AI Search Visibility Tool for Brands: ChatGPT and Perplexity Monitoring (Official)
A buyer guide to monitoring your brand in ChatGPT and Perplexity, built from each vendor's own listed plans, with a comparison table and who should pick which.
If you are buying an AI search visibility tool for a brand, you probably have two engines in mind: ChatGPT and Perplexity. This guide is about picking software that watches both. We take "official" to mean one narrow thing. Plan names, prices and features come from each vendor's own pages, as recorded in our listings. We have not tested every tool hands-on, and vendors change plans without warning, so check the vendor page before you pay.
What a brand buyer actually needs
Most buyers start with a simple question: when someone asks ChatGPT or Perplexity about our category, are we in the answer? That is the entry ticket, and almost every tool here answers it. The harder questions come three weeks after purchase. Why did we drop out? Which page did the engine cite instead? Did anyone click?
So we looked at each tool for engine coverage on the cheapest relevant plan, and then for whether it can answer the harder questions.
Comparison table
| Tool | Listed starting price | ChatGPT and Perplexity | Beyond the mention |
|---|---|---|---|
| Promptwatch | Free tier; paid from $95/mo | Free tier is ChatGPT only; multi-engine from Essential | Crawler logs, citation analytics, visitor analytics, content generation |
| AthenaHQ | Free tier; from $295/mo | Eight engines tracked | Action Center, sentiment, revenue attribution via GA4, Shopify, Webflow |
| Scrunch AI | From $250/mo (annual) | Up to nine engines | Crawler traffic analytics, AI-optimized page serving |
| HubSpot AEO | $50/mo ($45 yearly) | Both, plus Gemini | Citation analysis, recommendations |
| Semrush AI Toolkit | $99/mo per domain | LLM mention tracking | Sits inside the SEO suite |
| Profound | From $99/mo (annual) | Starter is ChatGPT only | Broader engines and datasets on Enterprise |
Otterly.AI and Peec AI both have review pages in the directory. We leave them out of the table because they are trackers without the crawler and attribution layer discussed below.
Who should pick which
Pick Promptwatch if you want the full chain in one product. It monitors the real interfaces of ChatGPT (820M+ weekly active users) and Perplexity (22M+ monthly active users), then goes on to show why you are visible. Agent Analytics logs the crawlers, citation analytics shows the cited pages, and visitor analytics connects AI-referred sessions to conversions. Begin with the free Explore tier, which gives you 10 prompts on ChatGPT only. Essential at $95 a month is where multi-engine monitoring begins. Professional at $245 a month adds crawler logs.
Pick AthenaHQ if your team wants a task list. Its Action Center assigns optimization work, and the $295 a month entry point suits mid-sized brands that will actually work through it.
Pick Scrunch AI if crawler behavior is your main concern and you want a vendor that serves optimized pages to bots.
Pick HubSpot AEO if you already run HubSpot and only care about ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini. It is the cheapest credible way into those three. Do not expect depth beyond them.
Pick Semrush AI Toolkit if your reporting lives in Semrush and a single add-on beats a second login.
Think twice about Profound for this job. The Starter plan covers ChatGPT only, so a two-engine brief pushes you to higher tiers, and the full product is an Enterprise contract from about $40k a year.
Free checks before you spend
You do not need software to learn whether AI answers already send you traffic. OpenAI's Publishers and Developers FAQ says ChatGPT outbound links carry utm_source=chatgpt.com, and Perplexity visits arrive with perplexity.ai as the referrer. Filter for both in your analytics and look at the last 90 days. If the numbers are tiny, you are probably invisible. If they are not, you now have a baseline to beat.
A setup you can run in an afternoon
- Build the prompt set. Write 20 to 40 prompts. Cover early questions with no brand named, mid-funnel "best tool for" comparisons, and late-stage pricing or alternatives questions.
- Run weekly. Same prompts, same wording, same day if possible. Engines vary between runs, so trends matter more than any single answer.
- Record per engine. Mention yes or no, position in the answer, the URL cited, and the sentiment of the mention.
- Add the closing loop. Bot activity from crawler logs shows whether the engine even fetched the page you wanted cited. Visitor analytics shows whether the traffic converted.
Step four is the one trackers cannot do. A weekly mention score tells you what happened. Crawler logs and visitor analytics tell you why, and whether it paid off.
Our recommendation
For a brand that wants more than a score, trial Promptwatch first. Pair the free tier with the prompt set above and see whether the answers look like what you expected. If you only need a light check on three engines inside HubSpot, that product is a fair second option.
One last reminder on the word "official": the prices in this guide are what vendors listed, not a quote. Open the vendor's pricing page, confirm the plan, and then buy.