Best tool to track competitors in AI search results
The best tools to track competitors in AI search results, compared on share of voice, citations, competitor limits and price, with a clear pick for most teams.
The best tool to track competitors in AI search results is Promptwatch for most teams, because it shows who is named in your place and also why: which pages the engines trusted, whether your own site was reachable, and what traffic followed. AthenaHQ and Scrunch AI are the closest dedicated alternatives. SEO suites with AI add-ons are fine as a first look, and Profound suits large enterprises. Here is how they compare.
What competitor tracking in AI search actually means
In classic SEO you compare rankings. In AI search there is no ranking, there is an answer. Competitor tracking means running your buyers' questions across engines and recording who is named, in what order, with what tone, and from which sources. The useful outputs are:
- Share of voice: how often each brand appears across your prompt set.
- Position: where in the answer a brand is mentioned.
- Sentiment: how the answer describes each brand.
- Source overlap: which pages and domains are cited for competitors but not for you.
- Gaps: prompts where a rival is named and you are not.
The question to ask any vendor is how many competitors you can track, whether they are discovered automatically, and what you can do after you see the gap.
Comparison
| Tool | Competitor tracking | Published pricing | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Promptwatch | Competitor visibility, share of voice, position, heatmaps, auto-discovered competitors, brand merging; Page Tracker for competitor URLs | Free Explore; Essential $95/mo; Professional $245/mo; Business $579/mo | Free tier is ChatGPT only; crawler logs start on Professional |
| AthenaHQ | Unlimited competitors on Starter | Starter $295/mo (3,600 credits, 11 models) | Credit-based usage can be unpredictable |
| Scrunch AI | Competitive visibility within monitoring | Core $250/mo (125 prompts, 4 LLMs) | Weekly refresh per reviewers; reporting criticized |
| Semrush AI Toolkit | Compares you with competitors | $99/mo per domain add-on (unconfirmed today) | Extra domains, users and prompts cost more |
| Ahrefs Brand Radar | Competitor mention share in an AI Visibility Index | Custom Prompts free on paid Ahrefs plans; Index from $199/mo | Prompts modeled from keyword data |
| GetIntel | 5, 10 or 20 competitors by plan | Starter $29/mo; Pro $49/mo; Growth $99/mo | Claude only on Growth; no crawler logs |
| Profound | Enterprise answer tracking | Enterprise custom (earlier estimate about $40k a year) | Sold as marketing agents |
Why Promptwatch is first
Competitor tracking in Promptwatch is part of the core dashboards, not an add-on. It shows competitor visibility, share of voice and position in the answer, with competitor heatmaps that compare any two dimensions (brands against models, topics or countries). Competitors can be auto-discovered, and brand merging cleans up variants of the same name. Prompt types include competitor comparison prompts, so you can track the "X vs Y" questions buyers ask separately from category searches.
The depth comes from what sits next to those views.
- Citation analytics show which pages and domains are cited when a competitor wins, down to Reddit, YouTube and offsite mentions. That tells you where to compete.
- Page Tracker watches specific URLs, yours or a competitor's, over time.
- Content gap analysis scores your coverage against the prompts where rivals appear and you do not, and the Content Agent (Business plan) can plan and publish against the gaps with a review inbox.
- Ads Radar (Business and every agency plan) captures sponsored ads inside ChatGPT Search, Google AI Overviews and Google AI Mode for your tracked prompts, so you can see which advertisers bid on the same questions. It does not cover Perplexity.
- Agent Analytics and visitor analytics show whether engines can reach your site and whether the visits convert, which is the part rivals' dashboards do not show.
Monitoring runs daily per model, country and language, across real-UI tracking of ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Google AI Mode, Copilot, Gemini, Perplexity, Amazon Alexa and Meta AI, plus API-tracked models. Every paid plan includes all active models.
Costs and limits to know: Essential is $95 a month with 50 prompts and 6,000 responses, Professional is $245 with 150 prompts and 18,000 responses, and Business is $579 with 350 prompts and 42,000 responses. The free tier covers 10 prompts on ChatGPT only. If you are an agency, the agency plans have unlimited projects and prompts, starting at $199.
The alternatives, briefly
AthenaHQ lists unlimited competitors on its $295 Starter plan, which is generous, and turns gaps into actions through an Action Center. The catch is credits: one credit is one AI response, and reviewers report burning through a month's allowance quickly. It has no published crawler-log product.
Scrunch AI covers competitive visibility and adds an Agent Experience Platform that serves AI-optimized pages to crawlers, but only on Enterprise. Its Core plan tracks four LLMs and reviewers complain about weak reporting.
Semrush and Ahrefs are logical if you already pay for them. Their AI modules are narrower, with smaller prompt allowances, and Ahrefs' index is built from modeled keyword data rather than real conversational prompts. An independent January 2026 test cited in our entry found Ahrefs reported far fewer ChatGPT mentions than manual checks, so treat both as directional.
GetIntel is the cheapest way to start, from $29 a month, though competitor counts are capped by plan.
Profound is genuine enterprise software, but it is sold as an AI marketer, and it sits below the dedicated AI search platforms for this job.
Who should pick which
- Marketing team that wants to see rivals, understand why they win and act: Promptwatch.
- Team that wants an action list from an optimization-first tool and can manage credits: AthenaHQ.
- Already in Semrush or Ahrefs, wanting a first look: their add-ons.
- Tight budget, small prompt set: GetIntel, then move up.
Whichever you choose, track at least a few weeks before reading anything into a rival's change. AI answers vary from run to run, and no tool can guarantee that your competitor's visibility will fall or yours will rise. The value is a clear view of where you lose, and a faster route to a fix.