A new category of software has appeared in the last two years: tools that ask AI models questions about your market, over and over, and chart how often your brand comes up. Profound, Peec AI and Otterly.AI are the names that come up most, alongside AthenaHQ, Scrunch, Goodie, and AI add-ons from SEO suites such as Semrush, Ahrefs and SE Ranking.
They're useful. They're also often bought before the team knows what it would do with the numbers. Here's how to tell whether you need a tool, an audit, or both.
What the tools do
The core job is the same across the category:
- You enter the questions (prompts) that matter to you.
- The tool runs them regularly across several AI models.
- It records whether you're mentioned, how you're described, and which sources are cited.
- It charts the results over time, usually against competitors you choose.
Where they differ is scale and depth. Enterprise platforms run very large prompt samples across many models, regions and languages, with integrations for big teams. Mid-market tools focus on a clean dashboard for a marketing team. Entry-level tools cover the main models for a small monthly fee and charge extra for more.
Prices change often and range from a few dozen to several hundred a month at the lower tiers, with enterprise pricing on request. Check each vendor's site for current plans rather than trusting a comparison article, including this one.
What the tools don't do
A tracking tool tells you that you're named in 12% of answers. It won't tell you:
- Why. Which specific threads, reviews or articles are shaping the answer, and what they say.
- What to do first. Whether the fastest gain is your review rating, a forum, a reference page or your own site.
- Whether you qualify for things. A Wikipedia page, for example, depends on independent coverage, which no dashboard assesses.
- The work itself. Someone still has to earn the reviews, join the conversations and fix the inaccurate facts.
That's not a criticism. Measurement is a different job from diagnosis, and both are different from doing the work.
When a tool is the right first step
A tool makes sense first if most of these are true:
- You already know which sources shape the answer in your category.
- Someone on the team has time every week to act on what it shows.
- You need to monitor many questions, products, markets or languages.
- You report to people who want a trend line.
When an audit is the right first step
An audit makes more sense first if:
- You don't yet know what AI says about you, or why.
- You're deciding whether to invest at all, and how much.
- You need a plan, ranked by effort and impact, more than a chart.
- You want to know what your competitors are doing that you aren't.
An audit is a one-off piece of work: a fixed question set, put to several models, with every answer traced back to its sources and turned into a plan. You can then decide whether to run that plan yourselves, with help, or with a tool watching the results.
The case for both
For most companies the sensible order is: audit first, to set a baseline and a plan; then, if the volume justifies it, a tool to monitor the trend while the work is done. The audit tells you which prompts to track, so the tool's numbers mean something from day one.
Questions to ask any tool vendor
Before you sign up, ask:
- Which models and modes do you check? Signed in or out, web search on or off, and which versions. Answers differ a lot between them.
- How many times is each prompt run? Answers vary between runs. One run per prompt is a snapshot, not a measure.
- Do you show the sources cited, with links? Without sources, you can see the score but not what to change.
- Can I set the country and language? A clinic in Bristol and a software company selling across Europe need very different settings.
- Can I export the raw answers? You'll want them for your own analysis, and if you ever switch tools.
What we'd do
If you're not sure where you stand, don't start with a subscription. Start with a baseline you can run yourself in an afternoon, or with our visibility audit if you want every source traced and a plan in a week. Add a tool when you know what you're tracking and who will act on it.
And whichever you choose, measure the things that matter, not just the score. We wrote up the GEO KPIs we use.