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Best AI Search Monitoring Tools in 2026: 7 Compared | GEOly | GEO Data Platform for DTC Brands
What Are the Best AI Search Monitoring Tools in 2026?
Summary
GEOly, Profound, Peec AI, Otterly.AI, Ahrefs Brand Radar, Semrush's AI Visibility Toolkit and Scrunch AI are the seven AI search monitoring tools to shortlist in 2026 — entry pricing runs from free (GEOly) and $29/month (Otterly) to custom enterprise quotes, and only one covers the AI shopping shelf.
2026/07/05
9 min read
The short answer: the best AI search monitoring tools in 2026 are GEOly, Profound, Peec AI, Otterly.AI, Ahrefs Brand Radar, Semrush's AI Visibility Toolkit, and Scrunch AI. Which of the seven deserves your budget depends on what you need to watch — a DTC brand that lives on ChatGPT Shopping cards has very different requirements from an enterprise monitoring reputational answers across a dozen engines. This guide sticks to monitoring: mention tracking, engine coverage, alerting, and how often each tool actually checks. If you're shopping for the full stack including content optimization, our broader roundup of the best AI SEO tools is the wider lens.
Key takeaways
GEOly, Profound, Peec AI, Otterly.AI, Ahrefs Brand Radar, Semrush AI Visibility Toolkit and Scrunch AI are the seven AI search monitoring tools worth shortlisting in 2026; entry pricing runs from free to custom enterprise quotes.
Engine coverage is the biggest hidden cost: Gemini and Google AI Mode are paid add-ons on Otterly.AI and Peec AI, but included on GEOly, Ahrefs Brand Radar and Semrush.
AI answers are non-deterministic, so a single spot check proves nothing. Daily sampled runs per prompt and engine are the minimum cadence for trend data you can act on.
Only one of the seven treats the AI shopping shelf — product cards in ChatGPT Shopping and Google AI Mode — as a first-class monitoring surface: GEOly, with its Share of Card metric.
Monitoring is not optimization
An AI search monitoring tool answers four questions on a schedule: does the engine mention you, what does it say, whom does it cite, and how does that compare with competitors. Optimization tools take the next step and change your content. This list judges only the measurement job — several platforms here bundle both, but a monitor that measures badly can't be saved by a good content editor.
The evaluation checklist
Score any candidate against six criteria before you buy:
Engine coverage: ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews are table stakes. Ask specifically about Gemini and Google AI Mode — several vendors hide add-on fees there — plus Grok if your audience lives on X.
Prompt customization: you should be able to track your own bottom-funnel prompts, not just a vendor's keyword-derived set, and see the fan-out queries engines run behind a single user question.
Competitor tracking: mentions in isolation flatter you. You want share metrics — what percentage of answers name you versus each named competitor (Share of Model).
Source and citation visibility: which domains the engines pull from decides where your PR and content effort goes. A monitor without citation analysis is half a product.
Shopping-shelf coverage: for commerce, text answers are only half the surface; product cards decide clicks. See the Share of Card metric for why.
API or MCP access: monitoring data locked in a dashboard can't feed agents or pipelines. An MCP server lets you query visibility data from Claude Code, Cursor or Codex directly.
The best AI search monitoring tools in 2026
1. GEOly
Disclosure: GEOly is our product. GEOly is an AI-native monitoring platform built for e-commerce and DTC brands, free to start at app.geoly.ai. It tracks brand mentions and citations at the prompt level — including the fan-out queries engines quietly run behind a single question — across ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Grok, Google AI Overviews and Google AI Mode.
Three capabilities stand out. Share of Model turns raw mentions into a competitive share: what percentage of AI answers in your category name you versus each rival, per engine. Share of Card does the same for the AI shopping shelf, tracking whether your products appear as cards in ChatGPT Shopping and Google AI Mode — a surface no generalist monitor watches. And the GEM dataset adds ChatGPT Ads intelligence covering 2,352 brands already advertising in ChatGPT, so competitors' paid moves get monitored alongside organic mentions; our guide to tracking competitors' ChatGPT ads shows that workflow. There's also an open MCP server and Codex plugin (geoly.ai/open) if you'd rather query the data from your own agents.
Brand mention monitoring in AI search: per-prompt visibility, citation rate and tracking status across AI engines — Source: GEOly AI (app.geoly.ai)
Best for: commerce and DTC brands that need the answer layer and the shelf layer in one monitor. The honest limitation: GEOly is commerce-first. A B2B SaaS brand will never touch the shelf features, and it doesn't do AI crawler log analytics the way the enterprise platforms below do.
2. Profound
Profound is the enterprise reference point for answer-engine monitoring. It tracks the broadest set of AI surfaces on this list — ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews and AI Mode, Copilot, Grok, Meta AI, DeepSeek and Amazon Rufus — with prompt-level tracking, sentiment, and citation authority scoring.
Two things justify its reputation: conversation-volume data that estimates how often topics actually come up in AI chats, and crawler analytics showing which AI bots fetch which pages — monitoring the retrieval layer, not just the answer layer. Best for: enterprises with reputational stakes across many engines and the budget to match. Limitation: pricing is quote-driven and aimed squarely at enterprise contracts; a single-brand DTC team will pay for breadth it never uses.
3. Peec AI
Peec AI is a Berlin-built monitor aimed at marketing teams and agencies. It benchmarks brand visibility and share of voice against competitors with unusually clean dashboards, and every plan includes unlimited seats — rare in this category, and exactly right for agencies looping in clients.
Standouts: competitor benchmarking that non-SEO stakeholders actually read, multi-brand workspaces, and source analysis showing which domains drive citations. Base coverage is ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews; Gemini, Claude, Grok and others are per-engine paid add-ons. Best for: agencies and mid-market teams reporting to executives. Limitation: those add-ons compound — real monthly cost lands well above sticker once you cover four or five engines — and there's no shopping-shelf layer.
4. Otterly.AI
Otterly.AI is the lowest-friction entry into AI search monitoring: the Lite plan is $29 per month for 15 prompts, with daily tracking on every tier and coverage across 50-plus countries. Base engines are ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity and Copilot.
Standouts: price, genuinely daily cadence even on the cheapest plan, and multi-country tracking that most rivals gate behind enterprise tiers. Best for: solo SEOs and small teams who want a monitoring habit before a monitoring budget. Limitation: Gemini and Google AI Mode cost extra as add-ons, and 15 prompts evaporate once you add competitor and fan-out variants — expect to upgrade quickly if the tool proves useful.
5. Ahrefs Brand Radar
Brand Radar takes the opposite approach to everyone else here: instead of running your custom prompts, it mines a database of more than 199 million search-backed prompts across six engines — Google AI Overviews, AI Mode, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Copilot.
That design gives it two unique strengths: an instant, zero-setup view of any brand's AI visibility (including competitors you've never configured) and historical trend lines, all inside the Ahrefs suite your SEO team may already pay for. Best for: SEO teams on Ahrefs who want market-level share-of-voice context. Limitation: you're monitoring Ahrefs' prompt index, not your funnel — niche bottom-funnel prompts may simply not be in the database, and custom prompt tracking is thinner than on dedicated monitors.
6. Semrush AI Visibility Toolkit
Semrush's AI Visibility Toolkit brings AI monitoring into the platform half the industry already uses. It tracks prompts day by day across ChatGPT, Google AI Mode, AI Overviews, Gemini and Perplexity, with Claude a recent addition, and its brand performance reports layer sentiment and attribute analysis on top of mention counts.
Standouts: day-level trend granularity for catching sudden drops, sentiment reporting executives understand, and one login for classic rank tracking plus AI monitoring. It's sold as a per-domain add-on or bundled into Semrush One. Best for: teams consolidating SEO and AI visibility under one vendor. Limitation: per-domain pricing punishes multi-brand portfolios, and monitoring depth — fan-out visibility, shelf coverage — trails the specialists on this list.
7. Scrunch AI
Scrunch AI frames monitoring as part of a bigger AI customer experience platform: it watches how your brand appears in AI answers, audits what blocks AI crawlers on your site, and can serve agent-friendly pages at the edge.
For pure monitoring, the standouts are persona-based tracking (the same prompt asked as different simulated buyers, which surfaces answer variance most tools average away), site audit alerts tied to monitoring findings, and SOC 2 Type II compliance with multi-brand, multi-region deployments. Best for: enterprises that want monitoring wired directly into remediation infrastructure. Limitation: it's enterprise-shaped — API access sits on the top tier, and small teams end up paying for delivery infrastructure they'll never switch on.
How often should you check?
AI search visibility dashboard tracking mention rate, AIGVR and Share of Model across ChatGPT, Gemini and other AI engines — Source: GEOly AI (app.geoly.ai)
Treat AI search like uptime, not like a quarterly audit. The same prompt returns different answers across hours, model versions and user contexts, so single checks mislead. What works: daily sampled runs per prompt and engine, alerts on mention-rate drops or lost citations, a weekly competitor delta review, and a monthly citation-source audit to see which domains gained ground. Most tools above default to daily; confirm the cheap tiers aren't throttled to weekly before you buy. Our breakdown of AI search visibility metrics and KPIs covers which numbers deserve alerts and which are vanity. For more teardowns like this one, browse the AI visibility tag or my author page — I update this comparison as engines and pricing move.
FAQ
What is the best free AI search monitoring tool?
GEOly is free to start and includes prompt-level mention tracking across ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews, which makes it the most complete free starting point on this list. Several rivals offer free checkers or trials, but daily tracking with competitor benchmarking generally sits behind paid plans everywhere.
What is the difference between AI search monitoring tools and AI SEO tools?
Monitoring tools measure: mentions, citations, share of answers, shelf presence. AI SEO tools act on those measurements by generating or restructuring content. Most teams eventually run both, but buying optimization before you have monitoring is guessing with extra steps.
Do AI search monitoring tools cover Gemini and Google AI Mode?
It varies more than vendors admit. GEOly, Ahrefs Brand Radar and Semrush include both; Otterly.AI and Peec AI sell them as paid add-ons. If Gemini matters to your audience, price it into the comparison — our guide to tracking brand mentions in Gemini walks through the specifics.
How often should I check my brand's AI search visibility?
Daily automated runs, weekly human review. AI answers are non-deterministic, so trends built from daily samples matter far more than any individual answer. Set alerts for mention-rate drops and lost citations so the tool interrupts you instead of the other way round.
Can AI search monitoring tools track ChatGPT Shopping product cards?
Most can't — they monitor text answers only. GEOly tracks the shopping shelf directly through its Share of Card metric, measuring whether your products appear as cards in ChatGPT Shopping and Google AI Mode. For commerce brands the shelf increasingly decides the click, so a text-only monitor leaves the highest-intent surface dark.
