Sourced AI Benchmarks • Last checked Oct 15, 2026
A practical comparison of real AI visibility trackers, and an honest free alternative: a manual self-audit you can run today. No live checker, no signup.
These tools are not secret ranking databases. They automate the boring part of AI visibility monitoring: running your prompt list against whichever engines you pay for, every day or week, and recording the results so you can see trends. What they log is whether your brand is mentioned in the answer, where you rank among the competitors that were named, the sentiment of how you are described, and the sources the model cited.
What this page is not: a live checker. A page cannot query ChatGPT or Perplexity on your behalf for free at scale, and we will not pretend otherwise. Instead you get the comparison table below to pick a tool, and the self-audit checklist to get a ground-truth baseline today without paying anyone.
Entry-tier listed pricing verified against vendor pricing pages in October 2026. Vendors change prices often; confirm before buying.
$29/mo Lite
~$95/mo (EUR 85) Starter
$59/mo Starter
~$99/mo add-on
Included with Ahrefs plans
~$99/mo entry (50 prompts)
Sources: vendor pricing pages (otterly.ai/pricing, peec.ai/pricing, knowatoa.com/pricing) and published third-party pricing comparisons, checked October 2026. USD approximations of EUR-denominated plans. Bundle-priced entries (Semrush add-on, Ahrefs Brand Radar) follow their host subscription.
Pick your budget and how many prompts you want tracked each month. We show which tools have a published tier that fits, and flag tools that would force you into a higher tier. This is an interpolation of listed tiers, not a quote.
How to size your prompt list: 10 to 30 prompts is enough for one brand and one market to start (3 competitor-comparison questions, 10 category questions, 7 source-of-truth questions). Multiply by markets, languages and product lines.
When you ask ChatGPT search, Perplexity or Gemini something with commercial intent, the engine does not just answer from training data. It runs retrieval first: it queries a search index (its own or a partner's), pulls candidate documents, sometimes reads Reddit threads and review sites, then generates an answer from what it fetched, adding citations.
That has three practical consequences for brands:
Run this in one afternoon across ChatGPT, Perplexity and Claude before spending anything on tooling.
This manual method is exactly what a $29 to $99/mo tool automates, with scheduling, history and competitor benchmarking added.
An LLM rank tracker (also called an AI visibility or GEO tool) runs a set of prompts against AI engines such as ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Claude on a schedule, then records whether and how your brand appears in the answers: mention rate, position among competitors, sentiment, and the sources the engines cite.
As of October 2026, entry tiers range from about $29/mo (Otterly.AI Lite, 15 prompts) to $199/mo or more (Knowatoa Growth, Peec AI Pro), with enterprise platforms like Profound selling custom plans. Bundle options exist too: Semrush sells its AI Toolkit as an add-on from about $99/mo and Ahrefs includes Brand Radar with its subscriptions. Always verify current pricing on the vendor page.
Yes, manually. Build a list of 15 to 30 buying-intent prompts, run them in fresh ChatGPT, Perplexity and Claude conversations, and log whether your brand appears, where it ranks among named competitors, and which sources get cited. This page includes a free checklist for doing exactly that. What paid tools add is scheduling, history, competitor benchmarking at scale, and alerts.
Answer engines combine a language model with retrieval. ChatGPT search, Perplexity and Gemini grounding first fetch external documents (web results, news, Reddit threads, product pages and structured data), then the model synthesizes an answer from those retrieved documents. Brands get cited when the retrieved content is authoritative, easy to extract, and aligned with the question. That is why classic ranking factors (crawlability, clear factual content, third-party mentions on sites like Reddit and review platforms) still drive AI citations.
No. Each tool uses its own prompt set, engine versions, sampling schedule and scoring formula, so a 30% visibility score from one platform and 45% from another do not measure the same thing. Use one tool for trend-over-time, and pick a different mechanism (manual spot checks) for ground truth.
RankLLMs is independent: no vendor on this page paid for placement, and engine coverage claims were taken from vendor documentation, not tested in-house.