Which AI Search Visibility Tools Should You Use? (2026)

Simon Young, founder of Question.Marketing, asks which tools you should use to track whether AI engines cite your brand, then sets up his own brand live in Nimt to see where it shows up.

Which tools track whether AI cites your brand?

Simon names Semrush's AI Visibility Toolkit for people who already pay for an SEO suite, Ahrefs Brand Radar for more detail, and demonstrates Nimt, a tool he likes. He stresses that no one yet knows which tools report most accurately, because each AI engine uses different models and sources.

Why does AI visibility tracking get expensive?

Every prompt run on an AI engine consumes credits. Multiply prompts by competitors, engines and days in the month and the cost rises quickly. Location matters too: a Manchester recruiter's buyers won't type "Manchester", so tracking from elsewhere can mislead.

What happened when Simon tracked his own brand?

For branded prompts, Question.Marketing showed up at or near the top in AI Mode, ChatGPT and Claude. Simon is clear that this is one run on one day, and a branded prompt should find you. For general prompts, such as how answer engine optimisation works for a small business, the AI engines mostly answered themselves.

Should you build a page for every prompt?

No. Simon warns against building hundreds of pages around slight variations of a question, and against using AI to fill your site with information the engines already have. Look for the gaps in knowledge, where you can add real data or insight.

What is the difference between being cited and being recommended?

Being cited means your content is used to answer a question. Few people click through, and fewer enquire. Being recommended means AI names your business, or your product, as the solution to someone's problem. That is the position worth working for.

FAQ

Which AI visibility tool should I use?

It depends on budget and which AI engines matter to you. Simon mentions Semrush's AI Visibility Toolkit for existing Semrush users, Ahrefs Brand Radar for more detail, and demonstrates Nimt. Check each vendor's current pricing and engine coverage.

Why do AI visibility tools give different results?

Each AI engine uses different models and sources, answers vary from run to run, and results depend on the prompts you choose and where the tracking runs from.

Should I track branded prompts?

Yes, as a basic check. If AI can't find you for your own brand name, it may be misreading your site. But branded results flatter you; general and buying prompts are more useful.

Is being cited by AI enough?

No. Citations rarely turn into clicks or enquiries. The aim is to be recommended as the business or product that solves the problem.

Notes on figures

• 18:07: the 13% figure comes from Meikai's September 2026 study and is about ChatGPT, not Perplexity: 13% of the domains ChatGPT cited ranked in Google's organic top 10 for the same prompt. Meikai sells a brand monitoring tool. https://www.meikai.ai/blog/seo-vs-ai-search-google-ranking-chatgpt-citations

• 19:07: content reaching the top of Google within 48 to 72 hours comes from Simon's own case studies.

• 20:14: the 60% AI Mode figure is one run on one day for a branded prompt.

• 15:31: the free audit Simon mentions is a basic free audit for potential clients. Question.Marketing's full AI visibility audit is a paid service.

• 21:03: Question.Marketing launched at the end of June 2026 (Simon asks for the date to be added).

Full transcript

[00:01] Which are the best tools to track whether a brand is being cited across all of the different LLMs, like ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini, AI Mode, Copilot, etc.? It's going to be one of the questions that get asked an awful lot over the next year, probably before Christmas. And we're sat here in, or I'm recording this in, October 2026. So where we are, there's a plethora of tools, and as it stands there are options for every single budget out there at the moment. My question is, do too many of these tools report data correctly? And it feels a bit like we are in the Wild West at the moment. And by that I mean, if you go back to the early days of SEO, lots of tools sprang up, the best known of which now would be, for example, Semrush or Ahrefs. And there are tons and tons of different tools. Whether clients use them as much as agencies is another question. So me personally, as an agency, as Question.Marketing, I use tools to report, and I'm going to go on to show you one of those and how you can get some understanding as to what your visibility is in terms of: do you show for questions? I want to say questions. I want to talk about questions that convert. So there is a huge difference developing at the moment between whether you're cited and clicked, and that leads to an enquiry or a sale, or somebody is asking a question to find out an answer, and that then satisfies what they were trying to do, and that therefore doesn't then trans... transpose, or move forward into a click onto a site and/or an enquiry. We are, as we know, with AI search or AEO, moving into a world where, you know, just getting cited, that's... that's great. You're getting your brand recommended, talked about, trusted, and also, you know, referrals coming from that. But a lot of that no-click marketing. So we're in a world where a lot of people are not then going on to click onto a website. You're going to have to rely on an awful lot of recommendation and people taking action themselves. So I believe, as a lot of you will know if you listen to my podcast, you'll know I think we move into voice search. We move into a world where we all engage with our agentic tools, you know, be that Muse, Charm in the future, or just talking more to Siri, or, you know, Alexa was your first ever sort of interactive speaker, although it didn't really do what it could have done. I'm sure Jeff Bezos is sat back there bashing somebody over the head saying, "You know, maybe we could have done a better job with this, chaps." He'll come back, I'm sure he will at some point.

[03:30] But if we look at the tools that are out there at the moment, there's very light touches, because if you want to run a visibility report and you want to ask a question, or create a prompt that is relevant to your business, every time a prompt is run, or ran, every time it runs on an LLM, that consumes credits. Now, if you're using a tool to do that, and, for example, you want to track 30 different questions or prompts, and you want to track that across six or seven of the different surfaces, that's a lot of prompts. That's a lot of searches. So if you then run that every day, you end up with consuming an awful lot of credits. If you then want to compare where you sit, so if you want to take a prompt that you think your business should come up for, and you want to compare it to however many other competitors that you might have, then you multiply that up exponentially again. So think of a scenario where you've got 30 prompts, 10 competitors, seven surfaces, and you multiply that up and run it for 30 days in a month. It starts to get pretty expensive. Where that data comes from is also important. So as we move into a world where we will, I'm certain, move a lot more to localised search, you will want a tool that talks about, is your... for example, is your brand mentioned for your town? So one of my clients is a business called Dcoded. They are based in Manchester and they are a recruitment specialist. Now, I wouldn't want to run their reporting from just a... an IP address based in Doncaster in the UK, because although I will be mentioning the... the brand and, for example, Manchester in the prompt, you would hope that that would give more visibility to that prompt and therefore get them cited in results more. But the chances are, the people in their area, they know they're in Manchester, right? So if somebody is searching for "Where can I quickly find a contract engineer that can work on Azure and my AI projects, blah, blah, blah", whatever that question or prompt is, they are probably more likely not to then add in the word Manchester at the end of it. So these are all the challenges that we're going to have to look at. You also want to look at how fan-out queries contribute to a search. So how is that search, by any particular LLM, constructed, and how is the result that's given to you produced? All of the different surfaces are working on different models, pulling data from different sources, and therefore giving different results. So if you want to know clearly where you sit, you need to have one of the more advanced tools. There are quite a few that are springing up that will give you an idea. As I say, we're in a period where no one necessarily knows which tools are working properly and which ones to trust, because the data is so different. You know, if you're already paying for SEO, you know, you might look at the Semrush toolkit, and it might cost you something like $99 a month, and it will give you an idea where you sit on ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AIO, Gemini, and it will give you a broad brush, right? And a lot of these will give you a broad brush. Ahrefs Brand Radar, you know, that'll give you a lot more detail. And there's other tools out there. I'm going to go on to show you a tool called Nimt, and, no, disguising the fact that I do... I do like this tool. I'm going to show you the insides. But what I thought I would do is show you me setting up my own brand on Nimt, so that that then gives you an idea of what you might expect and how you could use a tool like this. So if I want to check my brand, so I'm going to put in Question.Marketing into the tool, and I'm going to check it in the UK. So I'll then select a country. If you are just listening to the podcast, I'll do my best to talk you through this. Obviously, you can watch it on my usual channels, like YouTube, or on my blog, or visit the website. So I'm going to select the United Kingdom, if I can spell it, that is. Does help. Right, so we'll put in UK, and I'm going to do English. So if you want to test in other countries... Love to hear from people if they're running this in foreign languages. I'm currently not. I've got enough on my plate trying to run it in English for UK clients and US clients at the moment. So tools like this will then typically go out, research your site and give you a set of prompts. In my example here, it has come back with... it knows I talk about answer engine optimisation a lot. So it has asked the question, "How does answer engine optimisation work for a small business?" Sounds like a decent question that somebody might ask.

[09:42] It has also produced "Is Question.Marketing a good AEO consultancy for UK service businesses?" Somebody might ask that question as part of their follow-up research if they have previously discovered me. Now, I think we're going to find that I rebranded Question.Marketing. So it was previously my agency called Institution. We were a full-service agency. I specialise now in AEO. Before somebody says, "Well, why do you do that, Simon?", I have been talking about answer engines since 2019. I feel like I'm becoming a little bit of an authority in the space. I talk about it on my blog and my podcast, etc., etc. So I am focusing on that as a service for clients now. So it has then come up with things like "Who are the best AEO consultants in the UK for an e-commerce brand?" Now, I pretty much know I won't come up for that, because the Question.Marketing website has only been up for three months. So it has replaced Institution, but the challenge for me then is: how do I rank? Do I show up? Can I get listed in any of the LLMs? Now, this has then produced... the tool has produced a ton of recommendations, all around different topics. So one of the things we do are audits. So one of the questions it's come up with is "What does an AI visibility audit involve for a bit small business?" "Which UK agencies offer AI visibility audits to show which competitors ChatGPT recommends instead of me?" Now, bear in mind, someone may say that a lot or these questions or prompts are very detailed.

[11:35] We have to start thinking about how people are going to talk, and you're not trying to rank for keywords now. You're trying to rank in conversational search. And it doesn't mean you have to go and build hundreds and hundreds of pages around slight variations of how people are going to ask questions. It's... that's not the deal here at all. Some SEO companies might think, "Well, let's just go and find out all the questions that are on a subject from people also asking Google and just build a whole tonne of content around that, and answer all the questions, and therefore publish that." That's not how it works, people. What we need to do is understand a fan-out query behind a prompt. How does an LLM come to the decision it makes to give you the information it is going to display, or talk to you about? So I'm going to tell Nimt that I'm happy with what it's come up with. We could spend a lot more time on this subject, but I want to get through a demonstration and talk to where my brand sits. I'm imagining, and I haven't pre-empted this by running reports in advance. I am doing this live, or recording it live, to see what comes through, and I'll talk you through what we are going to then show. So it's put me up against some competitors. It's found a business called Hydra Creative, Coalface AI. It is obviously saying that ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini, etc. are effectively competitors to what I do, and they're not. What it's doing is understanding that when somebody asks a question that I'm trying to answer, a lot of the time, the AI will be the answer.

[13:28] So if somebody asks ChatGPT, "How do I rank in the answers within ChatGPT?", ChatGPT will tell you its own answer, and it will therefore be the recommended answer itself, right? So I'm going to deselect the actual LLMs as competitors, because they are not, right? What I want to understand is: what are my competitors? And I would have to teach it a bit more in this scenario. Now, if I go to my share of voice, and this is still running as we speak, what you can see is I've got, and for those that are listening, branded search. As will be, with probably the first time 99.9% of you guys put your own brand into one of these tools, if you stick in branded terms within there, you should obviously find yourself as the answer, hopefully. If you can't do that, that's probably the first misstep that you've got, because it would mean that the LLMs are reading your site completely incorrectly. So you should find you are able to be cited for your own brand, at least. Now, for those of you watching, again, I am now going to enable ChatGPT, Copilot, AI Mode, Perplexity and Claude within this tool.

[15:01] And this is one of the interesting things around Nimt is inside the tool, you're able then to collect data across all of the surfaces, or all of the important surfaces as it stands, meaning you can get a much better idea of where you sit to begin with. Now, remember, once you sign up for a trial, and these guys... these guys do have a trial, so please do go ahead and put your details in. If you've had an outreach message, perhaps from me, you may well get directed into this tool to, you know, to get a free audit of your current position. So if you then go and find "Am I listed?", you'll be able to see the... and you'll be able to see where your brand sits, where you're mentioned, which prompts you are showing up for, and which you aren't. I'm not going to go into too much detail in this session around how you then get listed, but what we don't want to do is produce AI slop. So the temptation for a lot of people is to go produce a ton of content, try and mirror what other people have done. Now... now, the overriding principle here is: don't use AI to produce content to fill in your own site with information that already exists within LLMs.

[16:33] My thesis, and the way I think a lot of people in this space are moving forward to look into how to rank across the different LLMs. And I say rank; I don't actually like the word rank, because there is no real source of the truth in terms of how you get ranked across all of the LLMs in one go at the moment. I'm sure if you've got a huge brand, and you are, let's say, HubSpot, and you're trying to rank for CRM, and there's certain things within that, you've got... you've got a very, very good chance, because so many third-party sites already trust your brand. They already talk about you. But if you look at the gaps of knowledge within queries, that's the bits that you want to fill in. So the interest for me, and it should be for guys as well, is comparing what different surfaces say about your brand, what they say about your industry. Are the answers correct across all of those surfaces? And is there an opportunity, more importantly, is there an opportunity for you to provide some data, insight, knowledge that will satisfy that LLM that you are trusted, you are also an authority, and you are therefore cited as an answer or an authority in your space? We're finding that, for example, Perplexity only referencing 13% of the top sites in Google in results. Now, you're going to find that that's different. Obviously, Google AI Overview and AI Mode will then therefore probably cite far more of its own listings, or its own knowledge base or dataset. We found recently, and follow... follow me along on some of these other case studies that I'm running at the moment: if, for example, you use Google NotebookLM to produce video, then publish that on YouTube,

[18:52] talk about it, write about it, share it, and get people engaged with that content, that is very quickly picked up by Google, listed. And we're seeing the ability then to see content coming to the top of main Google search within 48, 72 hours. Right, and I've got some case studies around this that show this happening and demonstrated. And it's, you know, this is now... well, it's not science, but there's nothing to say that this method, or these methods, won't change quickly. Things like where we saw... we saw Reddit being cited and used across a lot of the surfaces, particularly ChatGPT, and then suddenly the rules changing. So there's nothing to say that these rules are in stone. There's no methodology that anybody can say is 100% correct. Now... now that we've sent out our queries, the tool now will come back and give us some sort of level of visibility. Now, we can see now, if you're watching this on YouTube, you can see that Question.Marketing... the question was, "Is Question.Marketing a good choice for an AI visibility audit?"

[20:14] Now, in Google AI Mode, apparently 60% of the time... or my business is cited on AI Overviews. I'm top, I'm number one. Bear in mind, this is one run. One run on one day, at one particular time, from me running that, albeit in the cloud, on my computer. Now, there's nothing to say... it may well be... it may well be just the fact that it knows me, right? I don't know. You can see in Claude I am referenced, I'm found. ChatGPT, I'm found, on top. But that's, again, it's a branded search. So I would hope, albeit that that website's only been up for three, four months... Maybe I should reference the exact date that the public... it was published. So maybe my AI will go and correct this piece of the video for me, or add a date in. Claude, can you please do that in the... in the final publication of this video? But again, more branded search. Yes, I'm showing, and there are various results. There's a ton of data here, right? I could pull all of this out. Again, branded search, I'm showing. Now, when we get to another one: "Who are the best AI implement... implementation consultants for South Yorkshire?" I didn't check that prompt. It's put it in itself. It's probably found it in my website. I am on ChatGPT for that, interestingly enough. Good to know. "Which companies in South Yorkshire can build an AI system?" I am referenced in ChatGPT. Okay, interesting. "I run a small firm in Doncaster, which company can set up AI to take care of our..." I don't know what the additional part that search is, but it says I am referenced in ChatGPT. Now, what I want to do now is look for something that is a bit more general. So if we get down to "How does answer engine optimisation work for a small business?", that was one of the queries that we looked at originally. Now, I am not currently referenced, but the majority of those answers are getting served by the LLMs themselves. So that's teaching me, if I really want to try and rank for that, I've probably got no chance, right? Only for the fact that if you want to try and outrank ChatGPT on ChatGPT, does somebody want to tell me how you think that might go? And if I achieved it, well, I think I might get Sam Altman on the phone and say, "Come on, Simon, what's going on here?" But it's not going to happen. Here's a more interesting one: "I run an accountancy firm and want to show up in AI answers. Which UK AEO consultancy should I use?" Right, I'm not currently listed, but we're starting now to see some SEO slash AEO companies getting listed. So there are articles on here from professional trade bodies. There's one from the ACCA, which is the professional body of accountants. Now, that's in Claude. I can pretty much guarantee that that article is not talking about UK AEO consultants for accountants, and I'd be very surprised if there is very much knowledge already written into any of these LLMs designed to satisfy that exact query.

[24:05] So by that I mean, has somebody written a piece of content that says they are an AEO consultant, they work specifically with accountancy businesses, and they help them show up in AI search? Opportunity, maybe. Maybe I want to write some content around that. Probably not, because I'm not going down the route of trying to write very long-tail prompt research around content that is... well. Well, I'm more focused on trying to help small businesses, not necessarily going to try and write it just for an accountant. Somebody put, or one of the queries is, "I run an e-commerce brand, which company can set up ongoing tracking of our visibility in AI search?" Now, again, we're seeing the actual LLMs listed. Probably extremely hard to be able to be found. Again, "I run an e-commerce brand. Who can audit my visibility in AI search?" Things like Shopify getting listed. There is a business, Sussex SEO. Be interesting to go and see if they have written some content specifically to pull into that query. I'd imagine they probably have. Scrolling down further: "What does an AI visibility audit involve for a small business?"

[25:41] Now, what we've got to ask ourselves here is, if I showed up for "What does an AI visibility audit involve for a small business?": one, can I outrank any of the LLMs? Probably not. But... but if I did show up, what percentage of the people that see the answer... if I was cited... Now, the difference being cited or recommended is huge. So I could well be cited. I could build some content around that prompt, right? Landing them on a page... The chance of people then clicking through to read the piece of content that I've written to satisfy that query, probably already small. Landing them on a page and then telling them what they've probably just been told, because I wrote the article, and they land on something that looks similar. Follow me here. Again, then, the chance to get an enquiry from that: very, very low, right? The prompt that's below that is a little bit more interesting: "Where can I book an AI visibility audit in the UK to see if my business appears in AI search?"

[26:59] Now, in AI Mode, very little showing. There's a business called Kangaroo UK showing in AI Overviews, Optimus Consulting. We're starting to now get into a recommendation. So instead of a citation, could we get recommended? I think this is probably the point of this video: to show you the tools and show you the difference between being cited, as in your content is being used to pull in information into the LLM to answer a question, or can you be recommended as a business to help somebody with a problem that they may well have, or are your products able to then be recommended as the solution to what somebody is looking to buy? So have a think about that. Quick, you know, a very, very quick tour through Nimt today. One of the tools that I like. It will show you rankings, it will show you where you sit, it will show you where you rank in. You've got to be able to interpret the answers.

[28:20] And I think this is where I like to get involved, with marketing teams and brands, to help them understand how to interpret this data, how to work with it, and how to build the content in a way to then become the answers and the recommendations, not just the citations. So don't think of it in a way picked up. You can do it through building your own knowledge bases and publishing content correctly that adds to the knowledge corpus that is out there, right? So if you want to learn more, if you want to understand more about AEO, GEO, being listed as the answer, all the recommendation, I would love to speak to you. Hopefully that's been useful today. Please subscribe, watch, continue to like and comment, and I will see you in the next episode, guys. Thank you.