Which AI visibility tools do ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity recommend? October 2026 benchmark

We asked ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity 12 questions a buyer would ask about AI visibility tools and counted which tools each answer named. Five tools were named in most answers on all three engines: Semrush (33 of 36 answers), Profound (30 of 33), Otterly.AI (29 of 36), Ahrefs (29 of 36) and Peec AI (27 of 36). Beyond those five, the engines disagreed.

We make XeoRank, an AI visibility and SEO tool, and we ran this benchmark with XeoRank's own scanner. XeoRank was named in 0 of the 36 answers. We publish the result anyway, together with the raw data, so you can check our counting.

Key takeaways

• Five tools lead on every engine. Semrush, Profound, Otterly.AI, Ahrefs and Peec AI were each named in at least half of the answers on ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity.
• The engines disagree on the rest. Scrunch was named in 9 of 12 Perplexity answers and 2 of 12 Gemini answers. Tracking one engine tells you little about the others.
• AthenaHQ was named in fewer than half the answers that did not ask about it: 14 of 33.
• Vendors' own pages are a large share of the sources. At least 40% of the 371 citations went to websites of companies that sell SEO or AI visibility software.

Which tools were named, by engine

The counts below are the number of answers that named each tool at least once. Each engine answered 12 questions. For Profound and AthenaHQ we left out the one question that named them, so their counts are out of 11 per engine.

Another 20 tools were named in 1 to 3 answers each, most of them by Gemini. The CSV lists them all.

Gemini named the most tools per answer, 8.7 on average, against 7.4 for ChatGPT and 6.9 for Perplexity. Gemini also cited the most sources: 146 across its 12 answers, against 119 for Perplexity and 106 for ChatGPT.

Where the engines disagree

The top five look the same everywhere, but a brand further down the list can be strong on one engine and missing on another. Three examples from this run:

• Scrunch was named in 8 of 12 ChatGPT answers and 9 of 12 Perplexity answers, but only 2 of 12 Gemini answers.
• SE Ranking did the opposite: 7 of 12 on Gemini, 2 on ChatGPT and 3 on Perplexity.
• Surfer appeared in 6 ChatGPT answers and none on Perplexity. LLM Pulse appeared only on Gemini, in 5 answers.

If you track your own brand, this is the reason to look at each engine separately. A single blended score would have hidden all three patterns.

What the engines cited

The 36 answers cited 371 sources on 197 different domains. The most cited were semrush.com (18 citations), tryprofound.com (14), peec.ai (11), help.otterly.ai (8), and ahrefs.com, blog.hubspot.com and visible.seranking.com (7 each).

At least 149 of the 371 citations, about 40%, went to websites of companies that sell SEO or AI visibility software. We counted that share conservatively, so the real figure is a little higher. The rest were roundups, media coverage such as 01net and TechRadar, and a few research papers on arxiv.org.

For a tool vendor, the pattern suggests two jobs. Your own pricing, feature and help pages need to state plainly what the product does, because the engines quote them. And the third-party roundups that the engines read need to include you, because that is where most of the remaining citations come from.

The 12 questions

We wrote questions a buyer would type and kept our own product out of them. Two name a competitor, because "alternatives to" questions are common.

1. What are the best AI visibility tools to track how a brand appears in ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity?
2. What are the best generative engine optimization (GEO) tools in 2026?
3. Which answer engine optimization (AEO) platforms are worth paying for?
4. What is the best tool to track brand mentions in ChatGPT answers?
5. What are the best AI search visibility tools for marketing agencies managing multiple clients?
6. What are affordable AI visibility tracking tools for a small business?
7. What are the best GEO tools for B2B SaaS companies?
8. What are the best tools to monitor citations in Google AI Overviews and AI Mode?
9. What are the best alternatives to Profound for AI visibility tracking?
10. What are the best alternatives to AthenaHQ?
11. What are the best AI visibility tools for enterprise brands?
12. What are the best LLM brand monitoring tools for ecommerce brands?

Methodology

We ran every question once on each engine on 21 October 2026, through each provider's API with web search turned on:

• ChatGPT: OpenAI's GPT-5.5 model with the web search tool.
• Gemini: Gemini 2.5 Flash with grounding in Google Search.
• Perplexity: the Sonar model.

API answers are not identical to what a logged-in person sees in the consumer apps, which can add personalisation and memory. No location or account history was set.

We counted a tool as named when its name appeared anywhere in the answer, ignoring case. We counted the company name, so Semrush and Ahrefs count whether the answer meant their AI visibility add-on or their SEO suite, and HubSpot counts for either of its tools.

Two limits matter when you read the numbers:

• Answers vary between runs. One run per question is a snapshot, so a difference of one or two answers between tools is not meaningful.
• We read the first 5,000 characters of each answer. 9 of the 36 answers were longer, so a tool named only near the end of a long answer would be missed.

Claude is not included in this edition. We plan to add it and repeat the same 12 questions every month, so the table above will become a trend rather than a single reading.

Get the data

Download the per-answer CSV. It has one row per question and engine, with the tools named and the domains cited. If you run the same questions and get different results, we would like to hear about it.

To see how your own brand shows up in these engines, our AI visibility tracking asks your buyers' questions on ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Grok and reports each engine separately. For a broader comparison of the tools themselves, see the best AI visibility tools.