There is a growing category of tools that watch what AI says about your brand. They are useful. They are also easy to mistake for the fix. This is where each one fits. We run a free grader and sell the fixing work, so weigh our view accordingly.
What a tracker does
A tracker asks a set of questions to AI engines on a schedule. It then reports whether you appear, where you are placed, and which sources the engine cited. That is monitoring. It is the same thing you do by hand in a spreadsheet, done on a timer.
What a tracker cannot do
It cannot edit your pages. It cannot correct a directory listing, change what a review site says, or ask an author to fix an article. The numbers move only when the sources behind the answers move.
| What the dashboard shows | What actually fixes it |
|---|---|
| You are not mentioned | Crawl access, clear pages, consistent facts. See Can AI crawlers read your site? |
| A wrong price or feature | Fix the source pages. See What to do when AI gets your brand wrong |
| A competitor is named instead of you | Read the page the engine cites for them and compare it with yours |
| Your mentions dropped this week | Check whether the engine changed or your site changed. Your log tells you which |
When a tracker is worth paying for
- You watch many questions, brands or markets, and a spreadsheet will not keep up.
- You report to people who want a regular chart.
- You have someone who will act on what it shows.
When it is not
If you have one site and one team, a weekly spreadsheet does the same job for nothing. The routine is in A 60-minute weekly AEO routine for small teams, and the question set is in Five questions to test your brand in ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity.
What to look for if you buy one
AI answers vary from run to run, so one sample proves little. A good tracker lets you check its work:
- It shows the raw answers, not only a score.
- You can set your own questions.
- It tells you which engines and models it uses, and whether web search is on.
- It says how often it runs, and how many times it asks each question.
- You can export the data.
Want a one-time scored baseline before you pick a tool? The free AI Visibility Score rates your brand out of 100 across three engines.