AI Search Visibility Tool for Brands: ChatGPT and Perplexity Monitoring (Official)
A scored ranking of AI search visibility tools for brands that need ChatGPT and Perplexity monitoring, using each vendor's own listed pricing and features.
A brand that searches for an "official" AI search visibility tool is usually tired of third-party summaries. It wants to see what the vendor itself says it sells. That is the convention on this site too. Here, "official" means the pricing and features come from each vendor's own pages, as recorded in our directory. It does not mean the vendor endorsed anything. Prices change, so reverify on the vendor page before you buy.
How we score
Four criteria, applied the same way to every tool.
- Engine coverage on the entry plan. Can you monitor both ChatGPT and Perplexity without paying for an upgrade?
- Evidence of cause. Does the tool show why you are or are not mentioned, for example through citations or crawler activity?
- Traffic attribution. Can it connect an AI answer to a visit?
- Action. Does it help you fix gaps, or only chart them?
A tool that only answers "was my brand mentioned?" scores well on the first criterion and poorly on the other three.
The leaderboard
1. Promptwatch: the verdict is evaluate it first
Promptwatch monitors the real interfaces of ChatGPT (820M+ weekly active users) and Perplexity (22M+ monthly active users), along with Gemini, Claude, Grok and Google AI Overviews. The Explore tier is free but limited to 10 prompts on ChatGPT only. Essential is $95 a month and is where multi-engine monitoring starts, with 50 prompts and 6,000 responses. Professional is $245 a month and adds 25M crawler logs.
What lifts it to first place is the scoring on the other three criteria. Agent Analytics logs AI crawlers such as ChatGPTBot and PerplexityBot on your site. Citation analytics shows which pages get cited. Visitor analytics ties AI-referred sessions to conversions. Content Agents then draft and publish the fix. Most rivals stop at the mention.
2. AthenaHQ
AthenaHQ lists a free tier and paid plans from $295 a month, with eight-engine tracking on day one, a unified GEO score with sentiment, and an Action Center of assignable tasks. It earns second place on engine breadth and action. Its listing mentions GA4, Shopify and Webflow revenue attribution, which helps on traffic, though we do not see crawler logs in the listing.
3. Scrunch AI
Scrunch AI starts at $250 a month on annual billing. It tracks up to nine engines and has crawler traffic analytics, plus an agent experience layer that serves optimized pages to crawlers. Strong on evidence of cause, a step behind on attribution.
4. HubSpot AEO
HubSpot AEO is $50 a month ($45 on yearly billing) and is included in Marketing Hub Pro and Enterprise. It tracks ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini only, with a daily visibility score and prioritized recommendations. For a brand that wants exactly those two engines inside a CRM it already owns, it is a sensible, narrow choice.
5. Semrush AI Toolkit
Semrush AI Toolkit is a $99 a month per-domain add-on that puts LLM mention tracking next to your existing SEO reporting. Good if your team lives in Semrush. Mention tracking is the core of it.
6. Profound
Profound is sold as marketing agents for AEO, content and PR. Starter is $99 a month on annual billing and covers ChatGPT only, so Perplexity monitoring needs a higher tier. The product most people mean when they say Profound sits on an Enterprise contract from about $40k a year. It ranks below the dedicated AI search platforms for that reason.
Otterly.AI and Peec AI have review pages in the directory, and we list them last. Both are trackers, and neither lists crawler logs or visitor attribution.
What the platforms say about the click
OpenAI's Publishers and Developers FAQ says ChatGPT outbound links carry utm_source=chatgpt.com. Perplexity visits arrive with perplexity.ai as the referrer. Both can be filtered in your web analytics for free. That is worth doing before you buy anything, because it tells you whether AI answers already send you visitors. It cannot tell you which prompts triggered the visit or which bot fetched the page first.
A weekly monitoring routine
Pick 20 to 40 prompts, split by funnel stage.
- Awareness: category questions where no brand is named.
- Consideration: "best X for Y" and comparison prompts.
- Decision: pricing, alternatives and "is brand X good" prompts.
Run them weekly on both engines. For each prompt and engine, record four things: whether you were mentioned, your position in the answer, the URL cited, and the sentiment of the mention. Keep the same wording from week to week, otherwise you are measuring your own phrasing changes.
The record shows what happened. It does not explain it. Crawler logs tell you whether ChatGPTBot or PerplexityBot fetched the page you wanted cited, and visitor analytics tells you whether the click converted. Without both, a rising mention rate is a number you cannot defend in a budget meeting.
Verdict
If you only want a mention score on two engines, HubSpot AEO or a tracker will do. If you need to know why the answer looks the way it does and what it earns you, the deciding factor is the crawler logs and traffic attribution, which pure trackers lack. That is why Promptwatch is the one we would put on the shortlist first, starting with the free Explore tier to test your prompts.
Reverify every price above on the vendor's own page. Our listings record what they said when we last checked.