API
WebhooksThere's no submission process. ChatGPT recommends brands from two inputs: training data and live web search. Both are downstream of the same thing — public pages and conversations that mention your brand favorably in your category. Publish pages that answer buying questions directly, and earn mentions in the communities and listicles engines cite: Reddit, review discussions, third-party comparisons. Octolens finds those conversations so you can show up in them.
AI brand visibility
Get recommended by AI
ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini recommend the brands the internet talks about. Octolens shows you every conversation, thread, and listicle the engines actually cite — so you can show up in them before your competitor does.
No credit card • 15+ platforms • API, webhooks & MCP on every planWhat's the best tool for this? Give me a shortlist.
AI
Based on recent discussions and comparisons, here are the tools that come up most:
- 1.Your brand
- 2.Competitor A
- 3.Competitor B
Sources
reddit.com· r/SaaS — 'What are people using for this?'reddit.com· r/startups — comparison threadexample-blog.com· Best tools listicle (2026)news.ycombinator.com· Show HN discussion
Trusted by brands people talk about online
Why now
Your Next Customer Isn't Googling. They're Asking.
“Best tools for X.” “Alternatives to [your competitor].” Buyers ask ChatGPT and Perplexity the questions they used to type into Google — and the answer is a shortlist, not ten blue links. If you're not on it, you don't lose the click. You lose the entire consideration.
3–5 brands
make a typical AI answer's shortlist. If you're not on it, you're not in the consideration set.
~1 in 5
of Octolens signups tell us they found us through an AI assistant. Eighteen months ago that number was near zero.
0 forms
There's no submission process and no meta tag. AI recommends brands based on what it reads about them.
How AI decides
AI Assistants Read The Internet. Here's What They Actually Cite.
When an engine answers “what's the best tool for…”, it leans on third-party listicles, community threads, review discussions, and comparison pages — the places where real people compare tools out loud. So “AI visibility” reduces to a question you can actually act on: are you present in the conversations and pages the engines read?
- Community threadsReddit, Hacker News, Stack Overflow
When we ran 200 buying-intent prompts across four AI engines in our own category, reddit.com was the most-cited independent domain in the answers.
- Third-party listicles & comparisons“Best X tools” roundups, alternatives pages
The pages engines quote when someone asks for a shortlist.
- Review discussionsG2, forums, “is it worth it?” threads
Third-party opinions carry more weight than your own site.
- Your own pagesDocs, comparison pages, guides
Ahrefs found ~76% of AI citations come from pages already ranking in Google's top 10.
Illustrative weighting based on our own prompt research (200 prompts, 4 engines, Sept 2026) and published citation studies — not a live index.
The Octolens difference
Trackers Tell You Your Score. Octolens Moves It.
AI visibility trackers run prompts and hand you a dashboard: “you appear in 14% of answers.” Useful — once. But the score isn't the work. The work is showing up in the threads, listicles, and communities the answers are built from.
AI Visibility Trackers
- Run prompts and report how often you appear — a score, refreshed weekly
- Tell you a competitor is winning, but not which threads and pages made that happen
- Leave the actual work — engaging, earning mentions, pitching listicles — entirely to you
- Measure the symptom: what the answers say today
With Octolens
- Monitors every public conversation about your brand, competitors, and category across 15+ platforms
- Surfaces the exact Reddit threads, listicles, and discussions the engines cite — in Slack, minutes after they're posted
- Lets you answer the “any alternatives to X?” question while it's still being read — by humans and by crawlers
- Moves the input: what the internet says about you, which is what the answers are built from
Octolens monitors the open web, not the inside of AI answers. Pair it with an answer tracker if you want a prompt-level score — they measure, Octolens moves the number.
How it works
From invisible to recommended
01
See what AI reads
Track your brand, competitors, and category terms across the sources engines cite most — Reddit, X, Hacker News, YouTube, listicles, forums. AI relevance filtering kills the noise, even for common-word brand names.
brand namecompetitor namepain point
02
Show up in the conversation
Get the thread in Slack minutes after it's posted. Answer the “any alternatives to X?” question while it's still being read — by humans and by crawlers. Find the listicles that mention competitors but not you.
✨ Relevance scoring✨ Intent tags✨ Language analysis
The playbook
The Full System, Written Up Free
We documented the exact playbook — finding your money prompts, building pages LLMs cite, and earning mentions where the models actually look. It's the same system we run on ourselves, and the reason you may have found this page through an AI assistant.
Customer stories
Real results from teams using Octolens
"Built on top of the Octolens API, I use Railway as a service to pipe all of the mentions to different channels. Then there's a cron job that does a daily digest for us."
Mahmoud Abdelwahab
Senior DevRel Engineer, Railway
40% MoM
Signup growth correlated with mentions
13
Platforms monitored, up from 1
"Wild AI-native onboarding experience. I literally entered zero input other than vercel.com to get my Octolens feed up and giving me mentions."
Guillermo Rauch
Co-Founder and CEO, Vercel
20+
Teams monitoring community feedback
50%
Time savings
"A big part of our job is paying attention to what people are saying online - answering questions, correcting misunderstandings, and joining the conversation in real time."
Marc Hess
Developer Advocacy Manager, Prisma
600+
Social mentions handled per week
<5 mins
Average response time
"It's not about replying to everything. It's about showing up in the right conversations and doing it genuinely. Octolens helps us do that at scale."
Marie Martens
Co-Founder, Tally
1 hour/day
saved compared to manual search
0
Mentions missed
"Developers tune out advertising, but they do talk online - and that's where our reputation is built."
Brian Young
Senior Growth Marketing Manager, PostHog
Real-time
Sentiment tracking by product line
FAQ
Frequently asked questions
Everything you need to know about getting your brand recommended by AI
AI brand visibility (also called AI search visibility) is how often AI assistants — ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude — mention or recommend your brand when people ask buying questions in your category. It's becoming a channel in its own right: answers typically shortlist 3–5 brands, and buyers increasingly start (and sometimes end) their research there instead of on Google.
No — Octolens monitors the open web: the Reddit threads, listicles, forums, and communities AI engines cite. That's the layer you can act on. If you want a prompt-level answer score, pair Octolens with an answer tracker — they measure how often you appear, Octolens helps you change what the engines read.
Those tools run prompts against AI engines and report how often you appear — measurement. Octolens is the action layer: it finds every conversation about your brand and category across 15+ platforms so your team can engage, earn mentions, and change what the engines read. Measure with them; move the number with Octolens.
Live-search answers (Perplexity, ChatGPT with browsing) can pick up new mentions and pages within days to weeks. Training-data presence compounds over months. The teams that win treat it like community presence, not a campaign — a steady stream of earned mentions in the places engines read.
Yes — every mention is structured JSON with sentiment, relevance, and tags, available via REST API, webhooks, and MCP on every plan. The same data layer that helps you get recommended by AI also gives your own agents ears for what's being said about you and your competitors.
7-day free trial
Be the brand AI recommends
Start monitoring the conversations that decide your AI visibility — data access included from day one.
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