How to choose an AI visibility platform: setup, citation evidence and CRM attribution compared

B2B buyers now ask AI assistants to shortlist vendors before they talk to sales. 6sense's 2025 Buyer Experience Report found that 94% of B2B buyers use AI chat tools during a purchase, and over half use them to compare vendors.

That leaves two questions for a mid-market team. Does AI name us when buyers ask, and which pages does it trust? And are the buyers it sends turning into pipeline? Most tools answer the first. Fewer answer the second, and that difference decides how much setup you take on.

Monitoring needs no code. You add your brand, competitors and buyer questions, and the vendor asks AI assistants for you. Otterly, Peec AI and Targetlytics all work this way; the first Targetlytics report arrives in about two hours after starting the free audit. HubSpot AEO sits inside Marketing Hub, so there is no extra tool to connect. Profound starts with a trial and moves to a custom contract through its sales team.

Pipeline attribution takes more. With Targetlytics it is one tracking script on your site (no build step) plus the HubSpot app. Write access to HubSpot is optional at install, and pushing companies is off until you switch it on per brand. Qualified companies are pushed daily at 05:30 UTC, and their deals are read back every Monday. For EU and UK sites, install the script with consent required, so legal review has a clear answer.

All five platforms show which pages AI cites. The differences are in depth and in what happens next. Profound and Peec AI report the searches AI runs before answering (query fan-out); Targetlytics shows those searches for ChatGPT and Claude and the sources for every assistant on paid plans. Targetlytics and Peec AI check answers against facts you set and flag wrong claims; Profound calls this FactCheck.

Ask any vendor to open one number and show the answers behind it. In Targetlytics every number opens to the answers and sources it came from, and you can re-run the question yourself.

This is where the platforms differ most. HubSpot AEO is inside your CRM but does not identify the companies AI sends to your site. Otterly, Peec AI and Profound do not state on their sites that they write AI-referred companies into a CRM; their data leaves through exports, APIs, MCP or BI connectors, so the bridge to deals is yours to build.

Targetlytics writes AI fields onto HubSpot company records: the assistant that sent them, buying intent, the question topic, and the page they landed on. It never creates or edits deals. Your reps create deals as usual, and the weekly sync reads open and won deal totals back for each company it pushed. It identifies companies, not people, from business networks; on B2B traffic we expect roughly 10 to 25% of AI visits to resolve to a company.

Limits worth knowing before you buy: HubSpot is the only live CRM (Pipedrive, Attio and Zoho are coming; Salesforce is not on our integration list), the deal amount stays with the company rather than being split across touches, and company identification is on the Ultimate and Agency plans.

Executives usually want two numbers: how often AI recommends us against named competitors, and what pipeline came from AI. Where those numbers live matters more than how the chart looks.

HubSpot AEO puts its score next to your campaign data. Peec AI (from Advanced), Otterly and Profound feed Looker Studio, and Profound also feeds Tableau. Targetlytics keeps visibility in its dashboard and puts pipeline where finance already looks: filter HubSpot companies on "AI assistant that sent them" and report deals from there. Slack alerts are available, a read-only API and MCP connector come on every plan, and agencies get white-label PDF and CSV reports.

We ran five buyer questions about our own category through Targetlytics. AI named us in none of them, and the answers cited five sites, mostly tool home pages. That result is why this guide exists. The full numbers are on our B2B SaaS page; we will add the re-measured result there whether it moved or not.

We make Targetlytics, so read this as a vendor's view. Details about other products come from their own pricing, feature and documentation pages, checked on 31 October 2026. Where a vendor's site says nothing about a capability, we write "Not stated on its site" rather than "No". We did not run all five products on the same questions. Setup times for other vendors are not published consistently, so we describe what each asks of you instead of quoting minutes. If something here is out of date, contact us and we will fix it.