Key takeaways
- Promptwatch ($95/mo entry) is the only one of the three that pairs real-UI prompt tracking with IP-verified AI crawler logs, visitor analytics, and a Content Agent that writes and publishes fixes.
- Superlines (EUR 79/mo entry) is the cheapest way in. Its competitive metrics, AI topical map, Action Center, and MCP server on every plan are real strengths for in-house teams.
- Gauge has dropped its cheap plan. Self-serve is now Growth at $599/mo for 600 daily prompts across 3 platforms, which suits teams that want volume and answer count over breadth.
- Real-UI versus API collection matters. In Promptwatch's August 2026 test, the ChatGPT interface and the OpenAI API shared only 25.6% of their sources.
- I could not confirm the data collection method for Gauge or Superlines from public sources. Ask each vendor directly before you buy.
Why real-UI tracking is the first question to ask
Most AI visibility tools run prompts on a schedule and report whether your brand showed up. The part buyers skip is how the answer was collected. There are two routes: call the model's API, or load the actual interface the way a buyer does.
The difference is bigger than it sounds. In an August 2026 test on commercial prompts about platforms that help expats buy property in Europe, Promptwatch compared the ChatGPT interface with the OpenAI API (web search off):
- The two shared only 25.6% of their sources.
- 84% of interface answers had sources, against 26% of API answers.
- The interface produced 392 citations across 149 unique domains. The API produced 170 citations across 67 domains.
- The interface surfaced 48 editorial pages (listicles, comparisons, reviews) and 6 community sources. The API found 3 and 0.
- 87% of the API's citations pointed at a homepage, and the model invented a company that does not exist.
Turning web search on closes some of the gap but not all of it. Surfer SEO's August 2026 study (about 1,000 prompts) found 3.1 sources per API answer versus 12.1 in the interface, with 4.8% domain overlap. Paprik's April 2026 study found one brand at 20% share of voice in a search-enabled API and 5% in the interface. Both studies come from vendors that sell interface-based tracking, so weigh the bias, but the direction is consistent with Promptwatch's own test.
If you are tracking ChatGPT, where almost half of responses cite 10 or more unique domains (Promptwatch Data, Sep 28 to Oct 4, 2026), a tool that returns 3 sources per answer is measuring something different from what your buyers see.
The three tools at a glance
| Promptwatch | Gauge | Superlines | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Entry price | $95/mo | $599/mo (Growth, monthly) | EUR 79/mo |
| Prompts at entry | 50 | 600, run daily | 50 |
| Engines at entry | 4 models (pool of about 11 platforms) | 3: ChatGPT, Google AI Mode, Copilot | Any 3 of up to 10 |
| Data collection | Real UI, confirmed by Promptwatch | Not verified | Described as live-interface by one third-party review, not verified |
| AI crawler logs | Yes, from Professional ($245/mo) | Not confirmed | Bot analytics mentioned in a third-party review |
| Visitor analytics | Yes | Not confirmed | Not confirmed |
| Content creation | Content Agent, Content Refresh, CMS publishing | Not confirmed | Action Center tasks, no content writer |
| MCP and API | MCP and API on every paid plan | API on Enterprise (competitor claim) | MCP on every plan, API from Growth |
Treat the unverified cells as questions for a sales call, not as weaknesses. Public information on Gauge and Superlines is thinner than what Promptwatch publishes about itself, and the Gauge enterprise details come from a competitor's comparison page.
Promptwatch: tracking plus fixing
Promptwatch sits at the "measure and fix" end of the category. It scrapes the live interfaces of ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Google AI Mode, Gemini, Perplexity, Copilot, and others, per country and language, so citation order and localization match what a user sees.
What separates it from the other two is everything after the dashboard:
- Agent Analytics shows IP-verified requests from GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot and other AI crawlers, the page hit, the status code, and the citations that page earns. Spoofed bots are filtered out.
- Visitor Analytics tracks AI-referred human visits and conversions separately from bot hits, so you can see whether a new page was crawled, cited, and clicked.
- Prompt tracking carries monthly prompt volumes, difficulty scores, and the query fan-out behind each answer.
- The Content Agent plans, writes, and publishes to WordPress, Webflow, or Framer, and the Action Board turns gaps into a prioritized to-do list.
- Reddit, YouTube, and LinkedIn citation reports cover channels many trackers ignore.
Crisp is the cleanest proof point. After adopting Promptwatch it used citation data to focus on Reddit and YouTube, and its AI traffic converted at 2x the rate of its normal traffic.
Pricing
| Plan | Price | Prompts | Responses/month | Crawler logs |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Essential | $95/mo | 50 | 6,000 | Not included |
| Professional | $245/mo | 150 | 18,000 | 25M entries |
| Business | $579/mo | 350 | 42,000 | 100M entries |
There is a free Explore tier (1 project, 10 prompts, ChatGPT only) and a 7-day trial on monthly plans. Confirm current numbers at promptwatch.com/pricing. One caveat: crawler logs start at Professional, not Essential, and Shopping Insights and Ads Radar are Business-only. A third-party reviewer also reports state and city tracking sitting in Business, which matches Promptwatch's own plan structure, while country tracking is on every plan.
Superlines: the cheap, competitive-analysis specialist
Superlines is a Finnish platform that covers ChatGPT, Perplexity, Copilot, Google AI Overviews, AI Mode, Gemini, Claude, DeepSeek, Mistral and Grok, with three engines on standard plans and up to ten on Enterprise. A September 2026 review by Lari Numminen, based on a three-week trial, rates it as one of the strongest platforms tested.
What stands out:
- Share of voice and brand ranking rate measured against named competitors per prompt and per model. In the review account, visibility ran 20.52% on Perplexity and 4.89% on AI Overviews, and the share-of-voice ordering across engines was almost the reverse of visibility. That is the sort of insight that should change where you spend effort.
- An AI topical map plotting share of voice against topical presence across every peer.
- An Action Center that turns findings into tasks with owners and status, covering on-page and off-page work.
- An MCP server on every plan, including the EUR 79 tier.
Pricing
| Plan | Price | Prompts | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Starter | EUR 79/mo | 50 | Any 3 engines, 1 brand, 1 month history |
| Pro | EUR 199/mo | 150 | 3 brands, exports, monthly audits |
| Growth | EUR 379/mo | 300 | 7 brands, API access, weekly audits |
| Enterprise | Custom | 400+ | Up to 10 engines, SSO, strategist |
Every tier includes unlimited competitors, unlimited country and language tracking, daily prompt frequency, and a 7-day trial. Those prices come from a third-party review, so check superlines.io before committing.
The gaps are what the review also implies: no content writer, no confirmed visitor or conversion analytics, and a small review base (4.8/5 on OMR from 8 reviews). Superlines is a strong measuring and prioritizing tool, then you execute elsewhere.
Gauge: volume-first, priced for it
Gauge is a tracker aimed at teams that want a lot of answers. Per its own pricing and comparison pages, the Growth plan runs 600 prompts daily, which works out to 54,000 AI answers per month, across ChatGPT, Google AI Mode, and Microsoft Copilot, with 3 seats. Gauge puts its cost at $11.09 per 1,000 answers.
The wrinkle: a competitor's comparison page reports that Gauge removed its $99 Starter plan, leaving Growth at $599/mo as the only self-serve option. Enterprise is custom, and the same competitor claims it is the only tier with API access, BI integrations, and Claude and Grok tracking. Treat that last part as unverified, since it comes from a rival.
I could not confirm whether Gauge collects answers through the real UI or through APIs. That is the first question to ask. At 600 prompts daily, the answer decides whether you are buying 54,000 answers that reflect buyer reality or 54,000 API outputs.
Price per prompt, honestly framed
| Tool | Entry plan | Prompts | Rough cost per prompt |
|---|---|---|---|
| Superlines | EUR 79 | 50 | about EUR 1.58 |
| Promptwatch | $95 | 50 | $1.90 |
| Gauge | $599 | 600 | about $1.00 |
Per prompt, Gauge looks cheapest, but only if you actually need 600 prompts and the three platforms it covers. Superlines wins on the lowest cash outlay. Promptwatch costs slightly more per prompt at entry but folds in more of the stack at higher tiers. Prompts are also not equivalent across tools: refresh frequency, engines per prompt, and responses per month all change what one prompt buys. Promptwatch publishes response counts (6,000 on Essential), which makes comparing easier.
What happens after you find a gap
This is where the three diverge most.
Suppose a tracker tells you a competitor is cited for "best CRM for startups" and you are not. What next?
- With Superlines, the Action Center assigns the work and the topical map shows where you are thin. Someone then writes the page.
- With Gauge, you get the measurement at volume. Confirm with the vendor what guidance sits on top.
- With Promptwatch, content gap analysis finds missing topics against your own pages, the Content Agent drafts and publishes, and crawler logs plus visitor analytics check whether the page got crawled, cited, and clicked.
That loop matters more as citation behavior shifts. Promptwatch Data shows reddit.com's share of ChatGPT citations fell from about 4% to 0.5% on August 14, 2026, and that ChatGPT drew 0.46% of citations from social platforms while Google AI Overviews drew 12.2% (Sep 28 to Oct 4, 2026). Those swings can erase a strategy in a week. A tool that only reports will show the drop. One that shows crawls and citations per page helps you respond.
The content-type data points the same way: product pages were the most cited type in ChatGPT at 22.4%, and news lost half its cited pages within 36 days while landing pages and docs lasted longest. Content freshness tooling is not a nice-to-have.
Which one should you pick
| If you are... | Pick | Why |
|---|---|---|
| A lean in-house team that wants competitive analysis and MCP at the lowest price | Superlines | EUR 79 entry, topical map, Action Center |
| A team that wants to measure, publish fixes, and attribute AI traffic in one place | Promptwatch | Crawler logs, visitor analytics, Content Agent |
| A larger team that needs hundreds of daily prompts on ChatGPT, AI Mode, and Copilot | Gauge | 600 prompts, 54,000 answers per month |
| An agency | Promptwatch | Agency plans from $199/mo with unlimited projects and white-label reports |
| Developer-tool company | Promptwatch | Tracks Claude Code, Codex, and OpenCode recommendations |
I would not buy any of these on a feature table alone. Run a two-week trial with the same 30 prompts and compare three things: whether the sources and citation order match what you see in the live ChatGPT or Perplexity UI, how fast you can get from a gap to a published page, and whether you can tie any of it to traffic.
Questions to ask each vendor
- Do you collect answers from the live interface or the API, and for which engines?
- Are answers collected per country and language, and from which locations?
- How many responses per month does my plan actually include?
- Do I get AI crawler logs and AI-referred visitor tracking, and on which plan?
- What does the tool do after it finds a gap?
- Is MCP or API access included, or gated to a higher tier?
If you want a wider field than these three, the GEO software directory at bestgeosoftware.com lists more options. Our other tool cards cover close alternatives such as Peec AI and Profound.
Profound
Bottom line
Superlines is the best value if you mostly need competitive measurement and already have writers. Gauge fits high-volume monitoring, once you have confirmed its collection method and accepted the $599 floor. Promptwatch is the pick if you want real-UI tracking connected to crawler logs, visitor analytics, and content execution, and it is the only one of the three that publishes all of that on self-serve plans. Verify pricing on each vendor's own page before you commit, since all three have changed plans recently.