What are the best AI visibility tools for tracking offsite mentions? What we use with clients
How our agency tracks offsite mentions that shape AI answers: third-party pages, Reddit, YouTube and LinkedIn, the tool we use, and how findings become outreach.
Offsite mentions are references to a client's brand on pages the client does not own: review sites, forums, news, comparison articles, videos, social posts. In classic SEO we cared about the ones with links. In AI search we care about all of them, because the engines build answers from across the web. A brand named in ten places the engines read has a very different position from one named in two, whether or not any link points home.
Why this matters more than clients expect
When we show clients the sources behind their AI answers, the first reaction is often surprise. The cited pages are not the client's site and not the competitors' sites. They are a forum thread, a comparison blog, a video, a directory. The engines trust those sources, and the client has no presence in them.
So offsite tracking is partly diagnostic and partly a to-do list.
What we need from the data
Which external domains get cited for the client's prompts, ranked.
Which pages name the brand without linking. These are mentions the engines may read.
Community sources. Reddit, YouTube and LinkedIn, reported on their own.
What the competitors have that the client lacks. Sources that cite three rivals and not the client are the best leads.
Source type. Review site, forum, publisher, vendor page. It tells us what kind of presence is needed.
What we use
Our client programs run on Promptwatch, where offsite mentions are a named feature.
Offsite mentions identify third-party pages where the brand is named without a link. Reddit, YouTube and LinkedIn citation reports show the specific threads, videos and posts the engines cite. "My channels" filtering separates the client's own presence from everything else. Citation analytics give page and domain level citations with URL positions, and Citation Trends classifies citations by content type and source type.
Page Tracker lets us follow specific URLs, including a competitor's. Heatmaps compare any two dimensions, so we can lay competitors against source domains and see who owns which. The Action Board converts the findings into a prioritized list.
Plans: Explore is free, Essential $95, Professional $245 and Business $579 a month. Agency plans are Kick-off $199, Growth $399 and Scale $799, with unlimited projects and 10 seats.
We pair this with classic brand monitoring for some clients, since social and news listening are useful context. That sits outside the AI platform.
From data to outreach
We turn the source list into an outreach plan with strict rules.
Only earn what is real. Real reviews from real customers. Real contributions to forums, with disclosure where the community expects it. Accurate listings. Quotes given to journalists who ask. We do not seed fake reviews, and we do not post under invented identities, because it breaks platform rules and clients' reputations.
Prioritize by reach. A source that appears in answers for many prompts beats one that appears for a single prompt.
Fix the facts. Where a cited page describes the client wrongly, we contact the owner with corrections, politely.
Support it on the client's own site. A third-party review is easier to earn when the client's site makes the case clearly.
Track what changes. We re-run the panel and look at whether the source now appears alongside the client, and whether citations from it shift.
Platform-specific notes
Reddit rewards participation that helps people, and punishes promotion. We advise clients to assign a real team member who knows the subject. YouTube citations often come from tutorial and review videos, so the question is whether the client has a presence or a reviewer who covers them. LinkedIn citations often point to long posts and articles from named experts, which makes thought leadership more relevant than a company page alone.
Honest limits
Seeing a mention does not tell us that the engine used it. We only know it was cited when the answer shows it. We also cannot promise that earning a mention leads to a recommendation. Engines vary, and results move.
For a first look at the sources behind your own prompts, start with the free Explore plan on Promptwatch.