CitedSpy Review (2026): Pricing, Features & Honest Verdict

CitedSpy is an AI search visibility tracker that monitors how ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Copilot, Claude and Grok describe your brand. It is the cheapest serious entry point in a category that mostly sells to enterprises. Best for: solo founders and small marketing teams. Price: from $19/mo (free plan: no, 14-day trial). Rating: 7.5/10.

What is CitedSpy?

CitedSpy watches what AI assistants say about your company. You paste in a domain, it auto-detects your competitors and suggests 25 starter prompts, and from then on it runs those prompts against six AI engines and records what comes back. Share of voice, sentiment, which websites the models cited, and how all of that moves week to week.

We found it on the 19 July Product Hunt leaderboard, where it launched at number 8. It was built by Arshita Sharma in India, who says on the about page that she spent years building B2B SaaS and watched brands vanish from AI recommendations with no way to tell it was happening. That origin explains the pricing, which is the most aggressive we have seen in this category by a wide margin.

The category itself is about two years old and has settled into a shape: enterprise platforms that want a sales call, and a thin layer of tools for everyone else. CitedSpy is squarely in the second group and is priced to stay there.

What Are CitedSpy’s Key Features?

Daily tracking across six engines

CitedSpy runs every tracked question seven times per week per engine. That repetition is the actual product. AI assistants give a different answer to the same question on different days, so a single snapshot tells you nothing useful. Seven runs a week gives you a frequency: your brand appeared in 4 of 7 Perplexity answers, not “your brand appeared once when someone checked”.

Competitor share of voice

You track your brand against rivals side by side and get one number for how often each gets mentioned. The Solo plan allows 5 competitors, Growth allows 25, and Pro allows 100 per brand. This is the number CitedSpy expects you to paste into a monthly report, and it is honest about that being the point.

Source tracking

For every mention, CitedSpy shows which websites the engine drew on. Wikipedia, Reddit, G2, Product Hunt, your own docs. This is the most operationally useful part of the tool, because a share-of-voice number tells you that you are losing and the source list tells you where.

Action items with an impact estimate

CitedSpy converts findings into a task list, and each task carries an expected impact and a time estimate. The examples on the homepage are specific: add an FAQ section to your pricing page, expected 30% lift in pricing-related mentions, 20 minutes. Reply in a named Reddit thread where a competitor has 18 mentions and you have 2, one hour. Update a Wikipedia paragraph that currently links to a competitor’s blog and drives 7.8% of all AI recommendations, 30 minutes.

Treat those percentages as the vendor’s model rather than measurement. But the shape of the recommendation is right, and it is more than most competitors do.

Agency tooling on the top plan

Pro adds white-label PDF exports, API access and a Looker Studio connector, which is what an agency needs to resell this as a line item. A custom domain is a separate $29/mo add-on on top of that.

What is CitedSpy’s engine cap, and why does it matter?

This is the thing to know before you buy. CitedSpy’s homepage promises tracking across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Copilot, Claude and Grok. Six engines, named in the hero, named in the meta description, named in the feature copy.

Every single plan says “Engines (pick 4 of 6)”. Solo, Growth and Pro. The full comparison table lower down the pricing page confirms it: the engines row reads 4, 4, 4.

So at $399 a month you still cannot watch all six. You pick four and go blind on two. That is not disclosed anywhere in the marketing copy, only in the plan specification, and the gap between “track how six engines talk about your brand” and “pick four” is the kind of thing that should be in the hero, not in a table row.

How much it hurts depends on you. If your buyers live in ChatGPT and Perplexity, four slots is plenty. If you sell to enterprises where Copilot is the default assistant and you also need Gemini for the consumer side, you are making a real trade at every price point.

What do CitedSpy’s headline statistics actually claim?

CitedSpy leads with three numbers, and it cites all three, which is more than most tools in this space bother with. 900 million weekly ChatGPT users, attributed to OpenAI in February 2026. 60% of US searches now showing AI Overviews above the first organic result, attributed to Advanced Web Ranking in November 2025. And visitors arriving through AI recommendations converting 4.4 times better than regular Google traffic, attributed to Semrush in 2025.

Naming the source and the date is good practice and we want to reward it. Read the third one carefully, though. A 4.4x conversion difference between AI referral traffic and organic search traffic is a comparison between two very different populations, not evidence that AI visibility causes better buyers. Someone who asks an assistant “what should I use for X” and follows a recommendation is deeper in a buying decision than someone who typed a keyword. The number is probably real. The causal reading of it is doing a lot of work in the sales pitch.

How Much Does CitedSpy Cost?

CitedSpy starts at $19 a month. Solo is $19/mo for 1 brand, 20 prompts, twice-weekly tracking, 5 competitors and 1 seat. Growth is $149/mo for 3 brands, 75 prompts, daily tracking, 25 competitors, 3 seats and Slack plus webhook alerts. Pro is $399/mo for 5 brands, 200 prompts, daily tracking, 100 competitors, 5 seats, white-label PDFs, API access and the Looker Studio connector. Above that you talk to them.

Annual billing takes two months off, so $190, $1,490 and $3,990 a year, which works out at roughly $16, $125 and $333 a month. Every plan gets a 14-day trial with no credit card, and there is a 30-day money-back guarantee with a refund for unused annual months.

One quirk worth flagging: the pricing page loads with the annual toggle already selected, so the cards show $16, $125 and $333 while the comparison table directly underneath shows $19, $149 and $399. Both sets are correct, they are just different billing terms presented ten pixels apart. Read which toggle is active before you quote a number to your boss.

Against the category this is cheap. Otterly.AI charges $29/mo for 15 prompts on its Lite plan, $189/mo for 100 prompts, and $489/mo for 400. CitedSpy’s $19 Solo plan gives you 20 prompts, so it beats Otterly’s entry tier on both price and volume. Profound, the enterprise option, does not publish a price at all: its pricing page says the product is available through customised enterprise pricing and is built for global brands. Peec AI sits in the middle and aims at marketing teams and SEO agencies, but does not publish tier figures on its pricing page either, so we are not going to invent one.

Who is CitedSpy Best For?

Use CitedSpy if you are a solo founder or a small marketing team who needs to know whether AI assistants mention you, and $19 a month is an amount you can approve without a meeting. It is also a good fit for a small agency: $399 for 5 brands with white-label PDFs is materially cheaper than most agency tiers in this category, and the Looker connector means you can drop the data into reporting you already send.

Use it if your competitor set is stable and small. Five tracked competitors on Solo is tight but workable when you know exactly who you are up against.

Skip CitedSpy if you need all six engines. The cap is a hard product limit, not a plan upsell, and no amount of money removes it. Skip it if you are a large brand operating across many markets and languages, because that is what Profound is built for and CitedSpy’s per-brand limits will bite fast. And skip it if 20 prompts sounds thin: it is one brand’s worth of core questions and nothing else, so you will be on Growth at $149 sooner than the pricing page implies.

Best CitedSpy Alternatives

Otterly.AI is the closest direct comparison and publishes its ladder plainly: $29/mo for 15 prompts, $189/mo for 100, $489/mo for 400. It is more expensive per prompt at every tier, so pick it only if it covers an engine you need and CitedSpy’s four-slot cap forces out.

Profound is the enterprise option, sold through custom pricing with no public figures, built for brands with a global footprint and multiple markets and languages. If you have that problem you already know it, and you are not comparing against a $19 tool.

Peec AI targets marketing teams and SEO agencies with brand performance tracking across ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini plus competitor benchmarking. It does not publish tier prices on its pricing page, so budget for a conversation rather than a checkout.

Final Verdict: Is CitedSpy Worth It?

Yes at $19, with your eyes open about the engine cap. The category has an enormous pricing gap between free spreadsheets and enterprise contracts, and CitedSpy is one of the few tools actually occupying it. Daily tracking at seven runs per engine per week is real methodology rather than a marketing claim, the source-tracking view is the part you will actually use, and the action items are more concrete than the “improve your content” advice most of these dashboards produce.

The engine cap is what keeps this off a higher score. Promising six engines in the hero and capping every tier at four is the kind of detail that turns into a support ticket in week two, and it is not a limitation you can spend your way out of. Start on the 14-day trial, pick your four engines deliberately, and check whether the ones you dropped are where your buyers actually are before the trial ends.