What are the best tools for tracking brand mentions in AI answers?

How do the main AI brand-mention trackers compare?

The table compares engines, entry prices and tracking limits as published on each vendor's own site, as of September 2026.

Method: we read each vendor's pricing page in September 2026 and included only tools whose prices and plan limits we could confirm there. Profound, Peec AI, AthenaHQ and Rankscale are left out because we could not confirm their current plans from their own pages. Where a vendor does not publish a detail, the table says so instead of guessing. Prices change often in this category, so check the vendor's page before you buy.

Which AI engines should a brand-mention tracker cover?

The ones your buyers use, and for most software buyers that includes ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity.

Engines disagree. A tool that ChatGPT recommends may be missing from Claude's answer to the same question, so a tracker that covers only one or two engines can make you look better or worse than you are. If you sell to developers, include the assistants they already use for coding, because that is where a tool question often gets asked.

Check how a vendor handles coverage. Some include every engine in the plan price. Others include a base set and sell the rest as add-ons, which can double the real cost if you need Claude or Gemini. MarketHQ does not cover Google AI Overviews, Google AI Mode or Microsoft Copilot; Otterly.AI includes AI Overviews and Copilot in every plan, so it is the better fit if those two matter most to you.

What should you compare besides price?

Compare what you get per question, whether you can see the full answers, and what the tool helps you do after a miss.

A mention percentage on its own does not tell you what to fix. Look for tools that show the full answer text, name the competitors that were recommended instead, and show any sources the answer cited.

• Engines included in the base price, and the cost of add-ons.
• Question or prompt limits, and whether you write your own questions.
• Refresh frequency, and whether you can compare weeks.
• Competitor visibility: which brands AI names instead of you.
• Next steps: content ideas, gap analysis or an action plan.
• Access to the data through an API or export if you report on it elsewhere.

Which tool fits a lean team with no SEO hire?

A tool with a low entry price, a small fixed question list and a clear next step fits better than an enterprise suite.

A five-person marketing team rarely needs 100,000 prompts. It needs 10 to 20 honest buyer questions, checked weekly, and a short list of things to publish or fix. MarketHQ Lite covers 10 questions across six engines for $29 a month; Otterly.AI Lite covers 15 prompts across its four included engines for the same price.

Suites like Semrush and Ahrefs make sense when your team already lives in them for SEO and wants AI visibility in the same place.

Why does MarketHQ focus on developer-tool companies?

Developer buyers ask assistants and developer communities before they ask a vendor, so MarketHQ tracks both.

MarketHQ pairs the weekly AI-answer check with monitoring of Hacker News, GitHub, Stack Overflow, Dev.to, Lobsters and blogs on every plan, and Reddit, X, LinkedIn, YouTube, Product Hunt and Bluesky on paid plans. The weekly gap analysis turns questions where competitors are named and you are not into an action plan, and paid plans expose the data through a REST API and an MCP server.

How would a small team choose?

Illustrative example: a two-person growth team at an API company compares total cost for the engines it needs.

Illustrative example: the team wants ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity covered for about 10 questions. On MarketHQ Lite that is $29 a month with Gemini, Grok and DeepSeek included. On Otterly.AI Lite the base plan is also $29, and adding Claude starts at $29 more. If the team also needed Google AI Overviews, Otterly.AI would cover it and MarketHQ would not.

What are the limits of this comparison?

It covers only vendors whose pricing we could confirm, on one date.

Prices, prompt limits and engine lists in this category change month to month. The Ahrefs figures are our reading of add-on pricing and may differ by region. Several well-known tools are missing because their current plans were not confirmable from their own sites in September 2026, not because they are worse.