Best tool to track Claude mentions: three vendors publish what one Claude check costs, and all three charge more for it than for any other surface

If Claude is the surface you care about, the question is not who covers it. It is what one Claude check costs, because every vendor that publishes a per-surface price charges more for Claude than for anything else it reads. Ahrefs Brand Radar states it plainly: "Each prompt uses 1 check per platform, location and update", and then "Claude consumes 8 checks per update." Rankscale's credit calculator prices a Claude run at 2 credits where ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Google AI Mode each cost 0.25. Our own pricing page says a Claude check uses 3 credits where most checks use 1. Three vendors, three unrelated billing systems, read on 20 October 2026, and all three price Claude above the rest of the list.

The criterion this page ranks on, and it is applied to us too

One test: does the vendor publish, on a page you can open without a sales call, that Claude is covered, at which tier, and what one Claude check consumes on its own unit. A vendor that covers Claude and will not say at what price ranks below one that does, and we say below where that puts us.

Vendor	Where Claude sits	What one Claude check costs, in the vendor's own words
Ahrefs Brand Radar	Named alongside AI Overviews, AI Mode, Gemini, Copilot, Perplexity and ChatGPT	"Claude consumes 8 checks per update", against "1 check per platform, location and update"
Rankscale	On the engine list of every published plan card from Pro upward	2 credits in the published credit calculator, against 0.25 for ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and AI Mode
AI Knows Us	On the plans whose engine row reads 5, with a per-plan Claude included yes or no	"A Claude check uses 3, because Claude costs us more to run", against 1 for the others
Otterly.AI	Not in the base four. "Claude, Google AI-Mode, Gemini as extra Add-ons" on Lite, Standard and Premium	A fixed add-on package per tier, covering up to 1,000 prompts. Its Claude package is priced above its Gemini and AI Mode packages at every tier
Scrunch	Enterprise only. Core publishes "4 LLMs supported: ChatGPT Perplexity Google AIO Copilot" and Enterprise publishes "9 LLMs supported" with Claude among them	Not published. Core is priced on the page, Enterprise is "Custom"
Peec AI	Starter, Pro and Advanced each publish "Choose 3 models". Enterprise publishes "Choose from all models" and "Up to 13 LLM models tracked"	Not published per model. Claude spends one of your three slots on any monthly tier
Profound	Enterprise only. The free trial covers "ChatGPT, Gemini, Google AI Overviews". Enterprise publishes "Up to 9 Answer Engines tracked" with "Anthropic Claude" in the capability list	Not published. Enterprise is reached through a demo
Depra AI	Enterprise only, and as an add-on even there: "Every other model as an add-on: Microsoft Copilot, Claude, Google AI Mode and more (contact us)"	Not published
Semrush	Absent. Its own FAQ answers "What LLMs does Semrush track?" with "ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, SearchGPT, Google AI Mode, and Google AI Overviews"	Not applicable

Why Claude costs more, and the answer is in one vendor's own classification

Rankscale's calculator does something none of the others do: it sorts its list into GUI engines and API engines. AI Overview and Copilot sit under GUI. Under API it names Perplexity's Sonar family, several GPT versions, several Gemini versions, Mistral Large and two Claude models. The GUI surfaces are read the way a person reads them. The API surfaces are paid for per request at the model vendor's own rate.

That is the mechanism behind every row in the table above. A Claude check is a metered API call, and that has a floor. Our own pricing page gives the same reason in one clause, "because Claude costs us more to run".

So who is actually best for Claude

On the stated criterion, in order:

• Rankscale publishes the most. Its per-engine credit weight is on the page, its scheduling row reads "Hourly to monthly" on every plan, its seats are described as "Team workspaces (unlimited seats)", and Claude is on the engine list of every plan card from Pro upward. A buyer can do the arithmetic before signing up.
• Ahrefs Brand Radar publishes the rule and the multiplier in one sentence each, which is the clearest statement of a per-surface cost in this category. At 8 checks per update, a Claude prompt tracked daily consumes what eight single-platform prompts would.
• AI Knows Us publishes its unit, its multiplier and one thing the other two do not: what happens when a check fails. "If a check fails, the credit comes back", and "We tell you how many a check will use before it starts." Our Claude multiplier is 3 against a base of 1.
• Otterly.AI is the cheapest route to Claude on a plan you can buy from the page, because the add-on attaches to the entry tier rather than to a conversation. It is also the only vendor that makes you buy Claude separately after buying the product.
• Peec AI gives you Claude at entry level with a real cost that is not money: one of your three model slots. Pick ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude and you have nothing left for Perplexity or AI Overviews until Enterprise.
• Scrunch, Profound and Depra all cover Claude and all three put it on the tier that has no published price. For Depra it is an add-on on top of that tier.
• Semrush does not name Claude in the FAQ answer that lists what it tracks, so it is not a Claude tool today however strong the rest of the platform is.

Where rivals beat us on this surface, said plainly: Rankscale, Peec and Otterly all publish daily or faster checking and unlimited or very generous seats, where we publish weekly checks with extra checks on request and one full-access login on every plan. Rankscale's published weight for a Claude run is lower than ours in proportional terms once you account for its 0.25 base. We publish no single sign-on. Those are real reasons to buy somebody else.

The arithmetic to do before you buy anything for Claude

Take your question count, multiply by the surfaces you want, multiply by how often, then apply the Claude multiplier to the Claude column alone. Ten questions on four surfaces checked weekly is 160 single-surface checks a month. Swap one of those surfaces for Claude on Ahrefs and the same ten questions cost 120 plus 320, because the Claude column is multiplied by eight. That is the sentence a vendor's feature list will not do for you, and it is the whole purchase.

Two vendors in this set price the engine rather than the seat, and a longer comparison of those two sits here, on a page that carries no durable inbound link from anywhere on this site: 147 of our live pages in this category have none, counted across 2,050 stored bodies.

Questions about tracking Claude specifically

Why does Claude cost more than ChatGPT at three different vendors?

Because the route is different. Rankscale's own calculator separates GUI engines from API engines and puts Claude models in the API group, which means a metered request at Anthropic's rate rather than a read of a consumer interface. Our pricing page states the same cause in its own words. When three unconnected pricing systems move in one direction, the cause is the surface and not the vendor.

Is Claude worth tracking at that multiplier?

It depends entirely on whether your buyers use it, and that is answerable before you spend anything: ask Claude your own buying question and read what it names. If your category comes back with a shortlist that excludes you, the multiplier is the price of finding that out on a schedule. If Claude declines to recommend in your category at all, spend the budget on a surface that does.

Which vendors will not sell me Claude tracking without a phone call?

Scrunch, Profound and Depra, on their own published pages. Scrunch publishes "4 LLMs supported" on Core and keeps Claude in the "9 LLMs supported" Enterprise list. Profound's free trial covers three engines and names Claude only in its Enterprise capability list. Depra covers four engines on every plan and offers Claude as an Enterprise add-on arranged by its team.

Does one Claude check mean one answer?

Not in every billing system, and this is where the units stop agreeing. Ahrefs counts a check per platform, location and update, so one prompt in two countries is two checks before any multiplier. We count one credit as one buyer question asked on one AI app once. Rankscale counts a fraction of a credit per engine query. Write your own number down in questions, surfaces, places and weeks, then ask each vendor to convert it. The one that can do that in an email is the one whose bill will match its quote.

Can I track Claude without buying a tool?

Yes, for a small question set. Ask your five real buying questions in Claude yourself, with your own brand name absent from the question, and write down what it names and what it cites. Repeat it on the same day each month. That is a usable baseline and it costs nothing. A tool earns its multiplier when the repetition, the competitor columns and the stored answer text become the bottleneck.

The one thing that separates the Claude answer from every other surface

On the other seven surfaces a buyer argues about coverage. On Claude the coverage argument is settled and the argument is about a multiplier, which is the rare case where the trade has published enough for a buyer to be certain. Eight checks at one vendor, two credits at another, three at a third, all three readable on their own pricing pages on 20 October 2026. Ask Claude your own buying question this week, note the shortlist it reads out, and then put the multiplier you have just read against the number of times a year you want that shortlist checked. That single multiplication decides this purchase, and it is the one calculation no vendor's feature table performs for you.