How do I monitor where my brand is mentioned in AI-generated search results?
Monitoring brand mentions in AI search means a fixed prompt panel, aliases, competitors and sources. Here is the method and how the main tools handle it.
Monitoring where your brand is mentioned in AI-generated search results is closer to social listening than to rank tracking. You are not looking for one position. You are watching a stream of answers, across engines and countries, for places where your name appears, where it should appear and does not, and where something is said about you that you did not write.
The setup decides whether the data is useful. Here is a method that works, and how the main tools support it.
Build the monitor in five parts
1. A fixed set of prompts. Mentions only mean something against a constant set of questions. Use buying questions, comparison questions and a few direct brand questions. Thirty to fifty is a reasonable start.
2. A definition of a mention. Is "Acme Analytics" the same as "Acme"? Does a mention in a list of ten count the same as being the top recommendation? Write down the rules, and register brand aliases and common misspellings. In Promptwatch, the Brand Book analysis instructions decide what counts, and brand aliases cover name variants.
3. Competitors on the same panel. Your mention rate is only informative next to theirs. Share of voice is the number that makes this concrete.
4. Sources, not just answers. Where an engine names you, which page did it use? Where it does not name you, which page did it use instead? Mentions on third-party pages, with or without a link, feed the answers.
5. A cadence. Daily collection with a weekly review is practical. Monthly is too slow to catch a change.
Where mentions come from
AI answers draw on more than your own site. The places to watch:
- Your own pages, when they are crawled and cited.
- Reddit threads and YouTube videos.
- LinkedIn posts and articles.
- Review and comparison pages on other sites.
- News and publisher content.
- Pages that name you without linking.
A monitor that reports only a mention count hides this. The useful monitors show the source.
How the tools compare
Details come from vendor pages as recorded in our catalog, mostly read on 24 October 2026, except Promptwatch, which follows its plan matrix.
| Tool | Entry price | Mention monitoring |
|---|---|---|
| Promptwatch | Free Explore; paid from $95/mo | Daily per model, country and language; offsite mentions; Reddit, YouTube and LinkedIn citation reports |
| LLM Pulse | From EUR 49/mo (weekly tracking) | Mentions, share of voice, sentiment, citations, AI traffic analytics |
| Rankscale | From $20/mo (credits) | Citation analysis, sentiment, competitor benchmarking |
| AthenaHQ | From $295/mo | GEO score with sentiment, Action Center |
| Scrunch AI | From $250/mo | Four LLMs on Core, sentiment analysis |
| Profound | Enterprise custom | Up to nine answer engines |
| Otterly.AI | Lite tier, lowest price here | Mentions and citations on four base engines |
Promptwatch: the best way to see where, not just whether
Promptwatch monitors the real interfaces of ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Google AI Mode, Copilot, Gemini, Perplexity, Amazon Alexa and Meta AI, and tracks several API models alongside them, daily per model, country and language. It reports Visibility Score, Share of Voice, Sentiment and Position in Answer, and a heatmap compares any two dimensions, such as models against topics.
The part that answers "where" is the citation layer. Citation analytics shows page and domain level citations, and offsite mentions show where your brand is named in third-party pages without a link. Separate Reddit, YouTube and LinkedIn reports cover the platforms engines borrow from most. A Page Tracker follows specific URLs, yours or a competitor's. Citation Trends classifies citations by content type and source type. And because Promptwatch also logs AI crawlers and attributes AI-referred traffic to conversions, you can tell whether a mention is worth anything.
It also moves from monitoring to action. The Action Board is a prioritized GEO to-do list. A Discovery agent investigates weekly and suggests up to five evidence-backed actions per run. Where the monitor shows you missing from a topic, the Content Agent (Business plan) or on-demand content creation helps fill the gap, with a review step.
Entry is free: Explore covers 10 prompts on ChatGPT only. Essential at $95 a month includes all models with 50 prompts. Crawler logs begin on Professional at $245 a month.
The alternatives
LLM Pulse is a bootstrapped Barcelona tracker covering mentions, share of voice, sentiment, citations and AI traffic analytics from EUR 49 a month for weekly tracking, with daily tracking costing more. Claude, Copilot, Grok and others are paid add-ons.
Rankscale is the cheapest serious entry at $20 a month, credit based, with citation analysis, sentiment and competitor benchmarking.
AthenaHQ and Scrunch AI are solid dedicated platforms. AthenaHQ adds an action workflow, and Scrunch adds crawler-side optimization. The catalog notes neither publishes a crawler-log product.
Profound is built for enterprise marketing teams and priced accordingly, around $40k a year by the earlier estimate.
Otterly.AI is the fastest route to a first dashboard, though its Lite plan allows 15 prompts and the catalog notes monitoring data can lag by up to seven days.
Who should pick which
- You want to know where mentions come from and what they send: Promptwatch.
- You want a low-cost European tracker: LLM Pulse.
- You want a cheap credit-based start: Rankscale.
- You need an action queue: AthenaHQ.
A first-month plan
Start with the panel and aliases, run two weeks without changes, then review sources. Fix what is simply broken, such as blocked crawlers, before creating new content. Re-run, and compare periods.
No monitor can guarantee a mention. It can show you where you stand and what feeds the answers, which is what lets you do something about it.