Why measurement is the hard problem.
In traditional SEO, you know exactly where you stand. Log into Search Console, see impressions, clicks, ranking positions, keywords. It's not perfect, but it's real data.
In AI Visibility, you're partially blind. There's no ChatGPT Search Console. Perplexity doesn't publish your citation count. Gemini won't tell you which prompts you show up in. And the answers themselves are personalized, so what one user sees may not be what another sees.
Nobody has a perfect view into AI Visibility yet. But the tools below, used together, get you to about 90% clarity — enough to make good decisions.
Here's the stack we use in our audits, in the order we typically deploy them.
1. Otterly.ai — for prompt monitoring across AI engines.
What it does: Tracks how often your brand is mentioned in ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, and Gemini for prompts you define.
How we use it: Define 20-50 prompts your ideal buyers would ask ("best CRM for real estate," "how to reduce customer churn"). Otterly runs them daily and tells you which competitors get cited, how often, and with what sentiment.
Cost: Free tier available, paid from $69/mo.
2. HubSpot's AI Search Grader — for quick free audits.
What it does: Free tool from HubSpot. Enter a company name, and it tests it across ChatGPT and Perplexity for common industry prompts.
How we use it: First-look assessment when scoping new engagements. Not comprehensive, but gives a fast read on baseline visibility.
Cost: Free.
3. Google Search Console — for AI Overviews reporting.
What it does: Google recently added AI Overviews to the search performance report. You can see impressions from AI-generated answers separately from traditional results.
How we use it: Baseline for AEO work. If you're not appearing in AI Overviews for your money keywords, that's the first thing to fix — because AI Overviews sit above blue links.
Cost: Free.
4. Perplexity's Sources panel — for reverse engineering.
What it does: When Perplexity answers a query, it shows the sources it drew from. This is the closest thing to "showing you the algorithm" in the AI search world.
How we use it: Manually test the top 20 prompts in your category. For each, note the top 3 sources Perplexity cited. Study those pages — what structure, length, and formatting patterns keep appearing? Then apply those patterns to your own content.
Cost: Free.
5. Semrush's AI Content Toolkit.
What it does: Analyzes your existing content for AEO signals: answer density, schema presence, structural clarity, entity coverage.
How we use it: Bulk audit of a client's top 50 pages. Identifies which pages are structurally AEO-ready vs. which need restructuring. Prioritized fix list falls out of the report.
Cost: Part of Semrush's Pro plan ($139/mo).
6. Screaming Frog — for schema and structural crawling.
What it does: Crawls your entire site and reports on schema markup, H1/H2/H3 structure, meta descriptions, and semantic HTML usage.
How we use it: Site-wide structural audit. Identifies pages missing FAQPage schema, pages with duplicate H1s, and other structural issues that hurt AEO/GEO.
Cost: Free for up to 500 URLs, £199/year for unlimited.
7. Manual prompt testing (still the most important).
What it does: You. Actually asking ChatGPT and Perplexity the questions your buyers would ask.
How we use it: Every audit starts with 30-45 minutes of manual testing across 5-10 prompts. This gives you the qualitative picture: not just "are we cited?" but "what tone do the AI engines describe us with?" and "which competitors do we get compared to?"
No tool captures this yet. If you skip manual testing, you'll miss critical brand perception signals.
Cost: Free (ChatGPT and Perplexity's free tiers work fine).
The uncomfortable truth: even with all 7 tools, you'll only have 90% clarity on AI Visibility. The other 10% requires judgment. That's why this work is still a hybrid of tooling and expertise.
Our recommended audit stack, by budget.
$0 budget: HubSpot AI Search Grader + Google Search Console + manual Perplexity testing. You'll get a solid baseline read.
$100-200/month: Add Otterly.ai for prompt monitoring. Now you have real longitudinal data on which competitors are winning citations.
$200-400/month: Add Semrush for the structural audit + content optimization workflow.
$500+/month: Full stack + expert time. This is where our AI Visibility audits fit — we run all seven tools, plus our own scoring framework, and return a prioritized 90-day roadmap.
What to do with all this data.
The tools give you visibility. The action is:
- Identify 3-5 prompts where you should be cited but aren't
- Find the pages that should rank for those prompts
- Apply the 6 AEO signals (see our AEO framework post)
- Publish, wait 4 weeks, re-run the tools
- Compare, iterate, repeat
Most brands get visible in AI within 8-12 weeks of consistent AEO work. Fastest we've seen: 4 weeks. Slowest: 6 months (heavily competitive categories).
If you want us to run all seven tools against your brand and return a prioritized 90-day plan, book a free AI Visibility audit. We include the tooling in the fee, so you don't need to subscribe to anything.