Which tool shows me what content AI models cite? Six options compared
Which tool shows what content AI models cite? We compare Promptwatch, AthenaHQ, Scrunch AI, Ahrefs Brand Radar, Rankscale and LLMrefs on citation depth and cost.
If you want to see which pages, domains and videos ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Google AI Overviews actually cite, you need a tool that stores the sources behind each answer, not just a yes or no on whether your brand appeared. Most AI visibility products can do the second thing. Fewer do the first one well, and fewer still connect a citation to what happened on your site afterwards.
The short answer: Promptwatch goes furthest on citations, because it reports them at page and domain level, tracks specific URLs over time, and joins them to crawler logs and visits. The rest of this guide explains what "shows what content AI models cite" should mean, then compares the realistic options.
What a citation tool should actually show
A citation is a source an AI answer points to. When ChatGPT answers "best project management software for agencies", it may name five tools and link to eight pages. Those eight pages are the content the model cited. Someone else wrote them, and your brand was either on them or it wasn't.
A useful tool answers five questions:
- Which exact URLs were cited for my tracked prompts?
- Which domains show up most, and how does that change over time?
- Was my own content among the sources, and in what position?
- Where does the model pull from outside my site: Reddit threads, YouTube videos, review sites, news?
- What happened after a citation: did a bot fetch the page, and did a visitor arrive?
Anything that only returns a mention count is a brand monitor, not a citation tool. That is fine for a weekly pulse, but it will not tell you what to publish or fix.
Promptwatch: citation analytics plus the path to the visit
Promptwatch reports citations at page and domain level, with URL positions inside the answer. A Page Tracker lets you follow specific URLs, yours or a competitor's. Offsite mentions flag places where your brand is named on a third-party page without a link, and there are dedicated reports for Reddit, YouTube and LinkedIn citations. Citation Trends classifies each citation by content type and source type, and shows first cited, ramp-up days, peak rate and decay half-life per page.
What separates it from the pack is the second half. Agent Analytics shows IP-verified AI crawler logs (GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, ChatGPT-User, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot and others), with a crawl-to-citation path and a citation rate per page. 360 Insights then joins crawler logs, citation clicks and AI-referred visits for each page. So you can see that a page was crawled, cited, and visited, or that it was crawled and never cited, which is a very different problem.
Pricing starts with a free Explore plan (10 prompts, ChatGPT only). Essential is $95 a month, Professional is $245 and Business is $579. Crawler logs start on Professional, so if the crawl-to-citation path matters to you, plan for that tier. Every paid plan unlocks all tracked models.
Where it falls short: the free tier is narrow, and the full citation-to-visit chain needs a paid plan with crawler logs. It also asks you to connect a log source or the WordPress plugin, which is real setup work for a team without developer help.
AthenaHQ
AthenaHQ tracks how a brand appears in AI answers, rolls results into a GEO score, and pushes gaps into an Action Center. The pricing page read on 24 October 2026 lists a free Essential tier with 300 credits and a Starter plan at $295 a month with 3,600 credits and 11 models. The Athena Citation Engine sits in the custom Enterprise plan. If citation depth is your main need, that gating matters: the headline citation feature is not on the self-serve plan.
Scrunch AI
Scrunch AI pairs monitoring with an Agent Experience Platform that serves AI-optimized pages to crawlers, and it includes AI agent and bot traffic reporting. Core is $250 a month for 125 unique prompts and 5,000 responses a month across four LLMs. Nine LLMs and AXP are Enterprise. It is a reasonable pick when crawler-side delivery is the goal, less so when you want a source-by-source citation explorer.
Ahrefs Brand Radar
Ahrefs Brand Radar reports on AI Overviews, AI Mode, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Copilot, with YouTube and Reddit sources and AI crawler activity. Custom Prompts is included with paid Ahrefs plans with a daily quota (5 on Lite, 10 on Standard, 20 on Advanced). The AI Visibility Index starts at $199 a month. It suits teams already living in Ahrefs who want citation context beside their link data.
Rankscale and LLMrefs
Rankscale is the budget entry: Essentials is $20 a month (yearly billing only) and the pricing page lists citation analysis among its features. Pro is $99 and includes Looker Studio. Its own docs concede that visibility leads business results by weeks with only proxy linkage, so there is no visit data to close the loop. LLMrefs treats AI visibility like rank tracking, builds fan-out prompts from your keywords, and reports cited source URLs across ChatGPT, AI Overviews, AI Mode, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude and Grok. Its pricing page did not show a dollar figure when we read it on 24 October 2026, and the listing notes weekly refreshes and no alerting.
Side-by-side comparison
| Tool | Cited URLs and domains | Reddit / YouTube sources | Crawler logs | Entry price |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Promptwatch | Yes, page and domain level, with positions | Yes (also LinkedIn) | Yes, from Professional | Free; $95/mo Essential |
| AthenaHQ | Citation Engine on Enterprise | Not stated on the plan page | Not published | $295/mo Starter |
| Scrunch AI | Insights and recommendations | Not stated on the plan page | Bot traffic reporting | $250/mo Core |
| Ahrefs Brand Radar | Yes | Yes | AI crawler activity reported | Included with paid Ahrefs; Index from $199/mo |
| Rankscale | Citation analysis | Not stated | No | $20/mo (yearly billing) |
| LLMrefs | Cited source URLs | Not stated | No | Price not shown on page read |
Who should pick which
Pick Promptwatch if you need to know what is cited and then do something about it: find the pages that win, see whether bots are reaching your own pages, and tie citations to visits. It is the only option above that covers prompts, citations, crawler logs, visitor analytics and content in one place.
Pick Ahrefs Brand Radar if your team already pays for Ahrefs and wants a lighter citation view next to existing keyword and link data.
Pick Rankscale or LLMrefs if budget decides everything and a periodic list of cited URLs is enough.
Pick AthenaHQ or Scrunch AI if your priority is an action workflow or crawler-side page delivery, and you can budget $250 to $295 a month to start.
A caution on what any citation tool can tell you
AI answers vary from one run to the next. A tool that samples your prompts daily gives you a trend, not a guarantee. No product can promise that a model will cite you next week. What the better ones give you is evidence: which sources the models trust for your topics, which of your pages are missing from that set, and which technical blocks might be the reason. Start with a prompt set of the questions your buyers really ask, run it for a few weeks, and look at the sources before touching content.
That workflow is why we would evaluate Promptwatch first.