All five tools track whether AI assistants mention your brand and which sources they rely on. They differ in depth, coverage and price: Profound is built for large teams that need daily tracking across many countries, Otterly.AI and Peec AI are dedicated AI search monitors, Semrush adds AI visibility to its SEO suite from $99 a month, and Ahrefs Brand Radar checks your brand against a very large shared prompt database.
None of them gets you named. They measure. If your site is hard for assistants to find, a dashboard will show you a zero but will not tell you why, and the underlying work has to be done before any number moves.
Which GEO tools do AI assistants name most often?
We compared these five because the assistants chose them. On 21 October 2026 we put 20 English and 20 German questions about getting a business into AI answers to ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity, three times each. In the English answers, Profound was named in 12 answers, Semrush in 9, Otterly.AI and Peec AI in 8 each, and Ahrefs in 7.
There is a caveat. In the same measurement, most of the cited sources were the blogs of GEO agencies and tool vendors, and ahrefs.com was among the most cited domains in English answers. Vendors who write well about their own category tend to show up in answers about it. That says nothing bad about the tools. It does mean that 'the assistant recommended it' partly reflects the vendors' own content work.
The vendors don't even share a name for the category. Wikipedia notes that Semrush markets its tools as 'AI SEO' and 'AI Visibility', while Peec AI calls itself an 'AI search analytics' tool. Under different labels they do broadly the same job: run prompts through assistants and count who gets mentioned and cited.
What does each tool actually track?
Profound
Profound describes itself as tracking all major AI engines daily on real front-end data across more than 50 countries, with visibility analytics paired with agent-driven workflows. Front-end data means what a user sees in the assistant's interface, not only what an API returns. That distinction matters because the two can differ.
Strengths: daily cadence, wide country coverage, and workflows that go beyond reporting. Limits: no price is published on the page we used, so expect a sales conversation. Daily data across 50 countries is also more than a business serving one city or one market can act on.
Peec AI
Peec AI positions itself as an AI search analytics tool. The sources we used for this page do not include its official pricing or its list of covered engines, so check both on its own site before you shortlist it. Assistants named it as often as Otterly.AI in our measurement, which suggests they treat it as a mainstream option in the category.
Otterly.AI
Otterly.AI lets you define prompts that mirror real user queries. It runs them automatically across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, AI Mode, Gemini and Copilot, and reports which brands get cited, how often and in what context.
Strengths: you control the prompts, and coverage includes Google's AI surfaces and Copilot. Limits: the results are only as good as the prompts you write. Claude is not in the engine list on that page. Pricing is not in our sources.
Semrush AI Visibility Toolkit
Semrush's Base AI Visibility Toolkit starts at $99 a month per domain, billed annually. It includes 25 custom prompts with daily AI rankings and mentions from ChatGPT, Google AI, Gemini and Perplexity.
Strengths: a published price, and if you already use Semrush for SEO, the AI data sits next to your keyword data. Limits: 25 prompts is a small sample of what buyers ask. Per-domain pricing also adds up quickly for agencies and multi-brand companies.
Ahrefs Brand Radar
Ahrefs Brand Radar draws on a database of over 250 million prompts. It shows where a brand appears across AI platforms, search engines, web pages and other channels, and which sources AI models select to build their answers.
Strengths: breadth. You see mentions on prompts you would never have thought to write. You also see the source sites behind answers, which tells you where you need to be mentioned. Limits: prompts from a shared database are not your buyers' exact questions. Pricing is not in our sources.
How do the five compare side by side?
| Tool | What it tracks | Engines named on its page | Published pricing (in our sources) | Best suited to |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Profound | Daily visibility on real front-end data, 50+ countries, agent-driven workflows | 'All major AI engines' | Not published on the page we used | Larger brands in many markets with a team to act on daily data |
| Peec AI | AI search analytics (self-description) | Not covered in our sources | Not covered in our sources | Teams wanting a dedicated tool; verify engines and price directly |
| Otterly.AI | Your own prompts, run automatically; which brands are cited, how often, in what context | ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, AI Mode, Gemini, Copilot | Not covered in our sources | Marketers who want to write their own prompts and cover Google's AI surfaces and Copilot |
| Semrush AI Visibility Toolkit | 25 custom prompts (Base), daily AI rankings and mentions | ChatGPT, Google AI, Gemini, Perplexity | From $99/month per domain, billed annually | Existing Semrush users who want AI data next to SEO data |
| Ahrefs Brand Radar | Brand presence across 250M+ prompts, plus the sources models select | AI platforms, search engines, web pages, other channels | Not covered in our sources | Teams that want to discover unknown mentions and the sites assistants cite |
What should you know before trusting any GEO dashboard?
Answers vary from ask to ask. Ask an assistant the same question three times and it often names different businesses. We count a business as named for a question if any of three asks names it, and we compare weeks only on the same questions with the same number of asks. Ask any vendor how many times each prompt runs and how they handle that variance. Our article on measuring AI visibility over time goes into the method.
Many questions trigger no search at all. In a 23 September 2026 test of 20 German business questions, the model answered 10 without searching and cited nobody. Firms were named only on 'who should I hire / how to choose' questions. If you track mostly informational prompts, any tool will show near-zero brand mentions however good your site is. Choose prompts where a recommendation is the natural answer.
Traffic won't confirm the numbers. In about two weeks of logs from three of our course websites, human visitors arriving from AI assistants totalled one, from Copilot. Assistants mostly answer in place. Server logs are a better signal: in the same fortnight, one client blog of a few dozen articles received 56 live retrieval fetches (ChatGPT-User, OAI-SearchBot, Perplexity-User) across 24 articles. More on this in does AI search send traffic to websites.
Raw measurement is cheap. At October 2026 API prices, a report of 20 questions across four assistants with three asks each costs us about $5.40. When you pay for a tool, you are paying for the interface, history, competitor views and prompt discovery, not for the API calls. That is worth knowing when you compare plans.
When is a tool enough, and when do you need the work done?
A tool is enough when three things are true. You are already named sometimes. Your site is crawlable and indexed. And someone on your team can turn the gaps the tool shows into new pages and outreach.
You need the work done when the dashboard shows zeros and nobody knows why. These are causes we have seen in our own data:
- Crawlers blocked by accident. On itgrows.ai, a robots.txt rule meant to hide one redirect page (/b) was written as a prefix. From 11 August to 21 October 2026 it also closed /blog, /business and every article in our business blog to all crawlers. We changed it to /b$ on 21 October 2026.
- Too little surface. A site with complete markup but only 75 URLs was absent from answers on its own article's exact topic. A site with about 190,000 crawlable URLs was crawled constantly.
- Indexed is not findable. On 19 October 2026 we asked assistants for the exact titles of 18 client articles, each older than three weeks. ChatGPT found 1 of 18 and Claude found 7 of 18, while Google had indexed 29 of 30 articles on one of those sites.
On 21 October 2026 ItGrows was named in 0 of 160 answers to questions about our own field (the full write-up). A tracker would have shown that zero. It would not have found the robots.txt rule.
That gap is where ItGrows works. We publish articles on your own domain that answer the questions your buyers ask. We fix crawler access and indexing (robots.txt, sitemaps, Bing and Google indexing, IndexNow). Every week we put your buyer questions to ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity, three times each, and count the answers that name you and the sites they cite. It costs $499 a month (plus a one-time $499 setup, free with 3 months or a year). Nobody can guarantee that an assistant will name a business, and we don't. As reported by the clients themselves, FreightSizer got 2 new B2B customers in one month from ChatGPT, and appslift gets 2 to 5 leads a month from AI assistants.
What should you do next?
- Run the free check at itgrows.ai. It generates five buyer questions from your homepage and shows within about 30 seconds whether ChatGPT and Perplexity name you.
- Write 10 to 20 questions your buyers really ask, weighted towards 'who should I use' and 'how do I choose'. Our guide to checking whether AI assistants mention your business shows how.
- Check your robots.txt for prefix rules, and check Bing Webmaster Tools for pages that are 'discovered but not crawled'.
- Then pick a tool by fit. Choose Semrush if you already live in it. Choose Ahrefs Brand Radar for source discovery, Otterly.AI for engine breadth including Copilot and AI Mode, and Profound for multi-market tracking at scale. For Peec AI, verify its engines and price first.
Frequently Asked Questions
Which of these GEO tools is cheapest?
Of the five, only Semrush's price appears in the sources we used: $99 a month per domain, billed annually, for 25 prompts. For the others, check the vendor's current pricing. As a reference point, a do-it-yourself report of 20 questions across four assistants with three asks each costs about $5.40 in API fees.
Do these tools track Claude?
Not all of them. The engine lists on the Otterly.AI and Semrush pages we used do not include Claude, while Profound says it covers all major engines. Check before buying if Claude matters to you: on 20 October 2026, for an orthopaedic practice in Bonn, Claude named the practice more often than the other three assistants.
Can a GEO tool make ChatGPT recommend my business?
No. These tools measure whether and where you are mentioned. Getting mentioned depends on crawlable pages that answer buyers' questions and on the sources assistants cite, and nobody can guarantee the outcome.
How often should I check AI visibility?
Weekly is enough for most small and mid-sized businesses, as long as you keep the same questions and the same number of asks each week. Answers vary between asks, so daily swings on a few prompts are mostly noise. The trend across a fixed set of questions is what tells you something.