There are good AI-visibility tools out there, most are monthly subscriptions built for marketers tracking many brands. Found by AI is built for the business owner who wants an answer, a fix plan, and their evenings back. Here's the honest comparison (as at August 2026).
They're real, and you should use them. Google Search Console is rolling out a generative-AI performance report (your impressions inside AI Overviews and AI Mode), and Bing Webmaster Tools now shows how Copilot cites you, with Citation Share in preview. Connect both. What they can never show you: whether you were in the answer at all. Google and Bing tell you when AI sent you traffic; we show whether you were even named across all 7 engines, which competitor took your spot, the exact words AI used, and the fix. First-party dashboards report your own pages. The decision happens in the comparison, and the comparison is what we measure.
They're real too, and for the right person they're excellent. Lettertrace (MIT-licensed, launched August 2026) tracks mentions across four engines for free on a bring-your-own-key model: you create provider API keys, curate the prompts, pay the token bill (their estimate: around US$3 a measurement) and self-host or use their instance. If you're a developer, genuinely consider it. The trade is the same one this whole page is about: a BYOK tool hands you the tracking lever and stops. No inferred buyer questions, no registry-verified identity, no multi-sample majority voting, and no fix at the end. Our free scan asks for none of that setup, and the paid tiers exist because the fix, not the chart, is the product.
| Found by AI | Typical subscription tracker | |
|---|---|---|
| Built for | The business owner or founder: a verdict, the receipts, and a fix plan | Marketing teams & agencies who run tracking as a job |
| Setup | Nothing to configure: the scan reads your site and infers the real buyer questions itself | You supply SEO keywords, then review auto-generated prompt lists before anything runs |
| Entry | Free scan, no signup, no card: real engine answers in ~60s | Trial or demo, card usually required |
| Pricing | US$29 once for the Snapshot; Monitoring, 14-day free trial, then from US$49/mo | US$49–99+/month, forever |
| Measurement | Each question asked several times per engine: reported as "named in 2 of 6 asks", never a single-run tick | Usually single-run sampling |
| Proof | The receipts: every AI answer quoted verbatim, your name highlighted, position stated honestly | Scores and dashboards, answers rarely shown in full |
| Market context | Public live index: 21+ industry leaderboards across three countries, growing nightly | Private per-account data only |
| Local depth (AU) | ABN registry verification, suburb & region visibility map, Google Business Profile signals | Generally global/US-centric |
| Deliverable | A living report: re-renders with every product improvement, plus copy-paste schema and llms.txt | Dashboard access while you keep paying |
When a subscription tracker IS the better fit: you're an agency tracking many brands weekly, you need historical trend lines across markets from day one, or you specifically want screenshots from Google's AI Overviews UI today. For a single business that wants the answer and the fix plan, that's us. One more honesty note: a tracker that asks each question once a week is reading a coin flip, AI answers wobble ask to ask, which is exactly why we multi-sample and majority-vote every question.