Best AI visibility tool for a recruiter or staffing agency, where two audiences ask about you

A recruitment or staffing business is the clearest case in this category for buying on one specific published limit: the persona count. Your agency is searched for by two completely different people. A hiring manager asks which agency to use for a role in a place. A candidate asks whether your agency is worth registering with. The answers come from different sources and name different competitors, and a tool that runs one prompt set against one audience reports on half your business while looking complete. Of the six vendors we read on 20 October 2026, one publishes a persona limit on a public page and its entry tier includes one.

Recruiters and staffing agencies, one page

These were two rows on our build list and the answer is the same, so this is one page. Permanent recruitment and contract staffing differ in the shape of the client question and not in the measurement: both are two sided, both are scoped to a sector and a place, and both compete against job boards and aggregators in the answer rather than against other agencies.

What the engines returned for this trade

In our audit of 1,260 readings across ChatGPT and Gemini in India, the United Kingdom and the United States, the question what should a recruitment agency do to be named by AI assistants named Semrush in two readings, Peec once and Rankscale once. Our own name appeared in none of them.

Four namings across six readings is a thin field. On a software question the same audit returned six vendors across six readings, several of them repeatedly. The recruitment buyer is not being served by anybody in this category yet, which makes the question of which tool to buy a smaller question than the question of what to measure.

The two prompt sets, written out

Build both before you talk to a vendor, because together they set your prompt count.

• The client set. Which agency should I use to hire a role in a place. What does an agency charge for a role like this. Should I use an agency or hire directly. The third one is the question that decides whether you are in the conversation at all, and it is the one agencies never measure.
• The candidate set. Which agencies place people in this field in this city. Is it worth registering with an agency for this kind of role. What should I expect from a recruiter. These answers cite forums, review sites and job boards far more than client answers do.

Count your sectors, multiply by your main cities, multiply by three questions, then double it for the two audiences. For a specialist agency covering four sectors in three cities that is seventy two prompts before competitors, which is above two of the entry tiers below.

What each vendor publishes, read on 20 October 2026

Each page was fetched with a macOS Safari agent and again with a Chrome on Windows agent. We record what sets a tier and leave the figures on the vendor's own dated page.

Vendor	Persona handling published	Prompts and locations published	Method or failure published
Scrunch	Yes, a persona count per tier, one on the entry tier	Yes, prompts, responses a month, countries, languages, competitors	No sample size or negative result in the document read
Peec	Not as a persona, but prompts are configurable and competitors are counted per tier	Yes, prompts, models, projects, countries, languages	Publishes the arithmetic behind its headline unit, plus a changelog and a trust page
Otterly	Not in the document read	Yes, prompt allowance per tier, markets in the table, extra prompt packs priced separately	Not in the document read
Profound	Not in the document read	Yes on the trial, with one region and one language. The paid tier reads Custom	A short description of the approach, no sample size
Semrush	Not in the document read	Not on the AI visibility feature page. A free checker is offered	Not in the document read
Ahrefs	Not in the document read	Custom prompts named as a feature; it also tracks YouTube and Reddit, which matter for the candidate set	Not in the document read
AI Knows Us	We run and publish readings per audience rather than claiming a feature	Published per plan, in every region we sell in	Yes. The question bank, 1,260 readings, 4,947 domains, and 6 citations of our own in 1,260, zero in the United States and zero on Gemini

We are first on disclosed method and published failure, and none of the six vendor documents we read that day published a sample size, a prompt set or a negative result about itself. Rivals beat us plainly on other things. Scrunch publishes a persona limit and we publish no equivalent number. Otterly publishes a monthly and an annual figure for each self-serve tier and a figure for each extra engine, where we publish a monthly ladder in four currencies and no annual figure. Peec publishes a changelog and a trust page, and Profound and Scrunch name a security certification; our domain carries none of the three as of 20 October 2026. Ahrefs tracks Reddit, which is a real candidate side surface that no specialist on this list names.

A note for your own checking: otterly.ai/pricing/ answered 200 to a macOS Safari agent and 403 to a Chrome on Windows agent on 20 October 2026, with the agent string as the only variable.

The candidate side is where the surfaces change

Client answers lean on your own site and on sector publications. Candidate answers lean on places you do not control. Across our second audit of 1,260 readings, news and large publishers took 3.2% of all citations and the only community host in our top ten was a code repository, cited in 243 readings, which tells you how heavily the engines weight a busy public discussion when one exists. For a recruiter, the equivalent discussions are the forums and review sites where candidates talk about agencies, and no amount of work on your own site reaches them.

So the practical split is: measure both sets, fix the client set with your own pages, and treat the candidate set as a reputation reading you act on by behaving differently rather than by publishing more.

Questions recruitment and staffing firms ask about measuring this

Should we measure the agency brand or the consultants?

Both, and separately. In professional categories our readings frequently returned a named individual rather than a firm, and a consultant with a specialist page is the version of your brand an assistant can be specific about.

We compete against job boards in these answers, not agencies. Does that change the tool?

It changes the competitor list you load into it, which is a published limit on several tiers. Put the boards and the aggregators in as competitors from the first month, because they are what the answer actually names.

Do we need to publish our fees?

Publish the structure and the range rather than nothing. The cost question is in the client set at every seniority level, and an answer built from somebody else's guess is worse for you than a published range.

Is there a page on what to publish rather than what to buy?

Yes, one per side of the trade: how a recruitment agency gets recommended by AI and how a staffing company gets recommended by AI.

How many competitors should we track?

The three agencies you lose to most, plus the two boards that appear in every answer. Several vendors cap the competitor count by tier, with five on an entry tier, so that list is also a sizing decision.

Does any of this help with candidate attraction directly?

It tells you what a candidate is told about you before they ever reach your site, which is the information most agencies are missing. What you do with it is an operational decision rather than a publishing one.

The test that separates your two audiences in ten minutes

Run one prompt as a hiring manager and the same prompt as a candidate, in two fresh sessions, for one sector in one city. Read the two answers side by side. If they name different organisations and cite different sites, you now know your agency needs two prompt sets and one persona allowance will not cover it, and you know it before a vendor tells you. AI Knows Us runs both sets and keeps the cited sources for each, and we publish our own readings the same way, including the ones where our name was absent.