Who measures brand visibility across AI assistants?
AI Visibility Monitoring and Measurement: What The Shortlist Report Finds
3 firms lead, appearing in 51.5–59.1% of 66 AI responses. The sample cannot separate them, so we do not pretend it can.
Three firms lead
Profound, Ahrefs and Semrush come up most often here. They are close enough together that the order between them is not worth reading anything into.
Profound39 of 66
Tracks brand mentions, citations, and recommendation visibility across AI search experiences; also optimizes ecommerce product feeds and schema.
Ahrefs35 of 66
Provides traditional search intelligence and AI citation monitoring tools tracking mentions across AI engines.
Semrush34 of 66
SEO platform expanding to track AI visibility, mentions, and brand monitoring across AI search results.
Based on 66 ChatGPT responses to this question, collected September 3, 2026–September 22, 2026. Firms are counted once per response. How we measure.
The ranking
| Firm | Responses | Share | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Tier 1 3 firms, 51.5–59.1% | |||
| Profoundtryprofound.comTracks brand mentions, citations, and recommendation visibility across AI search experiences; also optimizes ecommerce product feeds and schema. | 39 of 66 | 59.1% | |
| Ahrefsahrefs.comProvides traditional search intelligence and AI citation monitoring tools tracking mentions across AI engines. | 35 of 66 | 53.0% | |
| Semrushsemrush.comSEO platform expanding to track AI visibility, mentions, and brand monitoring across AI search results. | 34 of 66 | 51.5% | |
| Tier 2 2 firms, 40.9–48.5% | |||
| Peec AITracks AI search visibility, competitive monitoring, and answer-engine presence across markets and languages. | 32 of 66 | 48.5% | |
| Otterlyotterly.aiProvides AI-visibility tracking platform at lower cost than agency-only reporting. | 27 of 66 | 40.9% | |
| Tier 3 5 firms, 9.1–19.7% | |||
| Search AgencyTracks named prompts and citations across AI assistants with monthly reporting on citation share, mentions, and sentiment. | 13 of 66 | 19.7% | |
| AIS Insightsaisinsights.comTracks brand mentions, citations, recommendations, and competitor visibility across AI search systems over time. | 12 of 66 | 18.2% | |
| Scrunchscrunch.comOperates an AI-visibility tracking platform monitoring brand mentions across AI engines. | 10 of 66 | 15.2% | |
| CitationLabcitationlab.aiTracks AI mentions, citations, recommendations and competitor benchmarks across ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews. | 8 of 66 | 12.1% | |
| FractlAnalyzes brand visibility in AI answers and runs prompt-based AI visibility audits. | 6 of 66 | 9.1% | |
Key findings
- Profound, Ahrefs and Semrush lead this sample, each named in 51.5–59.1% of 66 ChatGPT responses to the question “Who measures brand visibility across AI assistants?”, collected September 3, 2026–September 22, 2026.
- The gaps between Profound, Ahrefs and Semrush are inside the margin of error at 66 responses, so The Shortlist Report groups them in one tier rather than ranking them against each other.
- 10 firms cleared the reporting threshold on “Who measures brand visibility across AI assistants?” in ChatGPT as of September 22, 2026; the full table with response counts is below.
- Profound appears in 2 of the 9 AEO, GEO and AI visibility agencies reports published by The Shortlist Report, the widest coverage of any firm named on this page.
- No firm paid to appear in this ranking; placement cannot be bought, and the counts come from ChatGPT responses rather than from submissions.
Why the tiers fall where they do
Tier 1 holds Profound, Ahrefs and Semrush, named in 34 to 39 of the 66 ChatGPT responses. They are grouped rather than ranked because the gaps between them are inside the margin of error at this sample size — one extra mention would reorder them, so an order would be reporting noise as a finding.
Tier 2 holds Peec AI and Otterly, named in 27 to 32 of 66 responses (40.9–48.5%). The sample does separate these firms from the tier above: the difference from the leading group is larger than the margin of error, which is what puts them in a tier of their own.
Tier 3 holds Search Agency, AIS Insights, Scrunch, CitationLab and Fractl, named in 6 to 13 of 66 responses (9.1–19.7%). The sample does separate these firms from the tier above: the difference from the leading group is larger than the margin of error, which is what puts them in a tier of their own.
The test is McNemar’s at 95%, applied against the same 66 responses for every firm. The full reasoning, and what happened when we ranked one-to-N instead.
What the sample shows
3 firms lead this question: Profound, Ahrefs and Semrush. They appear in 51.5–59.1% of the 66 responses. The gaps between them are inside the margin of error at this sample size, so they are listed together rather than ranked against each other.
152 firms were named at least once across the sample. 10 of them cleared the threshold of 2 responses and appear above; the rest were named once and are inside the noise.
How to read this
Firms are grouped into tiers, not ranked one to fifteen. A tier holds every firm whose 95% confidence interval overlaps the leader's, which is a long way of saying the sample cannot tell them apart. Order within a tier is arbitrary — read the counts, not the position.
Share is the percentage of responses that named the firm — not a quality score. A firm scoring low here may be excellent and simply under-written about online, which is a finding about its visibility rather than its work.
The same question was asked repeatedly because AI assistants do not answer identically twice. A single response would tell you almost nothing.
What this measurement does not tell you
- It is not a quality ranking. Share reflects how much has been written about a firm online, which is what an AI assistant reads. A capable firm nobody writes about scores low here.
- It is a reading from a date range, not a permanent standing. This sample was collected September 3, 2026–September 22, 2026; models change and so do their answers.
- It covers ChatGPT only. Other assistants answer differently, and we do not extrapolate across engines we have not measured.
- Order within a tier is arbitrary. Read the counts, not the position. Why we use tiers.
Cite this report
The Shortlist Report. (2026). AI Visibility Monitoring and Measurement: What The Shortlist Report Finds. The Shortlist Report. https://www.shortlistreport.com/article/ai-visibility-monitoring-agencies
Underlying counts: CSV · JSON. Every answer they were counted from: plain text · JSON. All reusable under CC BY 4.0 with attribution.