What tools track whether AI recommends my business? Otterly.ai is named in 58% of 48 AI answers, Profound 56%, Peec AI 50% — a ranked list from four weekly runs of the question itself

How the list was built

Every Monday our self-audit sends 12 pinned small-business buyer questions to ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Claude through their APIs, three samples per question per engine, and stores each answer with its returned citation list. One of the twelve is the question in the headline, verbatim. This cut reads only that question across the four dated runs of 2026-07-28, 2026-08-03, 2026-08-10 and 2026-08-17: 4 engines × 3 samples × 4 weeks = 48 answers, 47 of which returned at least one citation. Two things are counted per answer: the tools the answer names (extracted from the answer text by the same competitor tally the audit product uses, aliases folded — Otterly/Otterly.ai, Semrush/Semrush AI Visibility Toolkit, Ahrefs/Ahrefs Brand Radar, SE Ranking/SE Visible — engine names excluded, one count per tool per answer) and the domains the answer cites (hostname minus `www.`, one count per domain per answer). Ranking is by answers-naming out of 48; ties break on engine breadth, then weeks named. Prices are the entry tier read from each vendor's own pricing page on 2026-08-01 (`vendor-prices-2026-08-01.json`); a dash means we have not read that vendor's pricing page and will not guess.

The ranked list: tools named in the 48 answers

The table's shape is the finding. Five tools clear 40% of answers, and then the list falls off a cliff: the sixth (Scrunch AI) is at 31%, the tenth (Amplitude) at 19%, and 27 of the 42 tools named at all are named in fewer than five answers. Only five tools — Otterly.ai, Profound, Semrush, Ahrefs and SE Ranking — are named by all four engines. Perplexity is the most consistent engine and the most concentrated: it names Otterly.ai, Profound, Peec AI and Semrush in every one of its 12 answers, so on Perplexity this question has a fixed four-vendor answer. Gemini and Claude share a second tier — Sight AI (9 answers each), PromptWatch (7 and 5), Amplitude (5 and 4), Mentionova (5 and 3) — that Perplexity and ChatGPT barely touch. ChatGPT is the outlier engine again: it names the top-five vendors in three or fewer of its 12 answers each and Peec AI, Sight AI and Scrunch AI in none, and it is the only engine to name Hikoo Spotlight, Visotrak, Friction AI, Visiblie and Siftly. A buyer who asks this question in ChatGPT gets a different vendor list than one who asks in Perplexity, and neither list overlaps much with the ranking a Google search returns.

What the engines cite is not what they name

The citation column tells a different story from the naming column. Across the 48 answers the engines cited 211 distinct domains (93 · 87 · 91 · 82 per week); only 15 (7.1%) appear in all four weeks and 126 (59.7%) appear in exactly one. The most-cited sources are listicles, and mostly listicles that live on vendors' own blogs:

Set the two tables side by side and the mechanism shows. Otterly.ai and Profound are the most-named tools but their own domains are cited in only 7 answers each; Peec AI's own domain is not cited in a single one of the 48 answers. The engines are reading third-party (and vendor-blog) comparison pages and repeating the vendors those pages list — Sight AI's listicle is cited in 34 of 48 answers and Sight AI is named in 23, which is the clearest single case of a vendor's comparison content carrying its own name into the answer. This is consistent with our earlier cuts: 92% of AI-cited URLs are deep pages, not homepages, and 54.5% of cited paths carry a listicle, alternatives or how-to marker. On this question specifically, the path to being named runs through being listed on the pages the engines already cite.

Where AskedAbout sits, honestly

We are on our own panel and we publish our own row: 0 of 48 answers name AskedAbout on this question, across all four engines and all four weeks. Our product is a $79 one-time audit of what ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Claude say and cite when asked about a specific business, with $29/mo monitoring and a $249 five-audit agency pack — it is a check-and-report tool, not a continuous prompt-tracking dashboard, and none of the named tools whose pricing page we have read is priced one-time. That is the real limit and the real difference; a buyer who wants weekly prompt tracking across dozens of prompts should read the top of the table above, not this paragraph. Our one gauge citation to date is on a different question (Perplexity cites `askedabout.com/compare/best-profound-alternatives` 3-of-3 on the Profound-alternative question, two weeks running as of 2026-08-17); this page is the first thing we have published that answers this question, and we will report on the 08-24, 08-31 and 09-07 runs whether any engine cites it.

What to do with this if you are shopping

• Ask the engine your buyers actually use. On Perplexity the answer is a fixed four (Otterly.ai, Profound, Peec AI, Semrush); on ChatGPT it is a rotating cast including tools no other engine names. A shortlist built from one engine is a shortlist for that engine.
• Read the price column, not the rank. The five most-named tools span $29/mo to $250/mo entry tiers (Sight AI's page we have not read) and one of them, Profound, prints annual-only pricing; the rank says how often engines name a tool, not what it costs or what it does.
• If you sell one of these tools, be on the pages the engines cite. 34 of 48 answers cite one listicle; the way to be named is to be listed there and in the dozen pages beneath it, because engines repeat lists more than they build them.
• Check the specific question you care about, not this one. Naming rates on the AI-visibility-tools question are not naming rates for "best dentist in Austin" — run the free check for your own business and read what the four engines actually say and cite.

Methodology

Question: "What tools track whether AI recommends my business?" — panel entry q35 of the AskedAbout self-audit (12 pinned buyer questions, panel version 2026-06-27, unchanged). Runs read: 2026-07-28, 2026-08-03, 2026-08-10, 2026-08-17 (production `aeoSelfAnswers` rows pulled by runId; 4 engines × 3 samples × 4 runs = 48 answers, 47 with ≥1 returned citation; per engine 12/12 answers with citations for ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini, 11/12 for Claude). Naming: tool names as extracted from answer text by the production competitor tally (`competitors` field), folded through an explicit alias map printed in the cut artifact, engine names excluded, one count per tool per answer; AskedAbout counted from the audit's own `mentioned` flag. Citing: each engine's returned citation array, hostname minus `www.`, one count per domain per answer; Gemini's channel returns bare hostnames. Prices: entry tier from `growth/pricing/vendor-prices-2026-08-01.json` (each vendor's own pricing page read on 2026-08-01, billing basis as printed there); vendors not in that file show a dash. Ten further names appeared exactly twice and could not be resolved to a vendor page (Belcher, Atlas, Gumshoe, MyMentions, Bourd, Promptmonitor, LLMrefs, Hall, LLMclicks.ai, Sophyx) — listed in the artifact, not ranked. Machine-readable artifact with every per-engine, per-run count and the alias map: `q35-tools-cut-2026-08-17.json`.