Key takeaways
- Citations.io ($39/mo) leans on hallucination alerts and confidence-labeled visibility scores, priced on "analysed answers" rather than raw prompt volume.
- Mentions.so ($49/mo) is the budget pick with unlimited seats on every tier, but its analytics are thin: no crawler logs, no Reddit tracking, and manual prompt entry only.
- Promptwatch ($95/mo) costs more at entry but is the only one of the three with AI crawler logs, Reddit/YouTube citation tracking, and content agents that actually publish fixes, not just report problems.
- All three define "mention" (brand named) and "citation" (brand linked/sourced) separately, which matters more than it sounds because most vendors blur the two.
- If your only question is "was I mentioned yesterday," any of the three will do. If your question is "why wasn't I mentioned, and what do I do about it," the choice narrows fast.
Why this comparison exists
Three tools, three price points, roughly the same pitch: type in a brand, get a dashboard, watch AI answers roll in. But "track brand mentions in AI search" has become a category with wildly different depth hiding behind similar homepages. I went through the pricing pages, docs, and third-party reviews for Citations.io, Mentions.so, and Promptwatch to see where they actually diverge, because on the surface they all promise the same thing and that's exactly the problem.
Before getting into the tools, it helps to nail down the vocabulary, because the vendors themselves don't always use it consistently. A mention is when an AI answer names your brand, no link required. A citation is when the answer links to or sources your domain as evidence. Ahrefs draws this line explicitly, and so do all three tools in this comparison, but how deeply they let you inspect the difference varies a lot.
Quick comparison table
| Tool | Entry price | Engines tracked | Free trial | Entry-tier prompts | Standout feature |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Promptwatch | $95/mo (Essential) | 8 named platforms: ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, AI Overviews, AI Mode, Claude, Grok, DeepSeek, Meta Llama | 7 days free | 50 | Crawler logs, Reddit/YouTube citations, Content Agents, Ads Radar |
| Citations.io | $39/mo (Starter) | 4: ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude | $5 for 5 days | 25 tracked + 25 benchmark | Hallucination and misattribution alerts |
| Mentions.so | $49/mo (Starter) | 3 on Starter, 8 named once you hit Pro ($99/mo) | Not publicly confirmed | 25 | Unlimited seats on every plan |
A note on the numbers: several third-party review sites still quote Promptwatch at $99/$249 and Mentions.so at $19/$49/$99. Both companies have since raised or restructured pricing. The live pricing pages, checked directly, show Promptwatch at $95/$245/$579 and Mentions.so at $49/$99/$199/$399. Use those, and treat anything you read elsewhere with a bit of suspicion until you check the source page yourself.
Citations.io: built around confidence and hallucinations
Citations.io prices itself on "analysed AI answers" rather than the number of prompts you track, which is a genuinely different mental model. Starter gives you 25 prompts you control plus 25 that Citations.io auto-generates as benchmarks, and caps you at 1,000 analysed answers a month. Growth ($69/mo) triples the prompt count and adds a Competitor Visibility Index and Source Influence score. Pro ($99/mo) unlocks API access, webhooks, and hallucination/misattribution alerts.
That hallucination-alert feature is the thing Citations.io leads with on its homepage, and it's a fair differentiator: it flags the moment an AI answer says something factually wrong about your brand, with the verbatim text and the source it pulled from. If your biggest fear is a bad AI-generated claim about your company spreading unchecked, that's a real reason to look here.
The company is also unusually candid about the pitfalls of this whole category. Its own solutions page warns buyers not to extrapolate share-of-voice from a 10-answer sample, and not to rely on a single engine when half your buyers might be asking a different one. That kind of self-aware guidance is rare in vendor marketing and worth taking seriously regardless of which tool you pick.
What it doesn't do: only four engines, no crawler-log visibility into when AI bots actually hit your site, and no built-in content generation to fix what it finds. It's a measurement tool with a confidence interval attached, not an execution tool.
Mentions.so: cheap, simple, thin
Mentions.so's biggest selling point isn't a feature, it's the seat structure: every plan, including the $49/mo Starter, includes unlimited team seats. Built by the agency Contact Studios, it's clearly aimed at teams who want a lot of people looking at one dashboard without paying per-login fees, which is a real annoyance elsewhere in this category.
The catch is that Starter only covers 3 of the 8 engines it lists on the homepage. You need Pro at $99/mo to unlock "all LLMs," and even then, third-party reviews describe the analytical depth as noticeably thinner than competitors: "Mentions.so tracks whether your brand gets mentioned, but the analytics layer is thin compared to platforms that capture full AI responses, citation positions, and detailed sentiment breakdowns," according to a review on LLM Pulse's blog. Its "AI traffic analytics" also measures referral traffic from analytics tools, not actual AI crawler-bot activity on your servers, a distinction that trips up a lot of buyers who assume the two are the same thing.
There's no published free trial, no confirmed API access, no SOC 2 or GDPR claims on the public site, and prompt discovery is entirely manual, you bring your own list. For a small team on a tight budget that just wants a mention/no-mention signal across a handful of prompts, it does the job. For anything more, you'll outgrow it fast.
Promptwatch: the only one that also fixes things
Promptwatch starts at a higher price, $95/mo for Essential versus $39 and $49 for the other two, but the gap in what you get for that price is bigger than the dollar gap suggests.
Where Citations.io and Mentions.so stop at telling you what happened, Promptwatch adds a layer neither competitor has: AI crawler logs. You can see, in near real time, when ChatGPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, or Meta's crawler actually visits your pages, what they read, and whether they hit errors. That's the difference between guessing why your visibility dropped and actually watching it happen. Meta's own web crawler went from roughly 2% to nearly 38% of all tracked AI crawler requests in about three weeks this summer, per Promptwatch's data on Meta-WebIndexer, which is exactly the kind of shift a mention-only tool would never surface.
Promptwatch also tracks Reddit and YouTube citations specifically, sources that neither Citations.io nor Mentions.so appear to monitor on their public pages, despite Reddit being one of the largest social citation sources across most engines. That said, Reddit's share inside ChatGPT specifically has been unstable: it held around 3.8% of ChatGPT Search citations through early August 2026, then collapsed to under 1% almost overnight on August 14, per Promptwatch's Reddit citation report. Google's AI Overviews and AI Mode saw the same decline happen far more gradually over the same window. If you're only checking mentions weekly, you'd miss a swing like that entirely.
The part that actually separates Promptwatch from being "just a bigger tracker" is what happens after the data comes in. Content Agents can draft and publish AEO-optimized content straight to Webflow, Framer, or WordPress on a schedule, Agent Chat lets you ask plain-English questions about your own visibility data, and Unified Actions turns all of it into a prioritized to-do list instead of a wall of charts. One NXT Pharma founder put it this way: "Promptwatch stands out for its powerful features, especially its earned media tracking for off-site mentions, the 'Actions' feature, and its well-documented API integrations."
Promptwatch also uses real UI scraping, geo-located sessions that mimic what an actual user in a given market would see, rather than relying purely on API calls, which is a methodology distinction worth asking any vendor about directly. It reports 4.7/5 on G2 and over 1,780 brands and agencies as customers.
The honest downside: it's the most expensive entry point of the three, and Essential doesn't include the crawler-log or content-generation features at their full depth, those really open up on Professional ($245/mo) and above. If your budget caps out at $50/mo, Promptwatch isn't the tool for you yet.
Where each one actually fits
Pick Citations.io if hallucination detection is your top concern and you want confidence-labeled scores without paying for a full execution layer. The $5/5-day trial makes it cheap to test before committing.
Pick Mentions.so if you're a small team on a tight budget, need more than three or four people to have logins, and can live with a manual, mention/no-mention level of insight rather than deep analytics.
Pick Promptwatch if you've outgrown "was I mentioned" and need to know why, where the citation actually came from, whether AI crawlers are even reaching your pages correctly, and want a tool that can draft the fix instead of just flagging the problem.
A buyer's checklist before you sign up for any of them
RMG Digital Solutions, a firm that advises on reputation monitoring, put together a due-diligence list worth stealing regardless of which vendor you're evaluating: confirm whether the tool tracks the actual consumer product interface or an API approximation, check whether you can upload and separate your own branded versus non-branded prompts, and ask whether the tool shows you failed or incomplete data collections rather than quietly smoothing them over. A visibility percentage is meaningless without knowing the denominator, how many prompts, how many engines, how often they were run.
It's also worth remembering that a mention or citation being present tells you nothing about whether it was favorable. As RMG puts it, "A mention means your name appeared. A citation means a source was linked or otherwise identified. Neither establishes that the answer was accurate or favorable." Read the actual answer text before you trust a sentiment score, on any of these three platforms.
Beyond these three
These aren't the only options. Otterly AI starts around $29/mo, Peec AI's entry pricing is disputed across sources ($19 vs $89 depending on where you look), and enterprise players like Profound and Scrunch skip the low end entirely. If you want a broader view of the category before committing, the GEO software directory at bestgeosoftware.com is a reasonable place to widen the search, and the AI rank tracking directory at ai-rank-tools.com covers more prompt-tracking-specific tools if that's the narrower job you need done.
And if the actual bottleneck isn't measurement but getting cited in the first place, that's a content and technical SEO problem, not a dashboard problem. That's the kind of work 1001 SEO Media does for clients who've already figured out they're invisible in AI answers and need someone to fix the underlying content and site structure, not just report on it monthly.