PromptRush and our scan look at opposite ends of the same problem. PromptRush runs buyer style questions through the AI platforms and records whether your brand is named, who is named instead, and which outside sources the answers lean on. Our scan reads your own page and checks whether AI crawlers can fetch and use it. The bottom line: PromptRush tells you what the answers look like and where the corroboration comes from, our scan tells you whether your own pages are eligible to be used at all, and a serious effort needs both.
For a full definition, read our answer engine optimization guide.
What PromptRush actually is
PromptRush describes itself on G2 as an AI mention monitoring platform that tracks how a brand appears across large language models, shows the source prompts and URLs, and compares your visibility against competitors. Its free checker takes a website and a market, then queries ChatGPT along with Gemini, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, and AI Mode using prompts it says buyers actually use in the category. The instant result is a visibility score and a top competitor ranking. A free account, with no credit card, unlocks the full report: the sources ChatGPT cites, the answer to each prompt, and ongoing tracking.
The full product runs the prompts daily across ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude, AI Overviews, and AI Mode. For each prompt it records whether your brand is mentioned, where it appears in the answer, which competitors are named, and which sources are cited. Its source analysis aggregates the cited domains and ranks them by influence on mentions in your space. PromptRush's pages describe that as the closest thing the AI era has to a backlink graph and illustrate it with hypothetical brands, not published results. Its site also lists customer claims, a 5.0 rating on G2 and more than 100 brands, and its verticals lead with SaaS, ecommerce, retail, fintech, healthcare, and travel. All of that is vendor reported.
The claim behind it: AI learns who you are from other people's pages
PromptRush's core argument is that AI systems form their view of a company from third party signals, review sites, listicles, expert articles, podcasts, and Reddit, so earned mentions on sources the AI already cites are the fastest way into an answer. That claim has real support, with caveats.
- BlueGrid Media's weighting agrees in direction. In its 11 signal methodology, brand mentions carry 20 points, reviews 12, forum footprint 6, and earned media 4, so 42 of 100 points sit in what other people say about you. BlueGrid derives its weights from observed correlations, not controlled tests.
- List style content is cited disproportionately. Ahrefs found that "best X" list pages are cited heavily in Google AI Overviews. Quattr's reading of that finding is the useful one: the brands inside those lists are not the ones who wrote them, they are the ones with enough recognized authority or third party coverage for the list makers to include.
- Retrieval is not selection. AirOps found that of more than 548,000 pages ChatGPT retrieved, only about 15 percent appeared in the final response, so being findable does not decide the outcome.
The caveat is that most of this evidence is correlational. Ahrefs' Brand Radar research found YouTube mentions correlate most strongly with AI Overview brand visibility across 75,000 brands, and Quattr points out that this does not show YouTube causes visibility, since brands with a strong YouTube presence often have strong presence everywhere.
What each tool cannot do
| PromptRush | Omni scan | |
|---|---|---|
| Measures | Outcomes: who is named, where, and which sources are cited | Readiness: crawl access, rendered content, schema, structure |
| Strongest at | Showing competitors and the outside sources behind the answers | Finding fixable blockers on your own page in seconds |
| Cannot do | Make your pages fetchable. If search bots are blocked, your own pages cannot be retrieved to answer a live question, though other sites can still name you. | Tell you whether any AI names you today, or see what other sites say about you |
| Data volume | A prompt set chosen from your category and market | One page plus robots.txt and llms.txt |
| Signup | None for the instant score, free account for the full report | None to run the scan |
| Cost to start | Free check | Free scan |
Reading a PromptRush report responsibly
- Check the prompts it used. The score depends on how closely the prompt set matches what your real customers ask. If your customers ask city specific or urgent questions, add those yourself.
- Do not trust one run. In the SparkToro and Gumshoe study, 600 volunteers ran 12 prompts 2,961 times, and there was less than a 1 in 100 chance that two responses returned the same list of brands. The researchers found that how often a brand appears across many runs is far more stable than its position in any one answer.
- Track share, not rank. Record the percentage of runs in which you are named, per platform, over several weeks.
- Read the sources column as a to do list. The domains that keep appearing when competitors are named are the review sites, comparison articles, and forums where you are missing.
Using both
- Run our scan on your homepage and one service page and fix any robots.txt or server rendering failure.
- Run the PromptRush free check and note the top competitor and every source it lists.
- List the review sites, directories, and articles where competitors appear and you do not. Pursue those placements as a separate work stream. BlueGrid Media estimates brand mention growth takes 6 to 12 months, so this is long cycle work.
- Write 10 real customer questions and run each five times on ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity. Log how often you are named.
- Repeat steps 1 and 4 after each round of fixes.
Neither tool can do the work for you. Readiness fixes you can make in an afternoon, and earned mentions take sustained effort, so the order matters: make sure your own pages are eligible, then build the outside presence that gets them chosen.
Questions people ask
Is the PromptRush free AI visibility checker really free?
The instant visibility score and top competitor ranking are free with no credit card. A free account unlocks the full report with sources, per prompt answers, and ongoing tracking.
Which AI platforms does PromptRush check?
The free checker queries ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, and AI Mode. The full tracker also covers Claude.
Do earned mentions matter more than technical readiness?
They answer different questions. Readiness decides whether your own pages can be fetched and read. Earned mentions influence whether AI systems choose to name you. BlueGrid Media's weighting puts 42 of 100 points on what others say about you, but that comes from observed correlation, not a controlled test.
Can one PromptRush score tell me how visible I am?
No. AI answers vary from run to run, so a single score is a sample. Track the share of runs that name you across many runs over several weeks.
Sources
- PromptRush: Free AI Visibility Checker
- PromptRush: AI Prompt Tracking and AI Visibility Tracker
- PromptRush: Perplexity Visibility Tracker
- G2: PromptRush reviews
- BlueGrid Media: AI Visibility Checker and methodology
- Quattr: what Ahrefs' AI search research really tells us (summarizing the Ahrefs and AirOps studies)
- SparkToro and Gumshoe: AI recommendation consistency study