Which AI visibility tools do ChatGPT and Gemini recommend? (October 2026)

We counted Llamat exactly like every other tool and show its result: it was named in none of the 66 answers, and llamat.com was never cited. Tools appear on this page in the order the engines named them most often, not in order of our opinion of them.

Key findings

Shares are of the successful answers on each engine: 33 on ChatGPT and 33 on Gemini. A tool counts as named when its name appears anywhere in the answer. Download the data (CSV): one row per answer, 66 rows.

• Five tools reached most answers on both engines. Semrush was named in 27 of 33 ChatGPT answers and 30 of 33 Gemini answers, Otterly.AI in 27 and 27, Ahrefs in 28 and 25, Profound in 27 and 21, and Peec AI in 27 and 20.
• The next two tools owe their count mostly to one engine. Gemini named SE Ranking or SE Visible in 16 of 33 answers, ChatGPT in 7. ChatGPT named Scrunch in 18 of 33 answers, Gemini in 2. Every other tool was named in 7 of the 66 answers or fewer.
• Gemini names more tools. It named 44 different tools, 7.12 per answer on average; ChatGPT named 29, 6.55 per answer. 30 tools came up only on Gemini and 15 only on ChatGPT.
• For the same search, the five tools each engine named most overlapped by 0.38 on average (Jaccard index, where 1 means the same five tools). The overlap was highest for “best ai visibility tools” and “best generative engine optimization tools” (4 shared tools, 0.67) and lowest for “best chatgpt visibility tracker” and “ai search visibility tool free” (1 shared tool, 0.11).
• ChatGPT repeats itself more than Gemini. Of the tools ChatGPT named for a search, 64% came up in all three runs and 21% in only one. On Gemini it was 46% and 34%.
• Every answer listed sources. ChatGPT cited dataforaisearch.com in 14 of 33 answers and ahrefs.com in 10; Gemini cited zapier.com in 19 of 33 and reddit.com in 14.
• Two days changed little on ChatGPT. On the four searches we had also asked on 1 October 2026, ChatGPT named the same five tools most often; Promptwatch fell from 6 of 12 answers to 2 and AthenaHQ from 5 to 3.
• Llamat, our product, was named in 0 of 33 ChatGPT answers and 0 of 33 Gemini answers.

Five tools on both engines, then a long tail

The table of tools below lists every tool named in at least 5 of the 66 answers. The top five are the same on both engines, in a different order. ChatGPT named Ahrefs most often (28 of 33 answers) and the other four in 27 each. Gemini named Semrush most often (30 of 33) and also tended to name it early: its average position in Gemini answers was 2.7, against 4.7 on ChatGPT (1 means named first). On ChatGPT, Profound (2.1) and Peec AI (2.3) came earliest of the five.

Below the top five, most tools appear on one engine only. Gemini named 44 different tools, 30 of which never came up on ChatGPT, among them ZipTie (7 of 33 Gemini answers), Arobis (6) and Botric (5). ChatGPT had its own: Promptwatch (6 of 33), RankScope and IsVisible (5 each), and Brand24 and Brandwatch, which it named for “best ai brand monitoring tools”.

The two searches for free tools got lists of their own. For “ai search visibility tool free”, ChatGPT named Ahrefs, RankScope and DoneHat in all three runs; Gemini named Ahrefs, Semrush and Arobis. For “ai visibility checker free”, ChatGPT named Ahrefs, Rank.ai and IsVisible in all three runs, and Gemini only Arobis. Neither engine named Profound, Peec AI or Otterly.AI in two or more runs of either free search.

Named is not the same as recommended

A tool counts as named whatever the sentence around it says. These three verbatim excerpts from the 3 October answers each count as naming every tool in them:

• An endorsement. ChatGPT, “ai visibility checker free”, run 1: “If you want to know ‘Does ChatGPT actually recommend my business when someone searches for my service?’, I'd start with Ahrefs or Rank.ai.” Ahrefs and Rank.ai are recommended for a stated need.
• A pointer to another category. ChatGPT, “best ai brand monitoring tools”, run 1: “Enterprise PR/social intelligence → Brandwatch, Talkwalker or Meltwater, rather than a lightweight AI-only tracker.” Brandwatch is named as a social listening tool for a different job, and the same answer warns: “don't choose a traditional social-listening platform just because it says ‘AI-powered.’”
• A closing question. Gemini, “best llm seo tools”, run 1: “Are you looking for a tool that integrates with a traditional SEO suite (like Semrush/SE Ranking), or a dedicated standalone GEO tracker for a startup or agency?” Semrush and SE Ranking appear only as examples in a question back to the reader.

To tell them apart, read the sentence around the name: a recommendation ties the tool to a need (“I’d start with”, “best for”), a caveat steers the reader elsewhere, and a question only offers it as an option. This edition counts all three alike. Our free report adds a “recommended” flag judged by our own model, as described in our methodology; this dataset has no such flag, and if a later edition adds one, this page will say how it is judged.

ChatGPT and Gemini: same category, different lists

For each search we took the five tools each engine named most often and compared the two lists (see the overlap table below). On most “best …” searches the engines share two to four of the five. On “best chatgpt visibility tracker” they share one: ChatGPT gave its usual five, Profound, Peec AI, Otterly.AI, Scrunch and Semrush, while Gemini’s five were Rankscale, Otterly.AI, Dageno AI, AIclicks and Omnia.

So a result on one engine says little about the other, even for the same search on the same day. If ChatGPT is the engine you care about most, our guide to the ChatGPT SEO tool options covers how to track it.

How stable the lists are from run to run

We asked every search three times on each engine, each time in a new logged-out session. For every tool named at least once for a search, we counted how many of the three runs named it. On ChatGPT, 57 of 89 such tool and search pairs (64%) were named in all three runs; on Gemini, 51 of 111 (46%). A single answer would have shown a different list: 21% of ChatGPT’s pairs and 34% of Gemini’s came up in only one of the three runs.

Between two runs of the same search, the tool lists overlapped by 0.76 on ChatGPT and 0.65 on Gemini on average (Jaccard index). That is why one answer is not a measurement, and why our free report asks every prompt three times on ChatGPT and on Gemini.

Which sources the engines cite

All 66 answers listed at least one source. ChatGPT answers cited 5.21 domains on average and 62 different domains in all; Gemini answers cited 6.88 on average and 59 in all. The two engines lean on different sites. ChatGPT cited dataforaisearch.com in 14 of 33 answers, ahrefs.com in 10 and marqeable.com in 7. Gemini cited zapier.com in 19 of 33, reddit.com in 14, and position.digital and visible.seranking.com in 13 each.

Several of the domains Gemini cites most are the websites of tools in this dataset, among them visible.seranking.com (SE Visible), frase.io, nightwatch.io and aiclicks.io. llamat.com was not cited in any answer.

What changed since 1 October

This is the first monthly edition. A smaller ChatGPT-only measurement on 1 October 2026 used the first four of these searches (“best ai visibility tools”, “best ai visibility tracking tools”, “ai visibility checker free” and “best ai visibility platforms”), three runs each, also from Czech IP addresses: 12 answers. On those four searches, 3 October gave the same top five. Ahrefs went from 10 of 12 answers to 12, Semrush from 10 to 11, and Otterly.AI, Peec AI and Profound stayed at 9. Promptwatch fell from 6 to 2 and AthenaHQ from 5 to 3. Each date had 15 different tools, 13 of them on both.

We recounted the 1 October answers with this edition’s name matching. The 1 October CSV lists IsVisible in 2 of 12 answers; the recount finds 3, because the original count missed “isvisible.ai” written in lower case. All other 1 October counts are unchanged. Perplexity, which we also asked on 1 October, returned none of its 12 answers and showed a sign-in wall instead, so it is not part of this dataset.

How we measured

• Searches: 11 phrases that Google Suggest offered in the US, in English, on 3 October 2026, such as “best ai visibility tools”, “best aeo tool” and “ai visibility checker free”. We asked them exactly as typed, in lower case and without a question mark. Our free report rewrites search phrases into natural questions; this dataset keeps them as people type them into Google.
• Runs: each search three times on ChatGPT and three times on Gemini, every time in a new logged-out session with no account and no history. That is 66 answers, and all 66 were successful. Four were collected at 11:59 UTC on 3 October 2026 and the other 62 between 14:46 and 14:56 UTC the same day.
• ChatGPT: the logged-out chatgpt.com web app with web search requested, through our own proxy farm with Czech IP addresses. ChatGPT has no country setting; it answered in English because the searches are in English.
• Gemini: the logged-out gemini.google.com web app with the country set to the United States and the interface in English. Our log records the proxy endpoint of each call, not the exit IP address. Gemini went through the same Czech proxy farm as ChatGPT, and the country setting does not move the exit: in a test on 4 October 2026 with the country set to the United States, Gemini placed the visitor in Prague, Czechia.
• Counting: code, not a language model, matched tool names in the answer text against a list of 67 tools and their spellings. The list starts from every tool in our comparison of AI visibility tools (22 trackers plus Llamat, with SE Ranking and SE Visible counted as one tool) and adds every other tool we found by reading all 66 answers and the 12 from 1 October. We checked every match against its context by hand. Names count only as whole words, and links are removed first, so a cited URL alone does not count as naming a tool. Names that are also ordinary words, such as Profound, Scrunch or Frase, count only when capitalized.
• One brand, one tool: Semrush includes its AI Visibility Toolkit and free checker, Ahrefs includes Brand Radar and its free AI visibility checker, SE Ranking and SE Visible count as one tool, and so do HubSpot and its AEO Grader. The AI engines themselves, Google Search Console, Bing Webmaster Tools, Google Analytics and review sites such as G2 and Capterra do not count as tools. The tool at aisearchvisibility.ai counts only when its domain is written, because its name is the same as the category. Gemini once wrote “Profond” while describing Profound; we counted it as Profound.
• Named, not recommended: a tool counts whenever an answer names it, including in a comparison, a caveat or a closing question. We did not judge whether the answer recommends it. Position is the order in which the answer first names each tool.
• Cited domains are the sources each engine listed for its answer, as host names without “www.”. Subdomains such as visible.seranking.com are counted separately from seranking.com.
• How we collect and count answers for the free report, and why we ask three times, is described in our methodology.