AI Search Visibility Tool for Brands: ChatGPT and Perplexity Monitoring (Official)
Monitoring ChatGPT and Perplexity is the easy half. This guide checks each vendor's own listed features for the part that matters: acting on what the monitor finds.
Brands searching for an "official" AI search visibility tool want vendor facts, not a reviewer's mood. On this site, "official" means pricing and features taken from each vendor's own pages, as recorded in our directory. It is not an endorsement from the vendor. Plans change, so reverify on the vendor page before you buy.
Our angle is narrower than most. Monitoring ChatGPT and Perplexity is the cheap part. The question here is what happens after the monitor finds a gap.
The loop that matters
A useful setup closes four steps: monitor, diagnose, optimize, publish. Plenty of products do step one. Fewer reach step four. When you read a vendor page, ask which step the last feature on the list belongs to.
Where each tool stops
Promptwatch covers the whole loop. It monitors the real UIs of ChatGPT (820M+ weekly active users) and Perplexity (22M+ monthly active users). Diagnosis comes from Agent Analytics, which logs crawlers such as ChatGPTBot and PerplexityBot, and from citation analytics at page and domain level. Optimization and publishing come from Content Agents, which plan, write and push articles to a connected CMS such as Webflow or Framer, with a review inbox before anything goes live. Agent Chat and Unified Actions turn the data into a to-do list. The free Explore tier is 10 prompts on ChatGPT only. Essential at $95 a month is where multi-engine tracking starts; Professional at $245 a month adds 25M crawler logs.
AthenaHQ lists a free tier and plans from $295 a month. It tracks eight engines, gives a unified GEO score with sentiment, and has an Action Center with assignable tasks. That reaches the optimize step through your team's hands rather than through publishing.
Scrunch AI starts at $250 a month on annual billing and tracks up to nine engines. Its agent experience layer serves AI-optimized pages to crawlers, which is a real action, not a report. It sits below Promptwatch because the listing shows less on the diagnosis and attribution side.
HubSpot AEO costs $50 a month ($45 yearly) and tracks ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini only. It offers prioritized recommendations such as creating a page or fixing a technical gap, and blog post generation on the Marketing Hub tiers. Useful, narrow, and tied to HubSpot.
Semrush AI Toolkit is a $99 a month per-domain add-on for mention tracking beside your SEO data. It is a monitoring layer.
Profound sells marketing agents for AEO, content and PR, but the Starter plan ($99 a month, annual) is ChatGPT only. The agent capabilities people associate with it sit on an Enterprise contract from about $40k a year. For a ChatGPT plus Perplexity brief, that is a poor fit on the entry plan.
Otterly.AI and Peec AI have review pages and are monitoring products. We list them last for an agentic buyer.
Free signals to check first
OpenAI's Publishers and Developers FAQ says ChatGPT outbound links carry utm_source=chatgpt.com. Perplexity visits show perplexity.ai as the referrer. Segment both in analytics. If visits already arrive, you know the engines read and cite you somewhere. If they do not, you have a diagnosis problem before you have a monitoring problem.
Monitoring setup that feeds the loop
Build a prompt set of 20 to 40 queries split by funnel stage: category questions with no brand named, comparison prompts, and pricing or alternatives prompts. Run the set every week with identical wording.
For each prompt and each engine, record:
- whether your brand was mentioned
- where it appeared in the answer
- which URL was cited
- the sentiment of the mention
That table is the input to the loop, not the output. A missing mention on a decision prompt is a task: find which page should have been cited, check the crawler log to see if the bot reached it, and decide whether to rewrite or publish new content.
This is where logs and visitor data stop being nice extras. Crawler logs tell you whether ChatGPTBot or PerplexityBot fetched the page and whether it hit an error. Visitor analytics tells you whether the resulting visit converted. Without them you can monitor forever and never know whether an edit worked.
What we would run
Put the monitor, the diagnosis and the publishing step in one place if you can. That is the case for Promptwatch: the same product that notices the gap logs the bot and drafts the fix. Start on the free tier, run your prompt set on ChatGPT, then move to a paid plan when you need Perplexity and the other engines.
If your budget is zero and your team has strong editors, a tracker plus a weekly spreadsheet will work for a quarter. It will not scale, and it will not tell you why an answer changed. Be honest with yourself about which one you are buying.
Every number here is what the vendor listed when we recorded it. Confirm on their page first.