If you want to see which sources an AI engine used to build its answer, GetIntel stores the full cited source list for every run from $29/month across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Google AI Overviews. Otterly.AI and LLM Pulse are the other credible picks; Siftly if you want it tied to revenue reporting. Prices checked 12 August 2026.
This is a narrower job than AI visibility tracking, and worth separating. Visibility tracking answers whether a brand gets named. Citation tracking answers what the engine read before it decided, which is the part you can actually act on: you cannot get into an answer without getting into the sources behind it.
GetIntel publishes this and sells one of the tools in it, so treat it as a vendor's buyer-side comparison rather than an independent test.
Which tools own this question?
Something unusual happens here. We ran three citation-tracking questions across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Google AI Overviews on 12 August 2026, twice each, and counted which domains the engines cited: 209 citations across 78 domains, published in the dataset under citation_tracking_subset.
The large platforms mostly are not there. Profound and Peec AI, first and third on the broader AI-visibility question, do not reach the top ten on this one. The engines answer it with small tools instead: atlasworkspace.ai on 13 citations, LLM Pulse on 11, Siftly on 11, an independent blog by Nick Lafferty on 9, and airankchecker.net on 6.
We are not in that top ten either. What that ranking measures is how often engines name a domain when asked, which tracks how long and how much a company has published about the category, so it favours whoever wrote about this first rather than whoever built the better tool.
The tools worth looking at
GetIntel
GetIntel stores every cited URL from every run, per prompt and per engine, rather than a summary count. That is the specific capability this article is about, and it is the thing we use on ourselves: every number in this piece came out of it. $29, $49 and $99 a month as of 12 August 2026, billed monthly with no contract, covering ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Google AI Overviews, with Claude on the $99 tier. Free tier and a 7-day trial with no card.
The honest limit: we are a small company and the engines rarely name us when asked this question. If your criterion is which tool the market already talks about most, that points elsewhere.
Otterly.AI
Seventh on this question with 7 citations, and unusually its documentation subdomain gets cited more than its marketing site, which tends to mean the docs answer real questions. Aimed at SMBs and indie hackers. We could not verify a current price on 12 August 2026.
LLM Pulse
Third on this question with 11 citations, and one of the few small tools that covers several engines rather than specialising in one. We could not verify a current price on the day.
Siftly
Joint third with 11 citations. Its pitch ties citation tracking to revenue attribution rather than stopping at counts, which is a different and harder claim than the rest of this list makes. We have not tested it and could not verify a current price.
Ahrefs
Second on this question with 12 citations, and the one large platform that does show up here. If you already pay for Ahrefs, Brand Radar is the cheapest thing on this page because the marginal cost is nothing. We could not verify a current standalone price.
What separates a real citation tracker from a dashboard?
Four things, and only the first is hard to fake.
- Does it store every cited URL, or a count? A number tells you that sources changed. The list tells you which ones, which is the only version you can act on.
- Is it per engine, or blended? Engines answering the same question cite almost entirely different domains, so a combined figure hides the only comparison that matters.
- Does it keep the raw answer text? When an engine cites a competitor, the answer text is the only place the reason is visible.
- How many runs behind each figure? Sources churn hard. On our own measurement ChatGPT returned a different source set on 93.3% of consecutive runs twenty minutes apart, so a single check is a snapshot rather than a reading.
That third and fourth point are why rerunning prompts matters more than adding engines, and why we would take a two-engine tool sampled often over a four-engine one sampled rarely.
Do you need a tool for this at all?
Not to start. Open ChatGPT, ask the questions your buyers ask, and write down the sources it cites underneath the answer. Repeat weekly. That is genuinely the same first insight a paid tool gives you, and it costs an afternoon.
Buy something when doing it by hand becomes the thing you stop doing, or when you need the history: the value of a tracker is not the single reading, it is having last month's readings to compare against, which you cannot reconstruct after the fact.
Where the citations actually go
Worth knowing before you optimise anything: in our category the engines cite forums and publishers far more than vendor sites. Reddit and YouTube out-cite every vendor in this space, and on shopping questions retailers took 1.41% of citations while publishers took almost everything.
A citation tracker tells you which sources won. It does not get you into them. That part is a pitching and publishing problem, and no tool on this page does it for you.
What this comparison does not do
It does not rank product quality. We have used one of these tools, ours, and are reporting public positioning for the rest.
The citation ranking rests on three prompts and two runs. It is enough to show which vendors own this question and not enough to separate fourth place from seventh.
And most prices here read as unverified because several vendors quote on request or render pricing in JavaScript we could not read on the day. We would rather leave a gap than publish a figure we have not checked.