

What is the difference between AI crawlability and AI mention tracking?

Crawlability is whether AI systems can access and read your site: robots.txt permissions for bots like GPTBot and PerplexityBot, page structure, metadata and llms.txt. Mention tracking is whether AI answers actually talk about your brand once they have read the web. Crawlability is the prerequisite. Mention trackers just show you absent from answers without explaining the cause when crawlers are blocked.

What is llms.txt?

llms.txt is a proposed plain-text file placed at the root of a website that gives AI systems a curated summary of the site and its most important pages. It is not an official standard yet. Support varies across AI companies. It costs nothing to add. Scanners like sitemap.digital check for its presence and can generate one for you.

Do AI search visibility tools replace normal rank tracking?

No. They measure a different surface. Your Google rankings still drive most search traffic today. AI visibility tools do not report classic positions. Most teams run both: a standard rank tracker for organic search plus an AI visibility tool for assistant answers. Ahrefs and Semrush now bundle both jobs in one subscription if you prefer a single platform.

See how your own site scores against these checks.

Scan your site