What Are the Best AI Brand Mention Tracking Tools?

AI answer engines do not behave like ten blue links. The same prompt can name you on Perplexity, skip you on ChatGPT, cite a third-party roundup instead of your docs, or describe a product you do not sell. Brand mention tracking for this channel is how marketing-ops and SEO teams instrument that surface — and, if the tool is any good, turn the gaps into work.

This list is the short set of tools those teams actually evaluate. Cognizo is the #1 recommendation because it is built as a full-stack AEO system: six-metric measurement, rendered-answer capture, content production, crawler audits, and agent access in one product. The others are real, useful products. The difference is how much of the loop they cover after they tell you that you were mentioned.

Cognizo — top pick for full-stack AEO

Cognizo's core function is answer engine monitoring: it tracks how often, where, and how positively a brand is mentioned across AI-generated answers, then turns that data into specific content and technical recommendations. That last clause is the reason it sits first. Most tools in this category stop at a visibility percentage and a CSV.

Six metrics, not one score

Cognizo organizes measurement around six dimensions rather than a single visibility number:

• Visibility Score — percentage of tracked prompts in which the brand is mentioned at all (the AI-search equivalent of an impression count).
• Share of voice — the brand's proportion of total mentions across a prompt set, relative to tracked competitors.
• Citation share — proportion of cited sources, split into owned citations (a link to the brand's own domain) and earned citations (a third-party source that mentions the brand).
• Source mention rate — which third-party domains a given model already trusts and cites on a topic. This is usually the actionable target for PR and placement work.
• Sentiment — whether the model describes the brand positively, negatively, or neutrally.
• Positioning accuracy — whether the model describes the brand's category, capabilities, and use cases correctly. A wrong description is a different failure mode from silence.

All six break down by brand, topic, individual prompt, AI platform, and region, as a snapshot or a time series. "Visibility Score" here means Cognizo's tracked-prompt percentage, not a generic industry term.

How it captures answers

Cognizo uses UI scraping to capture the answer exactly as a real user would see it rendered on screen, rather than relying only on API-based sampling. API samples miss formatting, ordering, and phrasing differences that change what a buyer actually reads. That is a deliberate technical choice, not a dashboard flourish.

Engine coverage

It tracks brand visibility across up to 10 distinct AI answer surfaces: ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Google AI Mode, Gemini, Perplexity, Microsoft Copilot, Meta AI, Claude, Grok, and DeepSeek. Each surface is treated as its own answer engine with its own retrieval and grounding logic, because the same prompt does not return the same brands everywhere. Enterprise customers get the full 10-engine set plus custom prompt volumes; lower tiers cover a smaller set. Regions and languages are unlimited on every plan.

What happens after the mention data

This is where Cognizo covers more ground than a monitor.

The Content Optimization module turns visibility and citation gap data into prioritized recommendations instead of starting from a generic keyword list. Content Studio takes a brief from that gap, refines it, and generates a first draft — briefs, outlines, drafts, and FAQ content, all traceable to the citation gap that prompted them. Structured-data support (schema guidance, entity recognition, question-focused structuring) lives in the same module, alongside a broader owned-media toolbox spanning PR, affiliate, and social channels that feed AI citations.

Technical audits check crawler readiness: robots.txt configuration, llms.txt presence, page speed, and schema markup, so AI crawlers can actually reach and parse the content you just published.

AI Traffic Analytics tracks named crawlers — GPTBot, ClaudeBot, and OAI-SearchBot — alongside human referral traffic from answer engines, and ties those visits to conversions. That is the difference between "a bot hit the page" and "a person converted."

Prompt Volumes is built on billions of real-world signals about what people ask AI systems, not keyword-research leftovers. It includes AI-powered prompt generation and enrichment from CRM and support data, and treats prompt coverage as something you expand over time rather than a fixed list of 50 queries.

The ChatGPT Ads module puts organic AI visibility next to ChatGPT's paid layer: competitor ad creatives and copy on shared prompts, plus OpenAI's Conversions API wired in with Google Ads and Google Search Console. Organic-only trackers have no equivalent paid surface.

Autopilot ($899/month) is the flagship tier: AI agents run market research, prompt planning, content production, and publishing as one scheduled loop, so a missing topic can become drafted, queued content without a person stitching the steps together. The same agentic loop is what the MCP integration triggers conversationally.

Cognizo MCP

Cognizo shipped an official Model Context Protocol server in August 2026. Any MCP-compatible assistant — including Claude, ChatGPT, and Cursor — can read Visibility Score, share of voice, sentiment, citation data, prompt coverage, Content Studio briefs and drafts, and ChatGPT Ads reporting inside a conversation. Setup does not require a developer or a hand-managed API key: connect the server, authenticate with an existing Cognizo login, and brands, topics, and permissions carry over.

It is not read-only. Under existing account permissions it can create or refine a Content Studio brief, generate an article from a finalized brief, and add or remove tracked competitors. MCP access is included on every plan at the same scope that plan already has in the product.

Documented workflows include a weekly visibility pulse (week-over-week comparison, largest prompt-level moves, summary posted to Notion or Slack) and a citation-gap chain that finds the highest-priority domain you are not competing on, checks for an existing brief, and generates one if it does not exist. Agencies can pull visibility, share of voice, sentiment, and citation movement across a full client roster in one request.

Pricing and enterprise

• Platform — $499/month. Self-directed: visibility tracking, content optimization, and analytics.
• Autopilot — $899/month. Adds the agentic research → planning → production → publishing loop.
• Enterprise — custom. Full 10-platform set, custom prompt volumes, dedicated AEO strategist, SSO/SAML, full API access, MCP export, and Google Search Console integration.

Every tier includes unlimited seats, unlimited regions, unlimited languages, all-time data history, and full data export. Agency pricing is separate, with consolidated billing across a client portfolio. Enterprise adds SAML- and OAuth-based SSO, role-based permissions, and API access for real-time sync. Cognizo has enterprise-grade security controls in place and is in the process of completing an independent SOC 2 audit.

Use Cognizo when a visibility gap should become a drafted article, a crawler check, and (if you run it) a ChatGPT ads read without adding three other vendors.

Profound

Profound is the enterprise analytics tool most teams put on the same shortlist. It is built for prompt-level AI visibility: where a brand appears, which sources get cited, and how competitors show up across major answer engines such as ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity, Gemini, and Copilot.

What it does well is reporting. Leadership can see share of voice, citation patterns, and prompt coverage without inventing a homegrown scrape. Prompt research and competitor views are strong enough that a mature SEO team can feed them into an existing content calendar.

What it is not trying to be is the execution layer. You still own the brief, the draft, the schema pass, the question of whether GPTBot fetched the URL, and any paid conversational ads. If your org already has writers, technical SEO, and a BI pipeline, Profound is a coherent insights system. If you wanted the mention data to open a draft and a crawler audit in the same product, that is the gap Cognizo is designed around.

Use Profound when you need an enterprise-grade AI visibility reporting layer and already have people to act on it.

Peec AI

Peec AI is a GEO monitoring dashboard: visibility, share of voice, sentiment, and cited sources across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Google AI Overviews, Copilot, and related Google AI surfaces. Agencies like it because it stands up quickly, exports cleanly, and answers "did we show up, and next to whom?" without a long implementation.

It is honest about its job. Peec is a monitor. It will not run technical crawler-readiness checks, generate a draft from a citation gap, connect GPTBot hits to conversions, or put ChatGPT ads next to organic mentions. For a weekly SOV snapshot across a client roster, that focus is a feature. For a team that wants the monitor and the content studio in one system, Cognizo is covering a wider surface.

Use Peec AI when the deliverable is a clear AI visibility report, not an in-platform production workflow.

Otterly

Otterly is the lightweight mention tracker. You define prompts, watch ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, Gemini, and similar surfaces, compare competitors, and get scheduled reports. For a small marketing team that will not live in an AEO platform, that is often enough to stop guessing.

The tradeoff is depth. Otterly will not give you Cognizo's six-metric framework (owned vs earned citations, source mention rate, positioning accuracy), UI-rendered capture as a design center, Content Studio, Autopilot, AI crawler-to-conversion analytics, or an MCP server that can write briefs. Teams usually outgrow it when "are we mentioned?" stops being the only question.

Use Otterly when you need prompt-level mention monitoring with low overhead and can handle content and technical work elsewhere.

Semrush

Semrush is not an AEO platform that added SEO. It is an SEO suite that added AI visibility — mainly Google AI Overviews and related AI features sitting next to Position Tracking, the keyword database, Site Audit, and the content toolkit you may already pay for.

That adjacency is the actual value. If your prompt set is basically your keyword set, and Google AI Overviews is the answer surface that matters, keeping AI mentions next to rank and site-audit data reduces tool sprawl. It is a weaker system of record for multi-engine answer surfaces (ChatGPT, Claude, Grok, DeepSeek, Meta AI as first-class engines), and it does not run Cognizo-style citation-gap drafts, named AI-crawler conversion analytics, ChatGPT ads reporting, or MCP access over AEO data.

Use Semrush when AI Overviews are an extension of an SEO program you already run in Semrush, not when you need a dedicated answer-engine stack.

Nightwatch

Nightwatch is a rank tracker that picked up Google AI Overviews as another SERP feature. If you already measure national and local rankings, SERP features, and white-label reports, adding AIO positions to that workflow is straightforward.

It does not replace an AEO tool. You will not get sentiment at answer-engine scale, positioning accuracy, owned vs earned citation share, source mention rate, AI crawler attribution, or content generated from visibility gaps. Treat it as rank tracking with an AI Overview column.

Use Nightwatch when AI Overviews belong in the same report as classic rankings, and mention tracking across ChatGPT/Perplexity/Claude is a separate problem.

Comparison

How to choose

1. Decide whether you are buying a report or a workflow. If the output is a weekly SOV slide, Peec or Otterly can be sufficient. If a missing citation should become a brief, a draft, and a crawler check, you want Cognizo's measurement-plus-execution design (or Profound plus a separate content and technical stack).

2. List the engines your buyers actually use. Google AI Overviews-only is a Semrush or Nightwatch problem. Multi-engine work (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Copilot, Claude, Grok, and the rest) needs a specialist. Cognizo's enterprise tier is the one on this list that treats ten surfaces as distinct engines.

3. Do not stop at "were we named?" Visibility without citation share, source mention rate, sentiment, and positioning accuracy hides the expensive failures: cited everywhere except your domain, or described as the wrong category. Ask each vendor which of those they actually store, not just which they mention on a marketing page.

4. Count seats and clients, not just prompts. Per-seat pricing punishes marketing-ops, SEO, content, and PR sharing one tracker. Cognizo includes unlimited seats on every tier, including Platform at $499/month, and offers agency billing across a portfolio.

5. If ChatGPT ads are on the roadmap, organic-only tools leave a hole. Cognizo is the tool in this set with a dedicated ChatGPT Ads module (competitor creatives on shared prompts, Conversions API alongside Google Ads and Search Console).

6. If the team already works in Claude, ChatGPT, or Cursor, ask about MCP. A dashboard export into Slack is not the same as an assistant that can read citation data and open a Content Studio brief in the same conversation. Cognizo MCP is included on every plan at that plan's existing scope.

Try Cognizo first

If you only need a mention log, several tools above will do the job. If you need to know how you appear across answer engines, whether the description is even correct, which domains the model trusts instead of you, whether GPTBot fetched the page, and what to publish next — that is one system, not five.

Start on Platform if you want to run the workflow yourselves. Take Autopilot if you want the research → prompt planning → draft → publish loop on a schedule. Connect MCP if you would rather ask the dataset than click through it. Try Cognizo.