Frequently Asked Questions

RivalHound monitors 6 AI platforms: ChatGPT, ChatGPT Search, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude, and Google AI Overview. We focus on the platforms where buyers are actually asking for products, services, and recommendations, and coverage expands as new AI search tools gain traction.

RivalHound uses a query-based approach to monitor your brand. You set up monitoring queries in three categories: Discovery queries ("best CRM for startups") to see if AI recommends you, Direct queries ("what is Acme?") to track what AI says about your brand, and Comparison queries ("Acme vs Competitor") to monitor head-to-head positioning. We run these queries against each AI platform and analyze the responses for brand mentions, sentiment, and competitive positioning.

The radar tracks what your competitors publish — their blogs, search rankings, and new site pages. Every Monday, RivalHound writes a brief grounded in that data: what changed this week, where your content gaps are, and ranked ideas worth acting on. Each finding also lands in your action queue — one prioritized list of concrete next moves sourced from your scans, citations, brief, and GEO audits. The brief is shareable with your team via a single link.

You'll see your first results within minutes of signing up. During onboarding, RivalHound runs an immediate scan of your selected queries so you can see real data right away. After that, scans run automatically every week on all plans — and Pro adds answer-variance bursts that re-run each query several times to show you which results are stable and which are a coin flip.

Each scan tells you: whether your brand was mentioned (and where it appeared in the response), the sentiment of the mention (positive, neutral, or negative), which competitors were also mentioned and their positioning, any citations or source links the AI provided, and the full AI response for context. Over time, you'll see trends in your visibility and share of voice.

Yes. When you add a brand, RivalHound automatically discovers your likely competitors based on your industry and domain. You can also manually add any competitors you want to track. The platform shows you share of voice metrics, competitive benchmarking, and alerts you when competitors start appearing in responses where they weren't before.

GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) Audits analyze your website's readiness for AI search. The audit checks technical factors (can AI crawlers access your content?), content quality (is your content structured for AI comprehension?), and provides actionable recommendations to improve your chances of being cited by AI platforms. Think of it as SEO, but for the AI era.

AI responses are inherently dynamic—the same query can return different results each time. RivalHound focuses on trends and relative changes rather than absolute numbers. If your brand consistently appears in 7 out of 10 scans this week vs. 3 out of 10 last week, that's a meaningful signal. We recommend looking at weekly and monthly trends rather than individual data points.

Yes — 7 days, no credit card. The trial is our most generous tier: 50 queries, 3 brands, GEO audits, the competitor radar and the weekly brief, all included. Your first scan runs immediately during signup, so you'll have real data about your brand's AI visibility within minutes of creating your account.

Starter ($39/month): 10 monitoring queries, 1 brand, weekly scans and 5 GEO audits—ideal for small businesses starting to track AI visibility. Pro ($149/month): 20 queries, 3 brands, weekly scans plus answer-variance bursts, the competitor content radar with the Monday brief, answer-change alerts, and 20 GEO audits—our most popular plan. Enterprise (custom pricing): unlimited queries, brands and audits with custom scan configuration and guided onboarding—built for agencies and large teams.