What tools can PR professionals use to monitor AI narratives?

There is now a real category of tools for monitoring AI narratives, and the useful question is not which is best but which is built for the job at hand. The names PR professionals will encounter include AIQ™, Profound, peec.ai, Otterly.ai, and BrandRank.AI, among others. They differ along three axes: model coverage, narrative depth, and focus.

The three differentiating axes

• Model coverage, How many of the major engines a tool actually polls. ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Copilot, Claude, Grok, Google AI Overviews, and Google AI Mode can each say something different about the same entity. Managing one is not managing the rest. AIQ™ polls the eight engines it currently tracks; coverage varies among the others.
• Narrative depth (presence vs. quality): Whether a tool records only that a brand was mentioned, or also attributes the sources driving each answer and tracks how the narrative shifts over time. Presence tells you that you appear; depth tells you what is said, why, and whether it is accurate. Profound and peec.ai, for example, are built primarily around citation tracking, measuring how often AI engines link to a brand’s website, which is a visibility metric, not a reputation assessment.
• Focus (reputation vs. marketing visibility), Most tools in this category are designed for marketing use cases: are we mentioned, how often, across which engines. Reputation work needs something different, narrative quality, meaning what the engines say and whether it is accurate and favorable. That distinction, attendance versus grades, is why AIQ™ exists as a reputation tool rather than a visibility dashboard.

Source attribution: the actionable layer

The source view is the most actionable output any of these tools can provide, because the AI narrative changes when the underlying source layer changes, not when you argue with the model. A tool that shows only presence data leaves the team without a lever. Purpose-built monitoring that attributes sources, and tracks which sources are driving each engine’s answer, is what turns monitoring into a workable program.