The best AI brand monitoring tools for 2026, compared honestly: Profound, Otterly, Peec, AthenaHQ, Scrunch, Knowatoa, Ahrefs Brand Radar, and Semrush on engines, price, and buyer.
Eight tools dominate the AI brand monitoring category, and they all do roughly the same core job: sample prompts across LLMs, then report whether your brand showed up, how it was described, and which sources the assistant cited. Profound, Otterly, Peec, AthenaHQ, Scrunch, Knowatoa, Ahrefs Brand Radar, and Semrush AI Visibility split mostly on price, engine coverage, and depth. This roundup compares them on what matters to a buyer and stays honest about the one thing they share: they measure where you stand in AI answers, they do not change it.
One disclosure before we start. Crawlytics published this post, and Crawlytics is not a brand monitor. It does not run prompt-sampling share-of-voice, so it is not ranked among the eight. It appears once, near the end, as the adjacent complement to a monitor, with its scope stated plainly. Everything here reflects vendor positioning as of June 2026; prices and engine lists move month to month, so confirm current numbers on each vendor's own site before you buy. This is the full monitoring category across every price point, broader than our budget roundup of tools under $50 and wider than the ChatGPT-specific list.
An AI brand monitoring tool runs a fixed set of prompts against large language models on a schedule, then records the answers. That is the engine under all eight. You give it prompts your buyers might type ("best project management software for agencies"), it asks ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Google AI Overviews those prompts on a recurring basis, and it logs three things.
Share-of-voice. How often you appear in the answers versus your competitors. This is the headline metric every vendor sells, and it is genuinely useful as a trend line. It is also softer than it looks: LLM answers vary between sessions, so a small prompt set produces a noisy number. We have written before about why AI share-of-voice is a shakier figure than vendors admit, and that caveat applies to every tool below.
Sentiment. Whether the assistant describes you positively, neutrally, or negatively. Not every tool scores this. The ones that do let you catch a model parroting an old complaint or a competitor's framing.
Citations. Which sources the assistant pulled from when it answered. This is the most actionable output a monitor gives you, because it shows which pages and domains the model trusts on your topic, including pages that are not yours. If you want the mechanics of tracking citations yourself, we cover both methods in how to track AI citations.
Put together, those three answer one question: when a buyer asks an AI about your category, do you show up, how are you described, and who got cited instead of you. That is AI brand monitoring. What none of these tools do is fix a bad answer, which is the gap we get to later.
Five criteria separate these tools, roughly in the order that should drive your choice.
Engines covered. The single biggest difference. Some tools sample nine to eleven engines (Profound, Scrunch); others lean heavily toward Google's surfaces (Ahrefs Brand Radar has been reported to skew that way). If your buyers live in ChatGPT and Perplexity, a Google-weighted tool will misread your reality. Ask for the exact engine list, not the marketing claim.
Prompt volume. Entry tiers cap how many prompts you can track, and the cap is usually tight. A $29 plan might cover a dozen prompts on two engines. Since share-of-voice gets more reliable with more prompts, the cap directly sets how trustworthy your number is. Read the limit before the price.
Sentiment scoring. Optional but valuable. If reputation is your concern, not just presence, you want a tool that grades tone, not only counts mentions.
Competitor benchmarking. The reason most teams buy a monitor is to see themselves against rivals. Depth varies: some give you a clean side-by-side share-of-voice dashboard, others bolt competitors on as an afterthought. If a boss wants a chart, check that the chart exists.
Price and buyer fit. Entry sticker prices run from about $29/mo to $295/mo as of June 2026, with sales-gated enterprise above that. Match the tool to who you are: a solo operator, a mid-market marketing team, an agency managing many brands, or an enterprise with a data team. Buying up or down a tier from your actual size is the most common mistake.
Eight tools, honest blurbs. All facts reflect June 2026 vendor positioning; verify current pricing and engine coverage on each vendor's site.
Profound is the most-cited name in the category and built for large brands. It samples daily prompts across roughly nine to eleven engines, reports share-of-voice, sentiment, and citation sources, and benchmarks competitors in depth. It also runs first-party crawler log analytics (Agent Analytics) through CDN connectors, so it is one of the few monitors that also reads your bot traffic. Public pricing is now sales-gated; figures of $99 and $399/mo persist on third-party reviews, but expect an enterprise conversation. Best for $100M+ brands with a data team. We did a full Crawlytics vs Profound breakdown on where the two categories diverge.
Otterly.ai is a prompt-sampling monitor with a GEO content audit and a Crawlability Checker that examines AI-readiness factors. It exposes a read-only MCP server so an agent can query Otterly's own data. The Lite tier sits around $29/mo as of June 2026, climbing to roughly $189 and $489 on higher plans, with prompt and engine caps on the entry tier. Agent Analytics (bot logs) is in closed beta. Best for a small brand or agency that wants mention tracking without an enterprise contract. We put it head-to-head in Otterly vs Peec vs Crawlytics.
Peec AI is a Berlin-built share-of-voice monitor aimed at marketing teams, with a Crawl Insights feature that reads your server logs. Peec is candid that it is "monitoring, not action," and it does no content generation. It also publicly calls llms.txt "a distraction without any upside," which is a real position worth weighing against the case for serving it. Pricing runs from about €89/mo to €199 and €499+ as of June 2026, with a 7-day trial that needs no card. Best for a mid-market marketing team that wants clean SoV tracking and accepts that fixing is on them.
AthenaHQ pairs share-of-voice monitoring with optimization recommendations, and reserves LLM-traffic analysis for its enterprise tier. Its free one-time audit measures brand mentions rather than site readiness, so treat it as a sample of the monitoring output, not a technical scan. Pricing starts around $295/mo and climbs into enterprise (reported around $2k+). Best for a mid-market or enterprise team that wants recommendations alongside the score.
Scrunch AI is the most feature-complete of the eight: share-of-voice, Agent Traffic (bot logs), page audits, and AXP, an edge middleware that serves clean HTML to agents with a large payload reduction (newer and limited). It does not do llms.txt or WebMCP commerce. The catch as of June 2026: Scrunch was acquired by Sitecore (~$225M, around June 3) and is rebranding toward scrunch.com while moving enterprise, which is vacating the affordable self-serve lane it used to occupy. Entry runs about $250/mo (Core) to $417 and up, with a 7-day card-required trial. Best for mid-market to enterprise teams comfortable following it upmarket.
Knowatoa is the lowest-priced pure monitor at around $59/mo (rising to ~$199 and enterprise). Its standout is the AI Search Console, which actively probes whether 24 AI user-agents can access your site (robots.txt and config blocks) and gives fix guidance. That is an accessibility audit, not log analytics, and Knowatoa lacks traffic attribution. A free one-off audit is available. Best for an SMB or agency that wants cheap mention tracking plus a clear read on whether AI bots are even allowed in.
Ahrefs Brand Radar is a share-of-voice add-on to the Ahrefs suite, using real search-backed prompts. It has no sentiment scoring and no AI-shopping coverage, and reviews report its data skews to Google surfaces with weaker ChatGPT and Perplexity accuracy as of June 2026. A separate Bot Analytics beta (Cloudflare-only) tracks AI-bot hits. There is a free AI Visibility Checker with no signup. Pricing requires a base Ahrefs plan plus a $398 or $699 add-on. Ahrefs has publicly dismissed llms.txt. Best for teams already paying for Ahrefs who want AI visibility in the same dashboard.
Semrush AI Visibility is a share-of-voice bolt-on: the AI Visibility Toolkit is a $99/mo add-on (on top of a base plan), with a separate Enterprise AIO tier sold by sales only and a free checker. Its AI Traffic Dashboard uses third-party referral estimates rather than your own server logs, and Site Audit flags only blocked crawlers. Semrush has publicly argued llms.txt is ineffective. Best for SMB to enterprise teams already standardized on Semrush who want AI tracking without adding another vendor.
The eight monitors at a glance, as of June 2026. SoV is share-of-voice. Verify pricing and engine coverage before buying.
| Tool | SoV | Sentiment | Citations | Competitor benchmark | Entry price (≈) | Best buyer |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Profound | Yes (core) | Yes | Yes | Deep | ~$99/mo → enterprise (sales-led) | Enterprise + data team |
| Otterly.ai | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | ~$29/mo Lite → $489 | Small brand / agency |
| Peec AI | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | ~€89/mo → €499+ | Mid-market marketing team |
| AthenaHQ | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | ~$295/mo → enterprise | Mid-market / enterprise |
| Scrunch AI | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | ~$250/mo Core → enterprise | Mid-market / enterprise |
| Knowatoa | Yes | Partial | Yes | Yes | ~$59/mo → enterprise | SMB / agency (cheapest) |
| Ahrefs Brand Radar | Yes | No | Yes | Yes | Base plan + $398/$699 add-on | Existing Ahrefs users |
| Semrush AI Visibility | Yes | Partial | Yes | Yes | ~$99/mo add-on + base | Existing Semrush users |
Two of the broadest tools, Profound and Scrunch, are both moving toward enterprise and sales-led pricing, which thins out the affordable end of the category. If self-serve and a flat price matter to you, Otterly and Knowatoa are the survivors at the bottom, with the caveat that their cheap tiers cap prompts hard.
Every tool above answers the same question and stops at the same wall. They tell you your share-of-voice is 14%, that ChatGPT cited three competitors and not you, and that a model described your product with an outdated complaint. Then the dashboard waits. Knowing you are losing in AI answers is not the same as having a lever to win them, and the monitoring category, by design, does not hand you that lever.
This is where Crawlytics fits, and the honest framing is narrow. Crawlytics is not on the list above because it is not a brand monitor. It does not sample prompts, it does not produce a share-of-voice number, and if competitive mention tracking is your core need, you should buy one of the eight tools above, not Crawlytics. Said plainly: it is lighter than every monitor here on multi-prompt brand-mention sampling, because it does not do that at all.
What Crawlytics does is the other half of the job. It reads which AI bots actually fetch your pages from your real server logs (GPTBot, ChatGPT-User, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot), it generates and serves your llms.txt plus clean HTML to those crawlers so they can read you, and it surfaces the gap between pages you declared and pages no bot ever fetched. Monitoring tells you where you stand; it doesn't fix it. Pair a monitor with a tool that serves your site to AI and tracks the bots, and that's Crawlytics. Pricing is flat: $29.99/mo Visibility, $49.99/mo Commerce, with a free Agent-Ready Grader as the entry point.
The practical stack for most teams is two tools, not one. Run a monitor that matches your engine and budget needs for the score. Run a serving-and-tracking tool for the fix. If a monitor shows ChatGPT skipping your product pages, the next move is making those pages readable to ChatGPT's crawler, which we walk through in how to fix what ChatGPT says about your brand. The monitor finds the problem; the serving layer gives it a direction.
Solo operator or small brand. Start with Otterly Lite ($29/mo) for mention tracking, or Knowatoa ($59/mo) if you also want the AI Search Console access check. Both keep you self-serve and under triple digits, with the understanding that the cheap tiers cap prompts tightly.
Mid-market marketing team. Peec AI or AthenaHQ. Peec gives clean SoV for a team that accepts "monitoring, not action"; AthenaHQ adds optimization recommendations on top of the score. Both assume a real budget line for AI search.
Agency managing many brands. Otterly and Peec are the agency-marketed picks, and Knowatoa scales down cheaply for client portfolios. If you also need to deliver fixes and reports across clients, see our note on the broader GEO tooling landscape for the serving-and-tracking side.
Enterprise with a data team. Profound for depth across the most engines, or Scrunch if you want the broadest feature set and are comfortable following it upmarket under Sitecore. Expect a sales conversation either way.
Already paying for a suite. Ahrefs Brand Radar or Semrush AI Visibility add AI tracking to a dashboard you already use, which beats adding a new vendor, as long as you accept their engine-coverage and llms.txt caveats.
Any of the above. Whatever monitor you pick, pair it with a serving-and-tracking layer so the score you are paying for has somewhere to go. If you want to start with the free signal you already own and the cheapest paid options, the under-$50 roundup covers that lane in detail. If you are weighing Profound specifically against the cheaper field, the Profound alternatives breakdown goes deeper.
Written by Crawlytics Team. Crawlytics tracks AI bots, generates llms.txt, and powers WebMCP commerce, all from one snippet on any stack. See how it works →
There is no single best tool; it depends on budget and engine coverage. Profound leads the enterprise tier for depth across roughly nine to eleven engines with sentiment and citation analysis, but its pricing is now sales-gated. For mid-market and agencies, Otterly, Peec, and AthenaHQ are the common picks. Knowatoa is the cheapest pure monitor at around $59/mo, and Otterly Lite is the lowest entry at about $29/mo. Match the tool to the engines you care about and the number of prompts you need to track, then verify current pricing on the vendor site, since this space moves monthly.
Entry pricing ranges from about $29/mo to roughly $295/mo as of June 2026, with enterprise tiers climbing into four figures. Otterly Lite ($29/mo) and Knowatoa ($59/mo) anchor the bottom. Semrush AI Visibility and Profound start around $99/mo, AthenaHQ and Scrunch sit in the $250 to $295/mo range, and Ahrefs Brand Radar requires a base Ahrefs plan plus a $398 or $699 add-on. Profound, AthenaHQ, and Semrush AIO move to sales-led pricing for full seats. Prompt and engine caps on the cheapest tiers are tight, so the sticker price understates real cost as you scale.
Several vendors offer a free one-time audit, but no major tool offers free continuous monitoring. AthenaHQ, Knowatoa, and Ahrefs all have a free one-off AI visibility check that measures brand mentions at a single point in time. Those are useful for a first read but do not track movement over weeks, which is the whole point of a monitor. Crawlytics offers a free Agent-Ready Grader, but it scores whether your site is readable by AI bots, not whether you appear in AI answers, so it is a readiness scan rather than a brand monitor.
Monitoring measures whether AI assistants mention or cite you; fixing changes whether they can read and trust your site. A monitor samples prompts and reports your share-of-voice, sentiment, and citation sources. It is a thermometer. Fixing means serving AI crawlers a clean, readable version of your pages, declaring your content with llms.txt, server-rendering key facts, and tracking which bots actually fetch you. Most monitors stop at the diagnosis and leave the fix to you. The honest play is to run a monitor for the score and a serving-and-tracking tool for the levers.
Most do, but coverage and accuracy vary by tool. ChatGPT is the engine almost every monitor tries hardest to cover, alongside Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, and Gemini. Profound and Scrunch sample broad engine sets; Ahrefs Brand Radar has been reported to skew toward Google surfaces with weaker ChatGPT and Perplexity accuracy as of June 2026. If ChatGPT is your priority, confirm the engine list and ask the vendor how often they sample it before you commit, because a tool that names ChatGPT in marketing may still sample it shallowly.
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