There is a question more B2B marketing leaders are asking in 2026 than almost any other. It sounds simple. It is not. Unlike traditional search, where a rank-tracking tool can tell you precisely where your website sits for a given keyword, generative AI answers are probabilistic, non-deterministic, and distributed across a half-dozen platforms with different training data, retrieval architectures, and update cycles. Two people asking the same question of ChatGPT on the same day may get answers that mention different brands. There is no page one. There is no position three.
The stakes are high enough that marketers have stopped waiting for clarity. In G2’s April 2026 survey of 1,076 B2B software buyers, 51% now start their software research with an AI chatbot — up from 29% just a year earlier. Gartner has predicted that traditional search volume will fall 25% by the end of 2026 as generative AI absorbs the queries that used to go to Google. And Similarweb data shows AI-generated referral traffic to B2B sites has more than tripled in the past year. But visibility is only the opening move. Idea Grove’s 2026 research on how consumers verify AI-recommended brands found that only 2% of consumers will buy from an unfamiliar brand based on an AI recommendation alone — the other 98% immediately go looking for reviews, press coverage, and other trust signals. Getting your brand into AI answers creates the opportunity. Everything else determines whether it converts.
That urgency has produced a new software category almost overnight. G2’s answer engine optimization (AEO) category launched in March 2025 with seven products. By January 2026 it had more than 150. Most of them are not equally credible. What follows is a ranked guide to the platforms doing the most serious work in AI visibility and LLM brand monitoring right now — who each one is best suited for, what it actually measures, and where it falls short.
Profound is the most heavily funded pure-play AI visibility platform in the category. The company raised a $96 million Series C at a $1 billion valuation in February 2026 — bringing its total funding to $155 million — and counts Lightspeed Venture Partners among its backers. That level of investment has produced a platform with genuine depth.
Profound tracks nine or more AI engines: ChatGPT, Gemini, Google AI Overviews, Google AI Mode, Perplexity, Claude, Copilot, Grok, and DeepSeek. Its distinguishing features include Agent Analytics (attribution from server logs, not just prompting), the Profound Index (a weekly ranking across 12 industries built from 400 million-plus real consumer conversations), and Prompt Volume estimates — an attempt to answer how often relevant queries are actually being asked, not just whether your brand appears in them.
The platform carries SOC 2 Type II and HIPAA certifications, supports single sign-on, and has case studies with brands like Shopify and Airbyte. Pricing ranges from $99 per month for ChatGPT-only tracking to $499 and up for multi-platform coverage; enterprise tiers are custom.
Goodie is the broadest-coverage purpose-built platform available to teams outside of agency-proprietary tooling. Founded by Mostafa ElBermawy, it monitors 11 or more AI surfaces simultaneously: ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, Grok, DeepSeek, Meta AI, Copilot, Amazon Rufus, and others. That breadth matters because citation patterns are not uniform across platforms — a brand cited regularly in Perplexity may be largely absent from ChatGPT, owing to differences in retrieval architecture and training data weighting.
Goodie tracks share of voice within AI answers, brand mention sentiment, citation source attribution, and competitive benchmarking. It carries SOC 2 Type II certification and integrates into agency workflows. Pricing runs approximately $199 to $495 or more per month. Case studies include SteelSeries (3.2x AI search conversions in six months) and NoGood (335% AI-traffic lift and 48 high-value leads in a single quarter).
Otterly is the most widely adopted mid-market tool in this category. More than 20,000 marketing professionals use it, and it has earned recognition from G2, OMR, and Gartner. Plans range from $29 per month for a lightweight 15-prompt setup to $989 per month for the Pro tier. The platform tracks six AI platforms across more than 50 countries, with Google AI Mode and Gemini available as paid add-ons.
Otterly’s GEO Audit feature analyzes more than 25 on-page factors that influence AI citation likelihood, making it one of the more actionable tools for content teams rather than just analytics teams. Per Otterly’s own research, 15% of website traffic now originates from AI agents and bots — with ChatGPT accounting for 56% of AI search referral traffic, Gemini at 18%, and Perplexity at 8%. For teams that need a real monitoring setup without enterprise-level budget, Otterly is the clearest on-ramp.
Peec AI is a European startup that has moved surprisingly fast since launching in mid-2025. The company reached €650K in annual recurring revenue within four months, raised a €18 million Series A led by Singular in November 2025, and counts Wix, Glide, and Merge among its customers. Crystal Carter, Head of SEO Communications at Wix, has said the platform allows them to pinpoint the exact types of content surfaced in specific LLMs.
Peec tracks ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Copilot, Google AI Mode, and AI Overviews across 115-plus languages — the most internationally capable platform on this list. Pricing ranges from €85 to €505 per month depending on prompt volume and platform coverage. For mid-market teams that want strong coverage without Profound’s enterprise pricing or complexity, Peec is one of the most credible options currently available.
AthenaHQ emerged from stealth in 2025 and is backed by Y Combinator, with founding team members from Google Search and DeepMind. Its distinguishing product is the Athena Citation Engine (ACE), which combines prompt-based auditing with proprietary Prompt Volume estimates and an Action Center that generates specific content and PR recommendations based on citation gaps.
AthenaHQ also tracks “competitor impersonation” — instances where LLMs describe your brand using language or positioning that actually belongs to a competitor, or vice versa. That is a genuinely different kind of measurement from share-of-voice tracking, and it is more useful for brand teams than for SEO teams. Pricing starts at $295 per month for self-serve access; enterprise is custom. There is no free trial.
Semrush’s AI Toolkit is available standalone at $99 per month per domain or bundled inside Semrush One at $199 to $549 per month. It tracks brand visibility in AI Overviews and integrates with Semrush’s existing organic research infrastructure — an advantage for teams that already live inside the Semrush ecosystem and want to add AI Overview visibility without adopting a new platform.
The limitation is scope: Semrush’s AI tracking is primarily Google-centric and does not cover ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Claude with the same depth as purpose-built tools. For brands whose primary AI visibility concern is Google AI Overviews specifically, it is the most practical starting point available.
BrightEdge launched the first version of its Generative Parser on December 19, 2023 — one of the earliest enterprise responses to the category — and has since evolved it into BrightEdge AI Catalyst, which tracks ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews within the same enterprise dashboard that already covers traditional SEO performance.
BrightEdge claims that 57% of Fortune 100 companies use its platform, which gives it a benchmarking dataset that newer tools cannot replicate. For large organizations already in the BrightEdge ecosystem — with complex site architectures, multi-brand portfolios, and SEO teams that need to see AI visibility and traditional rankings in one place — AI Catalyst is the most operationally coherent option. It is enterprise-priced with no self-serve tier.
Authoritas, a UK-based SEO platform, offers one of the most methodologically sophisticated AI tracking modules in the category. Its tool monitors seven AI engines — Google AI Overviews, Bing Copilot, SearchGPT, ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and a retail module that handles SKU and product feed ingestion — and allows teams to run large-scale query studies rather than simply tracking a fixed prompt list.
That query-level methodology is closer to what the research-focused PR and AI visibility agencies do internally. Rather than asking “is my brand mentioned,” Authoritas enables more precise investigation: In what types of queries does my brand appear? What citations precede my mention? What competitor is named when I am not? A free plan is available; paid tiers surface via demo.
Scrunch targets mid-to-large enterprises and agencies with its Agent Experience Platform (AXP) — a system that delivers AI-optimized content directly to LLMs rather than simply monitoring citation patterns after the fact. That positions Scrunch as more of an optimization tool than a measurement tool, though it does both.
The platform is SOC 2 Type II certified and offers a 7-day free trial. Pricing starts at $250 per month for the Core plan and $500 per month for the Agency Core tier, with enterprise custom pricing above that. For brands that have moved past the measurement phase and want a platform built around active citation improvement, Scrunch is one of the few options with the infrastructure to support it.
Evertune is built exclusively for Fortune 500 brands and is not accessible to teams without enterprise budgets. Its proprietary AI Brand Index processes more than one million prompts per brand per month and combines API-based testing with a 25-million-person consumer panel — a hybrid methodology that captures both the LLM response and the human perception of it.
Starting price is reportedly $3,000 or more per month, custom-only. Evertune’s strongest category presence is in automotive, financial services, healthcare, and B2B software, where brand perception in AI is both high-stakes and heavily regulated. For brands where reputational risk in LLM outputs is a legal or compliance concern, not just a marketing one, Evertune’s scale of data collection is difficult to replicate with lighter-weight tools.
HubSpot’s AEO Grader is the most accessible entry point in the category — it is free and requires no account to run. It scores a brand across five dimensions (sentiment, presence quality, brand recognition, share of voice, and market competition) across ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini, and generates a prioritized recommendation list.
The free version is a useful diagnostic. The paid HubSpot AEO product ($50 per month with a 28-day free trial) adds continuous tracking and more detailed guidance. For teams that are genuinely starting from zero — no AI visibility tracking in place, unclear where to begin — the AEO Grader is the right first step, not a final solution.
Brandwatch’s approach to LLM monitoring is different from every other tool on this list. Rather than interrogating AI platforms through structured prompting, its Trajaan integration monitors how leading LLMs cite brands across thousands of prompts worldwide, with a particular focus on how those citations then spread across the broader web.
This downstream tracking — capturing what happens after an LLM mentions a brand, as those mentions circulate in the wild — addresses a gap the prompting-based tools don’t cover. For brand reputation teams who need to catch cases where an LLM has generated inaccurate or outdated information that is then being shared as fact, Brandwatch’s approach is the most useful one on this list. The platform also powers PR Newswire’s AEO & GEO Brand Report, launched in April 2026. Pricing is enterprise-negotiated.
The category is evolving faster than most marketing technology categories, and the vendor landscape will look different again in six months. A few criteria are worth applying to any evaluation.
Query methodology. Ask how the vendor generates the prompts it uses to test visibility. AI visibility is not primarily a branded search problem — it is a category authority problem. The difference between a tool that runs a handful of branded queries and one that builds a representative set of category-level, competitor-comparison, and problem-based queries is enormous.
Attribution to source. The most actionable data tells you not just whether your brand appears but why — which publications, which content assets, and which third-party citations are driving your inclusion. Without source attribution, you have a scoreboard but no playbook.
Platform coverage versus depth. Some tools cover more AI platforms; others go deeper on fewer. A B2B buyer evaluating enterprise software is far more likely to be on ChatGPT or Perplexity than on Amazon Rufus. Coverage of platforms your buyers do not use is less valuable than depth on the ones they do.
Freshness. LLM behavior changes as models update and as retrieval systems pull from different source sets. A point-in-time audit is less useful than continuous monitoring, particularly in categories where competitive dynamics are shifting quickly.
The broader lesson is that measurement and strategy, in the AI visibility context, are not sequential activities. The brands using these tools most effectively are using citation source data to inform earned media strategy, identifying competitor citation patterns to find gaps, and tracking the impact of specific content investments on share of voice in AI answers over time. The tool just makes it visible.
A dashboard that tells you where you’re missing is only useful if you know what to do about it. That’s where most in-house teams stall — not for lack of data, but for lack of a strategy to act on it.
Idea Grove is a B2B PR and AI visibility agency that specializes in exactly this problem. The firm helps technology, manufacturing and other B2B brands build the earned media presence, third-party citations, and content authority that AI systems draw on when generating answers — turning AI visibility scores from a report card into a roadmap. If you’re investing in one of the tools above and want a team that knows how to work from those insights, Idea Grove is worth a conversation.