Original data
AI visibility tools for a small business, by what the engines recommend.
· Measured 1 to 25 September 2026
We put three questions a small business owner asks to five AI engines, several times over: which platforms track AI recommendations cheaply, which is cheapest across markets and languages, and which work for a local service business on a limited budget. One tool dominated. Otterly.AI was named in 37 of the 59 answers.
Tools the engines name constantly elsewhere barely appear here: Profound (2 of 59) and Ahrefs (1 of 59). Asked about a small business, the engines draw a different shortlist.
Key takeaways
- Otterly.AI was named in 63% of small-business answers, more than Semrush (29%) and Peec AI (20%) together.
- For a local service business, the engines named Otterly.AI in 17 of 19 answers.
- Start free: Google and Bing both report how your pages appear in their AI answers at no cost, and 12 of the tools named here let you begin without a card or an account.
- One check is not a verdict. The engines named 54% of the same tools again when the same question was asked at the next run.
What the engines recommend to a small business
Every tool named at least once across the three questions, and how the count splits between them. The questions are listed under the table.
| # | Tool | Answers naming it | Share | Q1 | Q2 | Q3 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Otterly.AI | 37 | 63% | 10 | 10 | 17 |
| 2 | Semrush | 17 | 29% | 3 | 2 | 12 |
| 3 | Peec AI | 12 | 20% | 4 | 7 | 1 |
| 4 | LLMrefs | 8 | 14% | 1 | 3 | 4 |
| 5 | Rankscale | 7 | 12% | 2 | 3 | 2 |
| 6 | SE Ranking | 5 | 8% | 0 | 0 | 5 |
| 7 | AthenaHQ | 4 | 7% | 1 | 2 | 1 |
| 7 | Ayzeo | 4 | 7% | 2 | 0 | 2 |
| 7 | Siftly | 4 | 7% | 1 | 0 | 3 |
| 10 | Cognizo | 2 | 3% | 0 | 2 | 0 |
| 10 | Omnia | 2 | 3% | 1 | 1 | 0 |
| 10 | Profound | 2 | 3% | 0 | 2 | 0 |
| 10 | Writesonic | 2 | 3% | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 14 | Ahrefs | 1 | 2% | 0 | 0 | 1 |
| 14 | Evertune | 1 | 2% | 0 | 1 | 0 |
| 19 | Greater Than Servicesours | 0 | 0% | 0 | 0 | 0 |
What a small business needs from one
A way in without a card. Tracking AI answers costs the vendor money on every question, so most paid plans start with a trial. Of the tools named here, Semrush, LLMrefs, SE Ranking, AthenaHQ, Ayzeo, Siftly, Omnia, Profound, Writesonic, Ahrefs, Frase and Surfer let you start without a card or without an account at all, by their own sites' description.
The engines your customers ask, on the plan you would buy. Entry plans often cover fewer engines than the headline list. LLM Pulse includes five engines on every plan and sells the rest as add-ons; Ayzeo includes ChatGPT and Google AI Overview and adds the others; Profound's free Trial runs ChatGPT, Gemini and Google AI Overviews. Check the entry plan, not the logo wall.
A reading every week, not once. Answers change between runs. The engines named 54% of the same tools again on the next run of the same question, and Gemini, the least steady, named 45%. A trend needs the same questions, asked on a schedule.
Your market, in your language. If your customers are in one city or one country, the tool should ask from there. LLMrefs says it targets more than 50 countries and 20 languages, Frase more than 40 countries, and SE Ranking seven markets.
What each lets you start for free
The tools named in these answers, most named first, with the free offer each one's own site describes. None of these are prices; for those, follow the link.
| Tool | Named here | Free to start, in their words |
|---|---|---|
| Otterly.AI | 37 | A free trial, plus free GEO tools such as a crawlability checker. |
| Semrush | 17 | A free AI visibility checker you can run three times a day without an account, and a seven-day trial of Semrush. |
| Peec AI | 12 | A free trial. |
| LLMrefs | 8 | A seven-day free trial with no card. |
| Rankscale | 7 | A seven-day free trial of its Pro plan. |
| SE Ranking | 5 | Five free checks a day on its tracker page with no account, and a free trial with no card. |
| AthenaHQ | 4 | A free Essential plan that includes a credit allowance. |
| Ayzeo | 4 | A 14-day free Pro trial with a card, and a free audit with no card. |
| Siftly | 4 | A free audit with no sign-up. |
| Cognizo | 2 | A free report and a free AEO audit. |
Tools whose own sites speak to small teams
The most-named tool here, and the ones whose sites say they are built for small teams, owners or local businesses. Everything below is their description, not ours.
Otterly.AI
Named in 37 of 59 answersAI search monitoring: where a brand is mentioned and its website cited across the AI search engines.
- Built for
- Agencies and marketing teams.
- Free to start
- A free trial, plus free GEO tools such as a crawlability checker.
- AI surfaces it lists
- ChatGPT, Perplexity, AI Overviews, AI Mode, Gemini, Copilot
- Leads with
- Prompt research beside the monitoring, to find which questions to track.
From otterly.ai, checked on 25 September 2026. Their site is the authority on what it offers.
Omnia
Named in 2 of 59 answersAn AI visibility platform built for small marketing teams, with sentiment analysis and an AI agent, Omnio, that automates most of the tracking and optimization work.
- Built for
- Small marketing teams, SEO and content leads, in-house marketers and agencies.
- Free to start
- A 14-day free trial with no card.
- AI surfaces it lists
- ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, Google AI Mode, Claude, Microsoft Copilot, Gemini
- Leads with
- Tracks every prompt every 24 hours.
From useomnia.com, checked on 25 September 2026. Their site is the authority on what it offers.
SE Ranking
Named in 5 of 59 answersSE Visible, SE Ranking's AI visibility app, also sold as a tracker inside the SE Ranking suite: brand mentions, sentiment and competitors in AI answers.
- Built for
- Business owners, agencies, CMOs and digital marketers, PR and brand specialists, and product marketers.
- Free to start
- Five free checks a day on its tracker page with no account, and a free trial with no card.
- AI surfaces it lists
- ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Google AI Overviews, Google AI Mode
- Leads with
- Shows the domains and URLs that appear most in AI answers, across seven markets.
From visible.seranking.com, checked on 25 September 2026. Their site is the authority on what it offers.
Ayzeo
Named in 4 of 59 answersAn AI visibility platform for brand mentions, citations and sentiment, with ChatGPT and Google AI Overview on every plan and other engines as add-ons.
- Built for
- SEO agencies, SaaS companies, ecommerce, publishers, marketing teams, local businesses and enterprise.
- Free to start
- A 14-day free Pro trial with a card, and a free audit with no card.
- AI surfaces it lists
- ChatGPT, Google AI Overview, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini, Grok
- Leads with
- Shows which pages on a site AI systems open and cite, and the phrases behind each sentiment.
From ayzeo.com, checked on 25 September 2026. Their site is the authority on what it offers.
Wellows
Named in 0 of 59 answersAn AI visibility and content platform for brands and agencies that tracks citations daily and drafts pages meant to earn them.
- Built for
- Brands and agencies, and also startups, freelancers and consultants.
- Free to start
- A free trial.
- AI surfaces it lists
- ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, AI Overviews, AI Mode
- Leads with
- A Citation Score, with citation and sentiment changes surfaced the next day down to the URL.
From wellows.com, checked on 25 September 2026. Their site is the authority on what it offers.
LLMrefs
Named in 8 of 59 answersAn AI search visibility tracker for brand rankings, citations and competitor benchmarks.
- Built for
- Marketing teams and SEOs.
- Free to start
- A seven-day free trial with no card.
- AI surfaces it lists
- ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, AI Mode, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude, Grok, Copilot, Meta, DeepSeek
- Leads with
- Geo-targeting in more than 50 countries and 20 languages, with weekly reports.
From llmrefs.com, checked on 25 September 2026. Their site is the authority on what it offers.
Start with what is already free
Before paying anyone, set up the two reports the search engines give every site. They show your own pages' appearances in their AI answers, which no third-party tracker can see.
- Google Search Console: Generative AI performance report. How often links to your site were shown in Google's generative AI features, as impressions, with filters for text and multimodal searches.
- Bing Webmaster Tools: AI Performance report. Total citations of your pages in AI answers, the grounding queries the AI used to find them, and citation counts per URL.
What they do not show is which businesses an answer named instead of you. For that, a one-off checker or a tracker asks the questions and reads the answers. The free checkers, compared.
Where we fit
Greater Than Services was named in none of these 59 answers. Our smallest plan, Starter, covers 1 brand with 10 questions a week on ChatGPT and Google AI Overviews, with your Google rank beside each answer. It is one option among the tools above, and the count shows the engines do not name it yet.
Greater Than Servicesour product
A workspace per brand that puts your buyer questions to five AI engines every week, records which answers named you and what they cited instead, shows your Google rank beside each answer, and drafts the fixes.
- AI surfaces it lists
- ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews
- Free to start
- A three-day trial on one brand with a card, a preview workspace with ten weeks of history that needs no sign-up, and a free AI crawler checker.
- Leads with
- Keeps the full text of every answer, so you can read what each engine actually said.
Our own description, checked against the product on 25 September 2026.
How we measured this
These are buyer questions we track for our own product, Greater Than Services, in our own workspace. Each run puts every question to five engines, asking as a buyer in the United States. It ran four times, on 1, 2, 10 and 25 September 2026. This page uses three of the questions, which drew 59 answers:
- “Which platforms help small businesses track AI assistant recommendations cheaply?”
- “What's cheapest AI assistant tracking platform that covers international markets and languages?”
- “What AI visibility tools work best for local service businesses with limited budgets?”
- ChatGPT: OpenAI's GPT-4o with web search, through the API
- Claude: Claude Haiku 4.5 with web search, through the API
- Gemini: Gemini 2.5 Flash grounded in Google Search, through the API
- Perplexity: Sonar, which always searches the web
- Google AI Overviews: read from Google's own results page
Named means the tool appears in the answer's own words. The engines write their sources into the text as links, and a link to a vendor's blog is a source, not a recommendation, so links are removed before names are matched. Own site read means the tool's website was among the sources the engine cited for that answer. A tool named in the question itself is not counted for that question, because every answer repeats it.
Across all 20 questions, Google showed an AI Overview for 71 of the 80 searches, so the other 9 are not counted as answers. Answers move from week to week: asked the same question on the same engine at the next run, the engines named 54% of the same tools again.
The full method, the questions we left out, and the data as a CSV are on the main ranking.
Questions people ask
Which AI visibility tool do AI engines recommend for a small business?
Otterly.AI, by a distance: it was named in 37 of 59 answers to our three small-business questions. Semrush came next with 17, then Peec AI with 12.
What is the cheapest way for a small business to track AI visibility?
Start with what is free: Google Search Console's generative AI report and Bing Webmaster Tools' AI Performance report show how your own pages appear in their AI answers. Several vendors let you start without a card, including Semrush, LLMrefs, SE Ranking and AthenaHQ. We do not publish vendor prices; each vendor's site has its own.
Do I need a paid tool to know whether AI recommends my business?
Not to find out once. You need one to know it week after week. When the same question went to the same engine at the next run, the engines named 54% of the same tools again, so a single check tells you about that moment only.
How many questions should a small business track?
Five to ten that a real customer asks before buying, in their words and for your area, asked the same way every week. Our own workspace tracks 25, and most of what we learned came from the first ten.