AI citation tracking means checking whether an AI assistant names your company when it answers a buyer’s question. A market of tools now sells that check. This piece compares the real ones, with every price taken from the vendor’s own pricing page on 10 August 2026.
Where we stand, up front. Legency runs a four-engine citation panel for its clients, so we sell a hand-run version of what these tools automate. No vendor named here has paid us, and no link below is an affiliate link.
What is AI citation tracking?
AI citation tracking is the practice of recording how often an AI assistant cites your website or names your brand in its answers. You pick a set of questions, put them to the engines, and log what comes back.
Two words get mixed up here. A citation is a link or a source credit pointing at your page. A mention is your brand name written into the answer text itself.
Both count, for different reasons. A citation can send a click. A mention shapes what the reader believes before any click happens. A brand can score well on one and badly on the other, so a tool that reports only one number hides half the picture.
Which tools track AI citations?
Eight products cover most of the AI citation tracking market. They fall into three groups: specialist AI visibility platforms, research tools built for large brands, and AI modules added to the big SEO suites.
| Tool | Engines it checks | Public entry price | Suits |
|---|---|---|---|
| Profound | 8, including ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude | $99 a month, billed yearly | Teams that want depth and crawler data |
| Peec AI | 3 of your choice on the entry plan | €89 a month | European mid-market teams |
| Otterly.ai | 4 core, with Claude and Gemini as add-ons | $29 a month | A first, cheap baseline |
| Evertune | 11 models | $800 a month | Brands that need statistical confidence |
| Scrunch | ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini, Copilot | Not published | Enterprise buyers with a security review |
| Semrush AI Visibility Toolkit | ChatGPT, Google AI, Gemini, Perplexity | $99 a month per domain | Teams already paying for Semrush |
| Ahrefs Brand Radar | 7 AI surfaces, plus YouTube, TikTok, Reddit | Inside standard Ahrefs plans | Teams already paying for Ahrefs |
| SE Ranking AI Search Toolkit | AI Overviews, AI Mode, ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity | €63.20 to €79 a month, as an add-on | Agencies running many client sites |
Profound
Profound is the deepest of the specialist platforms. Its site lists eight answer engines: ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini, Grok, Microsoft Copilot, DeepSeek and Google AI Overviews (Profound).
Pricing starts at $99 a month billed yearly, and that tier watches ChatGPT alone with 50 prompts. Growth is $399 a month for three answer engines and 100 prompts. Enterprise is custom and opens up to nine engines (Profound pricing, checked 10 August 2026).
It also sells Agent Analytics, which tracks how AI crawlers read your site. Most rivals leave that out.
Peec AI
Peec AI is the cheapest serious entry point in euro. Its documentation describes three measures: visibility, position and sentiment, plus the sources the models lean on (Peec AI docs).
Peec gathers data by driving the chat interfaces rather than the APIs, a method it calls UI scraping. Its own comparison page lists Starter at €89 a month with three engines of your choice, and Pro at €199 a month with 150 prompts tracked daily (Peec AI, checked 10 August 2026). The main pricing page loads its figures after the page renders, so we read them there instead.
Otterly.ai
Otterly.ai is the cheapest way to get a baseline at all. Lite is $29 a month for 15 prompts, Standard is $189 a month for 100 prompts, and Premium is $489 a month for 400 prompts (Otterly pricing, checked 10 August 2026).
Read the engine list before you buy. The plans cover ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity and Microsoft Copilot. Claude, Gemini and Google AI Mode are paid add-ons on top of that.
Evertune
Evertune sells statistical confidence. It samples each prompt 100 times across every model, so one lucky answer cannot swing the result (Evertune).
It covers 11 models, among them ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini, Copilot, DeepSeek and Meta. Its pricing page lists a Pro plan at $800 a month, with Enterprise on request (Evertune pricing, checked 10 August 2026).
Scrunch
Scrunch is built for large organisations. It tracks brand presence across the main assistants, the sources they cite, prompt-level rankings and live AI crawler activity on your site (Scrunch).
It names ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini and Copilot as the surfaces it watches. No price is published, so plan for a sales call. It holds SOC 2 Type II, the security audit your IT team will ask about.
Semrush AI Visibility Toolkit
Semrush sells AI visibility as its own product rather than as part of an SEO plan. It costs $99 a month per domain on annual billing, and that covers 25 tracked prompts with daily rankings (Semrush AI pricing, checked 10 August 2026).
The listing names mentions from ChatGPT, Google AI, Gemini and Perplexity. Claude is absent from it. The plan also includes a site audit for AI readiness, which the specialist tools tend to leave to you.
Ahrefs Brand Radar
Brand Radar sits inside the standard Ahrefs plans, so many teams already own it. It covers AI Overviews, AI Mode, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Copilot, Gemini and Grok, plus YouTube, TikTok and Reddit while those stay in beta (Ahrefs Brand Radar).
Ahrefs says its prompts are “search-backed prompts, not synthetic ones”, meaning they come from real searches rather than invented questions. The tool is also sold on its own from €179 a month (Ahrefs pricing, viewed from Ireland on 10 August 2026).
SE Ranking AI Search Toolkit
SE Ranking adds AI tracking to an SEO suite priced for agencies. The tracker covers Google AI Overviews, Google AI Mode, ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity (SE Ranking).
It sells as an add-on at €63.20 to €79 a month depending on billing term, on top of a Core plan at €87.20 to €109 a month (SE Ranking pricing, viewed from Ireland on 10 August 2026).
How much does AI citation tracking cost?
Published entry plans for AI citation tracking run from $29 to $800 a month. Two limits drive your real bill: how many prompts you track, and how many engines you watch.
Cheap tiers buy very few prompts. Otterly’s $29 plan tracks 15 of them. Semrush tracks 25 at $99 a month per domain. Profound’s $99 tier watches ChatGPT and nothing else.
A useful question set for a B2B company runs to 30 or 40 prompts. Price the tier that carries that number, then check what each extra engine adds.
One caveat on the figures above. Each price is the one that vendor’s page showed us on 10 August 2026, in the currency it quoted. Ahrefs and SE Ranking display euro when the page loads from Ireland.
Can you track AI citations without a tool?
Yes. A hand-run panel gives you a defensible baseline in about a day, and it costs time rather than money.
Here is the method we use for clients. Write 30 to 40 questions a buyer would really type. Put each one to ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Claude with web search turned on. Record the date. Then read every answer and log two things: the domains cited, and the brands named in the text.
Run the same questions again each month. The comparison between months is the useful part.
Three limits come with the manual route. It does not scale much past 50 questions. It gives you no history before the day you start. And the engines vary their answers, so a single run can flatter you or punish you by chance.
One habit protects you from your own data. Report the unbranded score, meaning the result from questions that never contain your company name. Between 14 and 31 July 2026 we ran this panel for six B2B companies and recorded more than 340 answers. In one of those panels a company collected 12 citations, and 8 of them came from the two questions that already named it.
Which AI citation tracking tool should you choose?
Start with what you already pay for. If your team runs Ahrefs, Brand Radar is in the plan already, and one month of its data will tell you whether this topic deserves a budget.
After that, match the tool to the job:
- A first baseline on a small budget: Otterly.ai at $29 a month, or a hand-run panel.
- Depth across every engine: Profound.
- A European team buying in euro: Peec AI.
- A board that will question the numbers: Evertune, for the 100 samples per prompt.
- An enterprise with a security review: Scrunch.
- An agency running many client sites: the SE Ranking add-on.
Whatever you buy, hand-check it in the first month. Ask five of your own questions in ChatGPT and Perplexity, and see whether the dashboard agrees with what you read. AI answers move between runs, so every dashboard is a sample of a moving thing.
Frequently asked questions
Is AI citation tracking worth paying for?
It is worth paying for once you have proof the questions matter. Run a free hand panel first. If your buyers ask questions the assistants answer, and your company never appears, a tool then earns its fee by watching the repair work.
Which AI engines should you track?
Start with ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Claude, then add Google AI Overviews if your market searches heavily. Most tools price by engine count, so this choice sets your bill more than any other setting.
How often should you re-run an AI citation check?
Monthly suits most B2B companies. In our own panels the picture is steady enough month to month that daily tracking mostly records the noise between runs. Use the same questions and the same week each time.
Do AI citation tracking tools report the same numbers?
No. Every AI citation tracking product picks its own prompts, its own engine list and its own sampling method, so two tools will report different scores for the same brand. Read any single score as a trend line rather than a fact.
Prices come from each vendor’s own pricing page, checked on 10 August 2026, in the currency that page displayed. Panel figures come from our own client work and are reported without naming clients.