Connexion

Which AI visibility tools do AI answer engines actually recommend?

When a software vendor’s marketing lead asks an AI assistant how to track brand visibility in AI answers, a shortlist comes back. We asked 24 different phrasings of that question across 2 engines, 48 answers in total, and counted every product named. This is the result. Nobody paid to be on it, and no vendor list was written in advance — the 50 vendors below are simply everyone the engines named.

We sell a product in this category — connexion.me is one of the things being measured here, and it is in the table below with the count it actually got.
Run 13 August 2026 Questions 24 Answers 48 Vendors named 50 Top-10 repeatability 9/10

Free to read, raw data included.

Is one of these AI answer engine visibility tools yours?

The board is re-measured every month. For $9.99 a month you get one email when your own row moves — your rank and answer count, who took the mentions you were absent from, and which of the 24 questions started or stopped naming you. Leave your address and I reply by hand with what your row reads today. What is in it, and the $29.99 one-off report →

Nothing is charged and nothing starts — I reply by email. Your address is used to answer you and to set up billing; it does not go on a list.

Two conditions on every number below

These 24 questions are one family of phrasings and every number below is conditional on them. A differently worded family about the same products — a different size of buyer, a different budget, a different constraint — is a different measurement and can come back naming a different set of products. All 24 questions are printed in full below, so you can see exactly what was asked before you read what came back. We have measured how big that can get, on two of our own boards: SuiteCRM is named in 83 of the 132 answers on /c/crmctx/ and in none of the 132 on /c/crm/ — same products, same day, same extraction, asked differently.
The engine columns below are not one instrument. Perplexity (sonar) searches the web while it answers and returned the sources used beside every one of those 24 answers — that column is what gets retrieved. ChatGPT (gpt-5.5) was called through its API with no tools and the near-empty system prompt quoted in the method below, so it answers out of the model’s own weights — not one of those 24 answers came back with a source. That column is what the model already remembers. Both are worth counting and they are not the same measurement: a product can be named often by what the models remember and rarely by what they retrieve, or the reverse, and the totals in the Answers column add the two together.

The leaderboard

“Answers” is how many of the 48 answers named that product. Share is the same number as a percentage. The two right-hand columns split it by engine. Every row has its own link — the # beside a vendor name gives you something like connexion.me/c/aeo/#profound. Click a vendor's name to see which of the 24 questions named them, and click one of those to read the answer it was counted from, word for word.

#VendorAnswers ShareChatGPTPerplexity
1Profound#2143.8%129
2Peec AI#2041.7%128
3Otterly.AI#1939.6%118
4AthenaHQ#1531.2%114
5Semrush#1225.0%66
6Scrunch AI#1020.8%100
7Ahrefs Brand Radar#612.5%33
8Semrush AI Toolkit#510.4%23
9Goodie AI#36.2%30
10Rankscale AI#36.2%21
11Brandlight#24.2%20
12BrightEdge#24.2%20
13Frase#24.2%02
14LLM Pulse#24.2%02
15LLMrefs#24.2%02
16SE Ranking#24.2%02
17Trakkr#24.2%02
18Ahrefs#12.1%10
19AI Rank Checker#12.1%01
20AI Search Toolkit#12.1%01
21AIclicks#12.1%01
22Ayzeo#12.1%01
23Beamtrace#12.1%01
24BrandRank.AI#12.1%10
25CheckThat.ai#12.1%01
26Conductor#12.1%01
27Evertune#12.1%01
28GoAI#12.1%01
29Goodie#12.1%10
30HubSpot AEO#12.1%01
31HubSpot AI Search Grader#12.1%01
32Keyword AI Tracker#12.1%01
33Mangools AI Search Grader#12.1%01
34MEMETIK#12.1%01
35Nightwatch#12.1%01
36Otterly#12.1%01
37Pranas#12.1%01
38Rankability#12.1%01
39Riff Analytics#12.1%01
40Ryze AI#12.1%01
41SE Ranking AI Visibility Tracker#12.1%01
42SE Ranking AI Visibility Tracker / Toolkit#12.1%01
43Searchable#12.1%01
44Siftly#12.1%01
45Sight AI#12.1%01
46Surfer#12.1%01
47Wellows#12.1%01
48WorkDuo#12.1%01
49XFunnel#12.1%01
50ZipTie.dev#12.1%10
connexion.me#
Ours. This row is not ranked with the others because it was not discovered the way they were: every row above is a product an engine named and the extractor kept, and this one is a plain search for “connexion” in the text of all the answers on this page. It is here at whatever number that search returns.
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What is free, and what is for sale

Everything above is free and stays free — the leaderboard, the method, all 48 raw answers and the machine-readable ranking, published in full at the bottom of this page. No vendor paid to be listed, no vendor can pay to move, and nothing here goes behind a login later.

What is for sale is one vendor's row, watched: $9.99 a month to be told when your rank moves, who took your mentions, and which phrasings started or stopped naming you — the board is re-run monthly and you get what changed. A one-off $29.99 deep report on a single row is the other option. What is in each →

Method

Every claim on this page is reproducible from the files linked at the bottom.

The engines

ChatGPT (gpt-5.5), Perplexity (sonar). Each was called through its public API with a near-empty system prompt — “answer the user's question directly and concisely” — and nothing else. The engines were not asked to produce a list, rank anything, or name vendors. Steering them toward a list would have manufactured the thing being measured.

The questions

24 distinct phrasings of one purchase decision, written before any measurement was run. No vendor name appears in any of them.

  1. How do I find out if ChatGPT recommends my software?
  2. Is there a tool that tracks whether AI answer engines mention my brand?
  3. AI answer engine rank tracker
  4. track brand visibility in AI answers
  5. How can I see where my company ranks when someone asks an AI assistant for a recommendation?
  6. Who does ChatGPT recommend in my category, and how do I check?
  7. We're a B2B SaaS vendor and buyers are asking ChatGPT instead of Googling. How do I measure that?
  8. Best AI visibility monitoring tools for SaaS marketing teams
  9. generative engine optimization software
  10. How do I monitor my brand mentions across ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini?
  11. Is there an SEO tool for LLMs?
  12. I want a report showing whether AI chatbots recommend our product over competitors. Where do I get one?
  13. AI search visibility tracking platform pricing
  14. How do I benchmark my share of voice in AI-generated answers against competitors?
  15. tools to improve how AI assistants describe my company
  16. What software tracks LLM citations of my website?
  17. My CEO asked why we don't show up in ChatGPT results. What tool answers that?
  18. answer engine optimization tools for marketers
  19. How do I audit whether large language models know about my product?
  20. Is there something like rank tracking but for AI chat assistants?
  21. software to measure AI chatbot recommendations of B2B products
  22. How much does it cost to monitor brand visibility in AI search?
  23. We want ongoing monitoring of how ChatGPT answers questions about our market. What are the options?
  24. AI brand monitoring tool that shows which competitors get recommended instead of us

How the vendor list was built

Each of the 48 answers was read back and every named product extracted. The vendor list is discovered: a product appears here if and only if an engine named it. Counted are products that measure, track or report brand visibility, mentions or citations inside AI-generated answers. Excluded, even when named: the answer engines themselves, general web analytics, social listening tools, agencies, and companies named only as an example brand being measured.

Spelling variants of one product are folded together, and a trailing “by company” is dropped. This run collapsed 10 spellings onto 3 of the rows below: “Otterly.AI”, “OtterlyAI” and “Otterly AI” are one row — the one the table prints as Otterly.AI. An edition name is folded into its product when it is that product’s name followed by a further word, and the plain name is at least three times as common. This run folded 7 such names, among them “Semrush AI Visibility” counts as Semrush and “Ahrefs/Brand Radar-style monitoring” counts as Ahrefs Brand Radar. A name that merely begins with the same letters is a different product and keeps its own row. No pair was merged by hand in this category: every fold above is the rule applied mechanically, with no human judgement about who is who.

Beyond those folds a product is counted as the engines spelled it, and two rows in the table are never merged into one. When a product has been renamed or acquired and the engines still answer with both names, both names keep their own row: this page carries no hand-maintained list of who is now who, because that list would be a human claim about a mechanical count and nothing here could check it. What it has instead is the answers. Where an answer itself writes two of the rows below as one product renamed — the construction “X (formerly Y)” — the line beside those rows quotes that sentence and gives the overlap and the total, so the union is on the page. Nothing else produces that line. Two rows being named in the same answers does not, however often: the engines answer in shortlists, so the leaders of a category are named together whatever they are called. No answer in this run wrote two rows below that way, so no row below carries that line.

A product is counted once per answer, however many times that answer mentions it.

Is this stable, or is it noise?

The entire run was repeated a second time, same 24 questions, same engines, independent calls. The top ten came back 9/10 identical. What moved: Rankscale AI (10 in run A) dropped out of run B's ten and SE Ranking (10 in run B) took that place. by position, Peec AI was 2 in run A and 3 in run B; Otterly.AI was 3 in run A and 2 in run B; AthenaHQ was 4 in run A and 5 in run B; Semrush was 5 in run A and 6 in run B; Scrunch AI was 6 in run A and 4 in run B; Ahrefs Brand Radar was 7 in run A and 8 in run B; Semrush AI Toolkit was 8 in run A and 9 in run B; Goodie AI was 9 in run A and 7 in run B. Run B named 57 vendors over 48 answers against run A's 50. The tail moves; the head does not.

A leaderboard whose top ten reshuffles between runs would not be worth publishing, so this check was run before the page was, and the page ships only because it passed.

What this is not

This measures what two answer engines said on 13 August 2026, in response to these questions, through their APIs. It is not a quality ranking, not a review, and not advice on which AI visibility tool to buy. A product can be excellent and rank low here — that gap is the point.

The raw data

All 48 answers, verbatim, one JSON object per line: run A · run B. The per-answer extracted product names: run A · run B. Machine-readable ranking: ranking.json.

What Perplexity was reading. It is the only one of these engines that returns a source list, and the markers in its answers above — [1], [2] — point into it. Every URL it cited, with the title, date and the excerpt it actually retrieved, one JSON object per answer: run A · run B. Join on index to the answers file, and read [n] as citations[n-1]. Perplexity returned a source list on 24 of its 24 answers. ChatGPT returned no sources at all — no citation, grounding or search-result field of any kind appears anywhere in its API response, on any of the 24 answers it gave. That is a fact about the engine, not a gap in this page.

The sources behind the answers

Run A's 24 Perplexity answers cited 472 URLs across 301 distinct domains. Below are the 27 that were cited in three or more separate answers. Citations counts every URL from that domain, so a domain cited three times in one answer counts three times; Answers is how many of the 24 answers cited it at all.

DomainCitationsAnswers
reddit.com1715
linkedin.com1310
blog.hubspot.com88
zapier.com88
trysight.ai77
seranking.com76
aiclicks.io66
tryprofound.com65
llmpulse.ai54
rankability.com54
semrush.com54
backlinko.com44
frase.io44
hubspot.com44
pcmag.com44
yotpo.com44
openai.com43
siftly.ai43
useomnia.com43
ahrefs.com33
airops.com33
dageno.ai33
llmclicks.ai33
position.digital33
therankmasters.com33
yourgpt.ai33
ziptie.dev33

A domain missing from this table was cited in fewer than three answers, or was never cited at all — the run A file linked above is the complete list either way, and it is the only way to tell those two apart. Cited is not endorsed: a page the engine retrieved is not a page that recommended anyone, and this counts what was read, not what it said.

The answer a vendor panel shows you is read straight out of the run A file linked above — the page fetches the one line it needs and displays it unaltered, so what you read there and what you get by downloading the file are the same bytes.

What one line of each file holds, and the terms you may re-use them under — the raw answers may be re-used in any medium, commercially and inside open-source software, with attribution.

Who runs this

Connexion is run by Lana — one person, reachable at lana@connexion.me, and mail sent there is answered by hand. It started on 2 August 2026, so it is early: there is no office, no sales team and no history to point at other than the runs published on these pages.

Anything sold here is sold by dplouffe Analytics Inc., a company registered in Canada. Stripe takes the card and the checkout page it opens is headed dplouffe Analytics; the charge on your statement starts with CONNEXION.

What this page is: a count of which products were named, in answers we publish in full. What it is not: a judgement of whether any of them is good, and not advice on which to buy. No vendor paid to be listed here, no vendor can pay to move, and no vendor sees a board before you do. — who runs this · terms · privacy · refunds