How to track and improve your brand’s visibility in AI search

Tracker, agency or SEO audit software: which should I choose?

Choose a dedicated tracker if someone in your business can act on what it finds, choose an agency if you have the budget but not the people, and keep SEO audit software for crawling and technical checks rather than for AI visibility. Most businesses end up with a mix. The order matters, though: measure before you pay anyone to fix.

The reason to start tracking AI visibility now is scale. According to Integrate.io's 2026 roundup of AI visibility tools, ChatGPT now reaches 900 million weekly users, the figure OpenAI itself gave in February 2026. Brand recommendations could appear in ChatGPT conversations with at least 74.2 million people each week, according to Ahrefs in its guide How to Monitor and Win Brand Mentions in AI Answers. Customers are already asking assistants who to buy from, and the answer either names your business or names someone else.

The right mix of tracker, agency and SEO audit software depends on the size of your business and on who can do the work, and the usual starting point differs by type of business.

Sole trader or very small team with no marketing person: run the free manual test in the last section, then choose a low cost tracker or a tool that measures and drafts the fixes for you.
Small business with a marketing lead who writes content: a tool that checks weekly and gives exact page edits, with no retainer.
Medium sized business with several services or locations: a tracker plus your own content team, with an agency brought in for digital PR if mentions on other sites are the weak spot.
Large or regulated brand across several markets: an enterprise tracker for reporting, plus an agency or in house team for content, PR and approvals.
Agency or consultant serving clients: resell a tracking and fixing engine under your own brand rather than building one.

Agencies and trackers are less separate than they look. Many agencies run their AI visibility reporting on a third party tool and present it under their own name. Reselling a tool in this way is a sensible way to work, but you should know which tool sits underneath, because you may be able to buy the same data directly. Provley, an AI search visibility service, offers white label reselling for exactly this reason. An agency can give its clients a weekly AI visibility report on its own web address and from its own email, set its own price and keep the client relationship.

What does a dedicated AI visibility tracker measure, and what can't it do?

A dedicated AI visibility tracker measures whether AI assistants mention your brand, cite your website and favour you over competitors, but it cannot tell you why or fix anything. It sends a fixed set of prompts to AI assistants on a schedule and records whether your brand is mentioned, whether your website is cited as a source, how often you appear compared with competitors, and the tone of what is said. Trackers are measurement tools. They show where you stand, not how to change it.

The metrics described on tracker pages from Ahrefs, Semrush and SE Ranking follow a similar pattern.

Mentions: how often an assistant names your brand in its answer.
Citations: how often it links to or credits your website as a source.
Share of voice: your mentions as a proportion of all brand mentions for the same prompts, set against named competitors.
Sentiment: whether the description of your business is positive, neutral or negative.
Position: whether you are named first, in the middle of a list or at the end.
Source domains: which websites the assistant leans on when it answers questions in your category.

What a tracker cannot do matters just as much. A tracker does not explain why a competitor is named instead of you, does not rewrite the page that lets you down, and does not earn the reviews, forum threads or press mentions that assistants draw on. AI answers also vary from one run to the next, so a single result is a sample, not a ranking. Look for trends over several weeks rather than reacting to a single change.

Gaps in what a tracker covers matter too. In a Semrush analysis of roughly 150,000 AI citations, reported in Integrate.io's Best AI Visibility Tracking Tools (2026), Reddit accounted for about 40.1% of the citations Semrush analysed. Most tracking tools do not monitor Reddit, according to Integrate.io. If discussion forums shape answers in your sector, a tracker that only watches your own domain will miss a large part of the picture.

Why can't normal SEO audit software tell me whether AI chatbots recommend my company?

Normal SEO audit software crawls your website and checks your positions in Google's ranked results, so it measures how search engines index your pages, not what an AI assistant says when a customer asks for a recommendation. An AI answer is written fresh for each conversation, and there is no public list of positions for an audit tool to read.

Several differences explain the gap between SEO audits and AI visibility.

No fixed ranking: Google shows broadly the same list of results to everyone searching a term, while an assistant writes a new answer each time, shaped by the wording of the question and the conversation before it.
Longer questions: people ask assistants full questions with context, such as their budget, location and situation, which keyword tools were never built to capture.
Mentions without clicks: an assistant can recommend you without the customer ever visiting your site, so traffic reports and rank trackers see nothing.
Off site sources: assistants draw on reviews, directories, forums and press coverage, which an audit of your own site never examines.

The gap between being recommended by an assistant and receiving clicks is larger than most owners expect. ChatGPT, the most popular assistant, sends only 0.21% of website visits, according to Ahrefs in How to Monitor and Win Brand Mentions in AI Answers. A business can be recommended often and still see almost nothing in Google Analytics, which is why website traffic is a poor stand in for AI visibility.

SEO audit software still earns its place. Assistants that search the web, including Perplexity and Google AI Overviews, can only use pages they can reach and read. Crawl errors, slow pages, blocked bots, missing structured data and thin content hurt you in both channels. Keep the audit tool for those checks, and add something that asks the assistants directly. Some SEO suites now sell AI visibility modules alongside their audit features. An AI visibility module inside an SEO suite is a tracker in its own right, so judge it as a tracker, not as part of the audit.

Which tools track ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews?

The tools most often named for tracking ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews are Peec AI, Semrush, Ahrefs Brand Radar, Otterly AI, Profound and Rankscale AI. They differ mainly in how many assistants and prompts they cover, how they handle competitors, and whether they do anything beyond reporting.

Peec AI: a dedicated tracker focused on mentions, citations and share of voice across the main assistants, popular with marketing teams.
Semrush: AI visibility features added to an established SEO suite, convenient if you already pay for Semrush.
Ahrefs Brand Radar: a large prompt database for comparing your brand with competitors across AI answers.
Otterly AI: a budget tracker for smaller businesses that want a simple weekly view.
Profound: an enterprise platform aimed at large brands with many markets and teams.
Rankscale AI: low cost tracking aimed at small and medium sized businesses.
Provley: a measure and fix tool that checks the assistants weekly, then gives page edits and drafts new articles.

Ahrefs says its Brand Radar tracks brand appearances across 500+ million AI prompts modelled on real search keywords (source: What is Brand Radar, and how to use it? | Help Center - Ahrefs). A database of that size suits market research and competitor comparison. A smaller business usually gets more from tracking the specific questions its own customers ask.

Google AI Overviews deserves its own line in any tracker you choose. An OnSaaS analysis, cited in Nudge's guide Best AI Search Visibility Tools and Tracking Methods in 2025, found that AI Overviews exposure grew 115% after March 2025. Because AI Overviews sit on top of normal Google results, they reach customers who never open a chatbot. Check that a tool reports AI Overviews separately from ChatGPT and Perplexity, since the sources each assistant favours can differ.

Before you buy, ask each vendor the same questions. Which assistants are covered on your plan? Are Gemini and Microsoft Copilot included? Can you write your own prompts? How often do prompts run? Can results reflect what a UK customer would see? The answers separate a useful tracker from a dashboard that looks busy but tells you little.

When is an agency worth paying for?

An agency is worth paying for when you know what needs changing but nobody in your business has the time or skill to do it, or when the work is mostly off your own website, such as digital PR, reviews and earning mentions in publications. No agency can guarantee that an assistant will cite you, so pay for the work done, not for a promised result.

Clear signs that hiring an agency makes sense:

Nobody in your business can write or edit web pages on a regular basis.
Your weak spot is coverage on other websites, such as trade press, comparison sites and forums, rather than your own pages.
You work in a regulated sector where every page needs careful drafting and sign off.
You are launching in a new market and need content, PR and technical work at the same time.
Your site needs technical changes that your current web developer cannot make.

Questions to ask any agency before signing:

Which tool do you use to track AI visibility, and can I see the raw data?
Which prompts will you track, and can I add my own?
Who writes the content, and how will it draw on our own expertise?
What will you change in the first months, and how will you report progress?
What is the minimum term and the notice period?

Watch for promises of guaranteed placement in ChatGPT, reports that show only a single score, and long contracts with no way out. A good agency will tell you plainly that assistants change their answers and that progress shows up as a trend over weeks and months.

How much does each option cost in the UK?

In the UK, a dedicated tracker is a monthly subscription usually priced in US dollars, an agency charges a monthly retainer quoted in pounds, and SEO audit software is a subscription many businesses already pay for. Trackers are the cheapest way to measure, agencies cost the most because you are paying for people, and audit software adds little if AI visibility is your only aim.

Published tracker prices are mostly in dollars. Nudge's guide Best AI Search Visibility Tools and Tracking Methods in 2025 lists Rankscale AI from $20/month, Otterly AI at $29/month, Peec AI at $99/month and Profound at $499/month. These are 2025 list prices; prices change and entry plans often cap the number of prompts, so check the current pricing page before you set a budget.

For a UK buyer, three things change the real cost of a dollar priced tool.

Exchange rate: a dollar price becomes a different pound amount each month on your card statement, and some banks add a foreign transaction fee.
VAT: overseas software sold to UK businesses is either charged with UK VAT or handled through the reverse charge if you are VAT registered, so ask your accountant how it lands in your return.
Prompt limits: entry plans often track a small set of prompts or assistants, and adding competitors or Google AI Overviews can push you onto a higher tier.

Agency retainers have no reliable public benchmark in pounds. Prices on an agency's website reflect what that agency sells, and the figures repeated by AI assistants often trace back to a single agency page. Expect retainers to be quoted excluding VAT, to bundle tracking with content and PR, and to run for a minimum term. Compare agencies by what they deliver each month, not by the headline price.

What each option delivers for the money:

SEO audit software: technical health and Google rankings, with AI visibility only if you buy a separate module.
Dedicated tracker: a regular measure of mentions, citations and share of voice, with the fixing left to you.
Measure and fix tool: the weekly measure plus specific page edits and draft articles for you to approve.
Agency: people who plan and carry out content, technical and PR work, usually with a tracker running underneath.

Provley prices its audit as a single fixed fee in pounds, with no account needed, so you can see where you stand before committing to a monthly plan.

Is there a middle option that measures and fixes without an agency retainer?

Yes. A measure and fix tool checks what AI assistants say about your business every week, then turns that result into specific page edits and new articles, giving you much of what an agency carries out without a retainer. You or your team approve the changes, and the tool does the analysis and the drafting.

Provley, an AI search visibility service, sits in exactly that gap. Each week Provley asks the AI assistants the questions your customers ask and sends you the Monday email with your Citation Share: the share of answers that name you, how that moved since last week, which assistant still names a competitor first, and the page most worth fixing next.

The difference from a tracker is what happens after the report arrives.

The exact edit: for each page that lets you down, Provley gives the specific change to make, not a general recommendation.
New articles from your expertise: where no page answers a question customers ask, Provley drafts an article based on what your own experts know, and nothing is published until you approve it.
Ask from the assistant you already use: connect Provley to ChatGPT or Claude and ask how your website is doing, what to fix next, or for a new article.
For agencies and developers: the same engine is available through white label reselling and an API, so an agency can run it under its own brand rather than compete with it.

A measure and fix tool is not a full replacement for an agency. Earning press coverage, building relationships with industry publications and running review campaigns still need people. For many small businesses, though, the work that moves AI answers most is on their own site: clear answers near the top of each page, question shaped headings, named sources for every figure, and pages that cover the questions customers actually ask. Changes to your own pages suit a weekly cycle of measure, edit and check again.

How do I test my own visibility before buying anything?

Run a manual baseline: write down the questions your customers really ask, put each one to ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Google AI Overviews in a fresh session, and record whether your business is named, cited or missing. Repeat the same test a week later and you have a free, repeatable measure to compare any tool against.

Write a short list of real customer questions. Mix broad category questions, comparisons with named competitors, problem questions and local questions that include your town or region.
Open each assistant in a private window or logged out, so past chats do not colour the answer.
Ask each question exactly as written, without mentioning your brand.
Record each result in a spreadsheet: named, named and linked, competitor named instead, or no business named.
Note which websites each assistant cites, especially directories, review sites and forums.
Work out your share: the answers naming you divided by the total answers.
Repeat on the same day next week, with the same wording, before you change anything on your site.

The manual test has limits. Answers vary between runs, and repeating the exercise by hand each week takes time once the list grows. The real value is a baseline you trust, so that any tool's dashboard can be checked against something you saw yourself. Provley's free checklist walks through the same test, and the paid audit runs it for you if you would rather not do it by hand.

Frequently asked questions

How often should I check my AI visibility? Once a week is a sensible rhythm. AI answers vary from one run to the next, so look for trends over several weeks rather than reacting to a single result, and repeat the same questions with the same wording each time.

Can I improve AI visibility without changing my website? Partly. Assistants draw on reviews, directories, forums and press coverage, so earning mentions on other websites can help. For many small businesses, though, the work that moves AI answers most is on their own site, such as clear answers near the top of each page and named sources for every figure.

Do these tools work for local businesses? Yes, as long as you track the questions local customers ask. Include your town or region in the prompts, check whether a tool can show what a UK customer would see, and if you are a very small team, start with the free manual test or a low cost tracker.