The Best AI Visibility & Citation Monitoring Tools, Compared (2026)

A new category of software has appeared in the last two years: tools that tell you whether ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini recommend your business. We build one of them, so treat this as an interested party's guide, but an honest one. Below is a sourced, side-by-side look at the main options, including where each is stronger than CitePulse, so you can choose the right fit rather than the loudest pitch.

What these tools actually do

AI assistants increasingly answer buying questions directly ("best B2B accounting firm in Austin," "top project-management software for agencies") and name a short list of companies. If you are not on that list, you are invisible to a fast-growing slice of demand, and it leaves almost no trace in your analytics. AI-visibility tools exist to make that blind spot measurable: they send real queries to AI engines, record which brands get cited, and track how that changes over time. Think of it as rank tracking for the answer era. For the background on why this matters, see what answer engine optimization is.

They differ on four things that actually affect your decision: how you get your first result (free and instant, or signup and sales call), how many AI engines they query and how often, price and whether it is transparent, and whether agencies can white-label the reports. We compare on exactly those.

The comparison at a glance

Facts below are drawn from each vendor's public pricing page (linked in the sources, re-checked 9 September 2026) and from independent 2026 reviews (first collected in June 2026), with sources listed at the end. The AI-visibility category changes its pricing often, so verify the current terms with each vendor before you buy. Where public information conflicts or is unclear, we say so rather than guess.

Tool	Free first result?	Entry price	AI engines (per public sources)	Agency white-label
CitePulse	Yes: no signup, no card	Free audit; $39 one-time; $89–$349/mo	ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude, Grok (each ×3)	Yes: Scale $349, up to 10 clients
Otterly.AI	Trial, no card, signup required	~$25–29/mo	ChatGPT, Perplexity, AI Overviews, Copilot	Not publicly confirmed
Profound	No: paid access	$99/mo Starter, self-serve; $399/mo Growth; Enterprise via demo	ChatGPT only on Starter (50 prompts); 3 engines on Growth; up to 9 on Enterprise	Agency plan; white-label not confirmed
Peec AI	Conflicting reports	~$95/mo (€85)	ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Copilot, AI Overviews	Agency plans; white-label not confirmed
Knowatoa	Free audit / free tier	$59/mo	ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude, AI Overviews, Meta	Agency tier; white-label not confirmed
Are You Found by AI	Yes – free scan, no signup, no card (2 questions, 2 engines)	Free scan; $29 one-time; $79/mo	ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude, Grok, DeepSeek, AI Overviews (7)	Not publicly confirmed

Head-to-head? See CitePulse vs Otterly.AI, Profound, Peec AI and Knowatoa.

Where each tool is strong

Profound is the enterprise-leaning choice, but it is no longer sales-gated at the bottom: its pricing page (checked 9 September 2026) sells a $99/month Starter self-serve, limited to ChatGPT and 50 tracked prompts, a $399/month Growth plan with three engines and 100 prompts, and an Enterprise tier behind a demo with up to nine engines, SSO and SOC 2. Its real strength is analytics depth (prompt-volume data, agent analytics, integrations). If you want the full engine set or agency features, expect the Enterprise conversation.

Peec AI and Knowatoa lead on raw engine breadth. Knowatoa's public materials describe coverage spanning ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude, Google AI Overviews and Meta AI, and it offers a free audit. Peec covers five engines and prices in EUR as well as USD. If your single most important criterion is "track the largest possible number of AI surfaces," Knowatoa in particular still covers more engines than CitePulse (it adds Meta AI).

Otterly.AI is the cheapest way in, with a Lite plan in the mid-$20s and a 14-day trial that does not require a card. For a solo marketer who wants a low-commitment way to start watching a handful of prompts, it is a reasonable entry point.

Are You Found by AI is the newest entrant and leads on engine breadth and agent access. It queries seven engines (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude, Grok, DeepSeek and Google AI Overviews), keeps every reply verbatim, and records the web searches each engine ran before it answered. It also exposes its measurement as an MCP endpoint, so AI agents can read the same context directly, and it publishes its scoring and evals openly. Like CitePulse, its first scan is free with no signup and no card, though the free tier is narrower at two questions on two engines. If maximum engine count and agent-native access are your priorities, it belongs on your shortlist.

We are telling you this because a comparison page that claims its author wins on every axis is not credible, and credibility is the whole point of a tool that audits credibility.

Where CitePulse is different

You get a real result before you give anything. Most tools in this category put your first number behind a signup, a trial, or a sales call. CitePulse runs a genuine audit from the public site: enter a domain, get an AI Reputation Score across ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini in about 30 seconds, with no account and no card. Knowatoa and the newer Are You Found by AI are the closest on this; the others gate the first result. CitePulse's free audit reads three engines (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini) against two on Are You Found by AI's free scan, and both ask for no signup and no card. That matters because the hardest part of fixing AI invisibility is simply seeing it, and a paywall in front of the diagnosis keeps most businesses blind.

We measure the answer, not the page. CitePulse does not score your HTML and infer how AI "should" see you. It sends the real buying questions in your industry to the live models and reads what they actually say: whether your domain is cited, the verbatim claims AI makes about you, and the competitors named in your place. Each query is repeated three times to smooth out the natural variance in model responses, so the score is stable rather than a single lucky or unlucky sample. We would rather query a focused set of engines carefully than report one noisy reading across ten.

Monitoring is self-serve and transparent. Shield ($89/mo), Protect ($169/mo) and Scale ($349/mo) are self-serve, in USD, cancel-anytime from your dashboard, with no "contact us for a quote," no demo required to start. The audit stays free, and the one-time Full Audit is $39.

Agencies can genuinely white-label. The Scale plan ($349/mo) puts client reports under your brand (your logo and colors) across up to ten client domains, with a multi-client dashboard, API access and per-client AI Verified Badges. Several competitors sell "agency" plans, but we could not find a public commitment to true white-label branding from the tools above; CitePulse states it plainly.

The honest trade-off

CitePulse queries ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini on the free audit, adds Claude on the Full Audit and Grok on the higher tiers (up to five assistants) with Google AI Overviews read as a source, and repeats each query for stability. A couple of competitors cover more surfaces: Knowatoa adds Meta AI, and Are You Found by AI reads seven engines including DeepSeek. If your buyers live primarily inside those, weigh it. Our bet is that for most B2B and local-service businesses, the engines we cover are where the buying research actually happens, and that a stable, repeated score is more useful than a single-shot reading across a longer list. That is the real trade: depth and a free, honest starting point, versus maximum engine count.

How to choose in one minute

• You just want to know where you stand, today, for free: run a no-signup CitePulse audit (or Knowatoa's free audit).
• You are an agency that needs client-ready, branded reports: CitePulse Scale offers confirmed white-label at $349/mo.
• You are an enterprise wanting a managed GEO program: shortlist Profound and Peec AI.
• You want the widest engine count or agent-native (MCP) access: look at Are You Found by AI (seven engines) or Knowatoa (adds Meta AI).
• You want the lowest possible monthly cost to watch a few prompts: Otterly.AI's Lite plan.

See also: weekly AI visibility monitoring · honest comparisons with other AI-visibility tools · CitePulse for agencies.