Add as preferred source on GoogleYou already know you are missing from some answers. What you probably cannot see is why, and that is the question a citation tracker exists to answer. It tells you which pages the model read on its way to an answer, so you can stop guessing about the gap and go and look at it.
This is the part of AI search most tools treat as a footnote and a few treat as the product. It is worth being picky here, because the source list is the only output that turns into a task somebody can actually do.
Five tools, and how far each one gets you.
Why the source list is the whole job
Here is the situation you will be in within a month of starting.
You ask a model the question your best prospect asks. A competitor gets named. You do not. Now what?
There are only two answers, and they need opposite responses.
Maybe the pages the model read were other people's sites, and not one of them mentions you. Then the problem is that nobody writes about you, and you could rewrite your homepage ten times without changing anything. The fix is coverage: reviews, mentions, getting into the comparison posts and community threads the model keeps going back to.
Or maybe the model read your own pages and decided not to quote them. Then the problem is on your site, and outreach is the wrong place to spend. The fix is making those pages say what you do in a way a model can lift a clean sentence out of.
Those two cost different money and usually belong to different people. A visibility percentage cannot tell them apart. A list of the cited URLs tells you in about thirty seconds, which is why we weight it above almost everything else.
At a glance
| # | Tool | Best for | From |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Peec AI | The best all-in-one pick. Sources grouped by type, a gap report naming the pages you are missing from, and crawler data underneath it | $95/mo |
| 2 | AthenaHQ | Seeing your citations free first, then having the tool draft the follow-up | Free, then $295/mo |
| 3 | Rankscale | The widest engine coverage per euro, if vendor size is not a question you have to answer | $99/mo |
| 4 | Nightwatch | Citation sources sitting next to the keyword rankings you already track | $32/mo + $99 add-on |
| 5 | Semrush AI Visibility Toolkit | Teams already living inside Semrush who want one login and one invoice | $99/mo per domain |
Checked against each vendor's own pricing and documentation, 14 September 2026.
1. Peec AI
From $95/mo. Berlin, founded 2025.
This is the tool we reach for when the question is why rather than whether.
Every answer gets broken into the pages the model read, and those pages get sorted into five groups: editorial, corporate, UGC, reference, and your own site. That sorting is what makes the data usable rather than just long. If your citations are mostly your own site, you are more fragile than the chart suggests, because models look for a second opinion and a company that only talks about itself gets described carefully. If they are mostly editorial and community pages, somebody has already done the hard work.
It also runs a gap report, which is the feature that answers the question people actually arrive with. It shows you the pages where your competitors are cited and you are not. That list is a brief. You can hand it to whoever owns PR and they will know what to do with it.
Underneath all that it can read your server logs, through eight setups including Cloudflare and Vercel. So if a page is never being fetched by an AI crawler in the first place, you find that out instead of rewriting it and wondering why nothing changed.
Where it is not the pick. The company started in 2025, so there is not much track record if someone senior asks. No free tier, so your first look costs $95. The entry plan stops at 50 prompts. And engines past the included six are charged per engine on top.
2. AthenaHQ
Free tier, then $295/mo. United States, Y Combinator backed.
Two of the founders worked on Google Search and DeepMind, which is the relevant background for this specific job, and it shows in how carefully it attributes sources.
Start on the free tier. Three hundred credits is enough to pull a real citation list for your own brand without spending anything, and that list is usually more persuasive internally than any business case you could write.
The other thing it does well is close the loop. Once it has found the gaps, an agent drafts the on-page and off-page work rather than leaving you with a list.
Where it is not the pick. One credit is one AI answer, so the 3,600 on the paid plan disappear quickly and your real cost lands above $295. API access is an extra, quoted on request. And it does not look at your server logs, so you get the citations without the crawler half of the picture.
3. Rankscale
From $99/mo. Europe, bootstrapped.
Citation analysis across ten engines on every plan, more than 17 supported, which means your source list covers more of the market than anything else here at this price. You can also run it as often as once an hour.
They publish the full credit formula, so you can work out what a heavy citation-tracking setup costs before you commit to it.
Where it is not the pick. Two founders and no outside investment, with nothing published on SOC 2 or SSO, which becomes your problem when someone asks who you are buying from. The traffic reporting was still in beta when we checked. And it groups sources less usefully than Peec does, so you get the list without as much of the sorting.
4. Nightwatch
$32/mo, plus $99/mo for the AI add-on. Established rank tracker.
Worth a look if you want citation sources sitting beside the keyword rankings you already watch, and you are not already paying for one of the big suites. The AI layer reports citation sources and sentiment alongside a rank tracker that has been running for years.
For a lot of SEO teams that adjacency is the point. Seeing that a page ranks third and is never cited is a more useful fact than either number on its own.
Where it is not the pick. The AI tracking was still in beta when we checked, which matters if you plan to report the numbers to anyone. A hundred prompts for $99 is not generous. And four engines means a narrower source list than the three above.
5. Semrush AI Visibility Toolkit
$99/mo per domain. Part of the Semrush suite.
On this list because it is the tool most teams already have open, and because its backlink data sits right next to the citation data, which is a genuinely useful pairing. If a domain keeps getting cited about your category, you can check what else links to it without leaving the tab.
Where it is not the pick. This is the weakest tool here on the specific job the article is about. The source data is thinner than the specialists', there is no gap report telling you where competitors are cited and you are not, and Google gets reported as one combined number rather than splitting AI Overviews from AI Mode. Per-domain and per-seat pricing also punishes anyone with more than one brand. Good if you are already inside Semrush and want a rough read. Not the tool to buy for this.
Questions we get asked
What do we actually do with a citation list? Treat it as a brief for whoever owns PR, partnerships or content. The sites that keep appearing for your category are a short list, usually twenty or so, and getting mentioned on them is the work. It is far easier to ask for budget when you can name the sites.
Are the same sites cited across every engine? Broadly yes, with one exception worth knowing. Google's AI Mode reaches further into community content, so Reddit threads and YouTube videos show up there more than anywhere else. If your category has an active community, that is where to start.
How often do the sources change? Slowly enough to plan around. New coverage takes weeks to start appearing in answers, which is frustrating at the start and useful later, because it means a win keeps paying out rather than disappearing next week.
Can we just look at the citations by hand? For one question, yes, and you should, today. Ask a model something your buyer would ask and read the sources underneath. What you cannot do by hand is see the pattern across a hundred questions over three months, and the pattern is what tells you where to spend.
