AI Visibility Audit vs. Monitoring Tools: Which Do You Need First?

Monitoring tools track your AI visibility score. An audit tells you what AI is saying word for word and what to fix. Most companies buy a monitoring subscription before they understand their baseline. That's backwards.

From 2,014 brand reports, 85.7% of companies score 0-20. They're in the invisible tier. A monitoring dashboard showing them a score of 4 out of 100 tells them nothing about why, or what to do.

See where your company sits: free check at loamly.ai/check, 15 prompts, 3 platforms, no credit card.

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What monitoring tools do

Monitoring tools, Otterly AI ($29-$489/month), Peec AI (€89-€499/month), Profound ($99-$399/month), Ahrefs Brand Radar ($199/month+), Scrunch ($300-$500/month): run your prompts on a schedule and report your visibility score. Pricing sourced from each tool's public pricing page as of February 2026 and verified against the SE Ranking AI tools comparison.

They show you:

• Your AI visibility score across platforms
• Which prompts you appear in
• Share of voice vs. competitors
• Sentiment (positive/neutral/negative)
• Score changes over time

They don't show you:

• What AI says about you verbatim
• Which specific facts AI is getting wrong
• The internal search queries AI generates for your category
• Which URLs AI is citing, at the individual citation level
• Why competitors outrank you on specific prompts
• What to fix first

I'm not criticizing monitoring tools. They do exactly what they're designed to do. The problem is you can monitor a score you don't understand for months and never know what's driving it.

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What an audit does differently

An audit is a one-time deep-dive. Here's what it produces that monitoring doesn't:

Verbatim AI responses. Every prompt, on every platform, captured word for word. Not a score, the actual text. This is where you find pricing hallucinations, competitor claims repeated as fact, deprecated features still cited as selling points. According to Princeton's GEO study (KDD 2024), the content AI cites directly shapes its outputs: so knowing which specific claims AI is making and where they come from is the starting point for fixing them. Ahrefs' AI traffic research shows AI referral traffic grew 700% in 2025. The brands getting that traffic are the ones AI is citing. The audit shows you which brands are getting cited instead of you, and why.

Sub-query capture. When ChatGPT or Perplexity search the web, they generate internal search queries before answering. A 50-prompt audit captures 300+ sub-queries: the actual keywords AI uses to find content about your category. This data doesn't exist anywhere else.

Citation chain mapping. Every URL cited by every platform for every prompt. You see which domains AI trusts, which of your pages get cited, and where the gaps are.

Brand accuracy audit. 15-30 facts checked against what AI actually says. This is how you find the TechCrunch article from 2022 that AI is still citing for your pricing.

Competitor analysis. Not "Competitor X ranks higher", but why: which content they have, which sources cite them, which prompts they're winning that you're losing.

Prioritized action plan. Specific tasks ordered by estimated impact, not "publish more content."

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The sequence that makes sense

Month 1: Audit first. Understand what AI is saying about you. Fix the highest-priority problems: hallucinations, missing citations, technical GEO gaps.

Month 2+: Monitor. Once you know what you're tracking and why, set up a monitoring tool to measure whether the fixes are working. Now the score means something.

The companies I see waste money buy a monitoring subscription first, watch their score go up and down for three months, can't explain why, and eventually realize they don't understand the underlying data.

A monitoring tool is like a blood pressure cuff. Useful for tracking. But if your reading is 180/120, you need a diagnosis, not another reading.

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Cost comparison

Option	Annual cost	Verbatim AI responses
Otterly AI (entry)	$348/year	No
Peec AI (mid-tier €199/mo)	~$2,600/year	No
Profound (Growth $399/mo)	$4,788/year	No
Loamly Snapshot audit	$299 one-time	Yes, 20 prompts
Loamly Professional audit	$990 one-time	Yes, 50 prompts + 3 CSV exports
Loamly Enterprise audit	$2,490 one-time	Yes, 100 prompts + strategy call

$399/month × 12 months = $4,788/year on Profound. You still don't know what AI is saying about you verbatim.

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When monitoring first makes sense

There are cases where monitoring before auditing is the right call:

1. You already ran an audit and fixed the main issues. Now you want to track whether the score improves. This is the correct sequence.
2. Your score is already above 50. You're in the top 10% by the 2,014-company distribution. Monitoring tells you if you're maintaining position or slipping.
3. You need weekly trend reports for stakeholders. An audit is a point-in-time deliverable. If your job requires showing AI visibility trends in board decks, you need ongoing monitoring.

For everyone else in the 85.7% scoring below 20, the audit is the starting point.

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One question to decide

Do you know what ChatGPT says about your brand for your top 5 buyer intent queries?

If no: start with the free check. It runs 15 prompts in 3 minutes. If the results show you below 20, the full audit tells you exactly why and what to fix.

If yes, and you know your baseline: monitoring makes sense.

The goal of every monitoring subscription should be to validate that the fixes from your audit are working. That is when monitoring earns its monthly fee.

No marketing spin. Just real data about your AI visibility.