| Feature | Rating | Details |
|---|---|---|
| Multi-AI Engine Coverage | 5/5 | ChatGPT (GPT-5, GPT-5 Mini, GPT-4o), Gemini, AI Overviews, Perplexity, Claude, Grok, DeepSeek, AI Mode (only Copilot missing according to latest test) |
| User Experience | 5/5 | Clean, professional, playful design with cartoon characters. AI-assisted setup (3 minutes), suggested prompts included, onboarding sessions available |
| Data Accuracy | 5/5 | API-first connection + native interface validation (dual validation). Fresh, bias-free testing with no cookies/history. Academic research foundation. Full conversation transcripts for verification |
| AI Traffic Attribution | 0/5 | No traffic estimation or visit tracking from AI engines. Must manually track in GA4 |
| Actionable Insights | 4/5 | Page audit tool (beta) identifies main issues with brief explanations. Three-lever framework provides strategic direction (Third-Party Content, Technical Improvements, First-Party Content). Could be more detailed |
| Lead/Conversion Tracking | 0/5 | No end-to-end attribution (ChatGPT mention → visits/leads). Monitoring tool only, not ROI platform |
| Brand Sentiment Tracking | 0/5 | Not included. No positive/negative/neutral tone tracking. Can manually review conversation transcripts |
| Brand Presence Overview | 5/5 | Visibility vs. competitors, persona-specific insights, topic coverage analysis, historical trends (30 days), model-by-model breakdown, cited sources tracking |
| Competitor Analysis | 5/5 | See exactly where competitors mentioned, citation source analysis, competitor mention tracking, "share of LLM" benchmarking |
| Data Freshness | 5/5 | Flexible scheduling - daily, weekly, or custom cadence across all tracked engines. Real-time API queries |
| Setup Complexity | 5/5 | 3 minutes AI-assisted setup. Auto-generates prompts, personas, and competitors. First 3 report runs completely free. Build unlimited reports for free |
| Pricing Value | 3/5 | Highly variable. Excellent for weekly monitoring ($60-224/month). Premium for daily comprehensive monitoring ($450-1,680/month). Writesonic offers daily at €249 but Gumshoe provides deeper persona insights |
Overall rating: 3.7I would recommend Gumshoe AI for AI Search visibility purposes. |
| Pros of Gumshoe | Cons of Gumshoe |
|---|---|
| 1. Persona-First Methodology: Unlike competitors that track generic keywords, Gumshoe builds rich, realistic buyer personas and shows you WHO sees your brand and in what context. This strategic approach reveals insights other tools miss. | 1. No Sentiment Tracking: Gumshoe doesn't analyze whether mentions are positive, negative, or neutral. You can see you're mentioned, but not if AI is praising or criticizing your brand. Must manually review conversation transcripts. |
| 2. Most Comprehensive AI Engine Coverage: Tracks all major platforms: ChatGPT (multiple versions), Gemini, AI Overviews, Perplexity, Claude, Grok, DeepSeek, and AI Mode. Only missing Copilot. Best-in-class coverage for complete visibility. | 2. No Traffic or Lead Attribution: Can't connect AI citations to actual visits, leads, or revenue. It's a monitoring tool, not an attribution platform. Must manually track AI referrals in GA4 to see business impact. |
| 3. Rigorous Data Quality + Transparent Methodology: Dual validation (API + native interface testing), academic research backing, fresh bias-free testing, and full conversation transcripts. You can verify every finding yourself. More rigorous than competitors. | 3. Premium Pricing for Daily Monitoring: While weekly monitoring is competitive ($60-224/month), daily comprehensive tracking costs $450-1,680/month. Writesonic offers daily monitoring at €249. High-volume users pay significantly more. |
Gumshoe AI is an AI search visibility platform that helps businesses understand and improve how their brand appears in AI-generated search results from tools like ChatGPT, Google Gemini, Perplexity, and Claude.
Gumshoe is a Seattle-based startup founded by Patrick O'Donnell (known for Urbanspoon and MightyAI) that raised $2 million in pre-seed funding in May 2025.
Gumshoe AI's home page
Here are the most interesting features of Gumshoe AI:
ChatGPT, Gemini, AIO, Claude, Perplexity, Grok, DeepSeek. They're all included in Gumshoe. Which is an unicum.
This is a core differentiator of Gumshoe as it builds realistic target personas based on customer roles and responsibilities, goals and pain points, and decision-making processes.
This test was made in October 2025. Be aware that these AI tools evolve quickly, and new features are removed and added weekly.
What I have written in this review today might no longer be valid 7 days later.
I have personally tested Gumshoe AI as part of a larger effort to test all the major AI search visibility platforms. Therefore, this is not an AI-generated review based on the opinions of others.
This review is based on my personal experience of using Gumshoe AI in a real-life scenario for an actual client.
Yes, I used chatGPT to run a deep research about Gumshow AI. But the goal was to find the most accurate information about this tool.
💡 Here is our detailed review of Writesonic for AI search visibility.
Can Gumshoe AI provide you with business-relevant metrics?
Yes, Gumshoe AI has comprehensive multi-AI engine coverage. It tracks all major AI search platforms: ChatGPT, Gemini, AIO, Perplexity, Claude, DeepSeek, Grok. Only Copilot is not included.
Yes, Gumshoe AI provides an excellent user experience. The platform is clean and professional yet also surprisingly playful. The user experience (UX) removes friction at every step, from the AI-assisted setup process to transparent pricing and verification through conversation transcripts.
I personally found it to be one of the best UXs out there.
💡 Here is our detailed review of SE Ranking for AI search visibility.
It depends on how you use it. If you're happy to receive weekly reports instead of daily ones and you don't have thousands of prompts to monitor, then the price is very good. However, if you have thousands of prompts to monitor across all AI search engines, the prices are not that favourable.
Yes, I believe that Gumshoe AI provides reliable and accurate data. The platform uses dual validation (API connections and native interface testing) to achieve a higher level of accuracy than its competitors. Every conversation starts afresh, with no cookies or history, to ensure bias-free results that reflect the behaviour of the AI model.
Key trust factors in my opinion:
- Academic research foundation
- Full conversation transcripts (verify everything yourself).
- Transparent methodology
Yes, the auditing tool identifies the main issues affecting your website and provides a brief explanation of how to resolve them. The descriptions could be more detailed, but having them at all is already a good starting point. We can find more information online and solve the issue that way.
💡 Here is our detailed review of Otterly AI for AI search visibility.
No, it does not. I wish we could have something similar, but at the current stage, we do not have it.
No, Gumshoe AI does not offer end-to-end AI referral attribution as standard. It won't tell you that a ChatGPT mention resulted in X visits/leads.
- Does Gumshoe AI offer a brand's sentiment tracking?
No, Gumshoe AI does not currently include sentiment analysis. The platform focuses purely on whether your brand is mentioned or cited, not on the emotional or qualitative tone of those mentions.
💡 Here is our detailed review of Scalenut for AI search visibility.
The fundamental question here is: Does Gumshoe AI use APIs, or does it scrape the actual web interfaces of AI platforms?
Finding an answer with Gumshoe was damn easy, as they have detailed documentation.
This is what they write in their documentation:
<<Gumshoe works by testing leading AI search platforms like ChatGPT, Google Gemini, Perplexity, and Anthropic. It analyzes how often and in what context your brand is mentioned in AI-generated responses.>>
<<[...] the reports are intentionally designed to reflect the same kinds of personalization and biases that users might encounter in everyday interactions with ChatGPT or other LLMs.>>
Here are the 3 steps of how Gumshoe works:
<<API Connection: Gumshoe establishes a direct connection to each AI model via API, ensuring a controlled testing environment. Every conversation starts fresh with a new persona—no history, cookies, or account data. So results reflect the model's behavior, not individual user bias.
Personas: Personas are foundational to Gumshoe and what truly sets us apart. Instead of treating all queries the same, we ask AI models to respond through the lens of distinct customer types. We provide human details that the models would know about their users.
Ongoing Academic Research: We continue to invest in research and value academic work, including contributions from our own team members. As part of this effort, we also query models through their native interfaces to ensure our results stay consistent with real-world responses.>>
This persona-driven prompt generation is what sets Gumshoe apart. It's early-stage structured AI search research, tied directly to how your audience thinks and searches, not just generic keyword queries.
By this point, I can tell you that I solved all the doubts I had about how Gumshoe works, and their team did a great job with the documentation. This is pretty unusual for such a recent AI Search visibility tool.
Gumshoe AI's home page
Gumshoe runs brand and topic-specific prompts across major AI engines and logs whether and how your brand is mentioned.
The visibility dataset includes:
- Mention frequency: How often your brand appears
- Mention context: What AI models are saying about you
- Position: Where you rank relative to competitors
- Model coverage: Which AI platforms mention you
When you click on a competitor's name, you can see exactly where and how they're being mentioned, providing valuable competitive intelligence.
Gumshoe captures any citations or reference links AI provides. Gumshoe aggregates these to show:
- Top cited domains: Ranked list of websites AI models reference when discussing your brand
- Citation frequency: How often each source is referenced
- Competitor citations: What sources are your competitors getting cited from
For example, if ChatGPT or Perplexity answers a question about your product and cites a TechCrunch article and your blog, Gumshoe logs those domains. This helps you understand which content is most influential with AI models.
Gumshoe's interface
Persona-specific visibility: How you perform across different buyer personas (roles, goals, pain points).
Topic coverage gaps: Areas where competitors outperform you, Gumshoe's sentiment metric.
Gumshoe's prompts and citations
Gumshoe AI gets its information by testing AI search platforms and capturing their responses. This is not based on third-party datasets, search console feeds, or theoretical analysis.
In case you wanna know the detailed technical steps, you can find them in the paragraph above, or by reading their documentation about the technical aspects of Gumshoe.
I have the same level of trust in Gumshoe as I do with established providers like Semrush or Ahrefs. The data is valuable and directionally correct, but not bulletproof.
What gives me confidence in Gumshoe's data:
1. API-first with native interface validation: They use both API connections for controlled testing AND query native interfaces to ensure consistency with real-world responses. This dual validation approach is more rigorous than competitors.
2. Fresh, bias-free testing: Every conversation starts with a clean slate (no history, cookies, or account data), so results reflect the model's actual behavior rather than accumulated personalization.
3. Persona-based insights: The persona approach surfaces not just mentions, but context and relevance to specific customer segments, providing strategic depth that other tools miss.
Here are the points that I would improve in Gumshoe:
- AI traffic analytics: Although Gumshoe primarily markets itself as a 'brand management platform', I believe many business owners would find a basic AI traffic analytics dashboard useful.
- AI content writing: When I started the test, Gumshoe had a tool to help me write content. Then, during the test, it disappeared. Such a tool would give Gumshoe a substantial advantage over competitors who were only offering a simple AI visibility dashboard.
- Content strategy tool: We can see what brings citations to our competitors. However, we still need an additional layer of analysis to determine whether our blog contains similar content. A 'Content Strategy' tool similar to the one offered by Writesonic would help here, as it provides hundreds of potential topic ideas. You just need to choose one to write about.
💡 Here is our detailed review of Peec AI for AI search visibility.
Excellent. I'm saying this with all the confidence I could. Since the first minute I entered, my impression was: "Clean, professional, focused, and a bit playful to make our day easier".
No, seriously, congrats to the design team because they have chosen these cartoon-looking characters, which is quite unusual in this era where everybody is going for an Apple-looking minimal design.
Gumshoe AI's initial setup
The initial setup is AI-assisted, and this helps quite a bit because you don't have to input all the prompts, niches, and competitors manually. Gumshoes does all that automatically.
Once you're on the main page, the interface is quite rich in information, but not overwhelming:
Gumshoe AI's initial interface
Gumshoe offers your first three report runs completely free: no credit card required.
This lets you:
- Build and test multiple report configurations
- Understand the platform
- See your actual AI visibility data before committing
- Experiment with different personas and topics
Once you end your free trial, the prices can vary based on the number of prompts you run and the AI search engines you would like to monitor.
Here's an example:
- 70 prompts
- 8 AI search engines
- Weekly audit
- The monthly cost will be $224
Here's another example:
- 70 prompts
- 8 AI search engines
- Daily audit
- The monthly cost will be $1680 😱
Let's imagine another situation which is closer to the one I experienced with the other AI search engines:
- 50 prompts
- 3 AI search engines
- Daily audit or Weekly audit
- For a daily audit, the price is $450/month. For a weekly audit, the price is $60/month.
💡 Here is our detailed review of Getmentioned AI for AI search visibility
Gumshoe's price is highly variable based on how you set it up. But the cost per conversation is rather high.
Alternative solutions like Writesonic cost $249 to monitor 150 prompts on 3 AI search engines with daily audits. Gumshoe costs $450.
But what if we run weekly reports instead of daily? In that case, Gumshoe will cost only $60.
Gumshoe AI's persona-first methodology, comprehensive platform coverage, and dual-validation data quality make it an interesting tool.
The UX is outstanding, with AI-assisted setup taking just 3 minutes.
However, it lacks sentiment tracking and traffic attribution, dealbreakers for some businesses.
Pricing is its double-edged sword: fantastic value for weekly monitoring ($60-224/month), but premium-priced for daily comprehensive tracking ($450-1,680/month).
My verdict: 3.7/5.
Perfect for strategic marketers running weekly reports who want to understand WHO sees their brand in AI search. Skip it if you need sentiment analysis, traffic attribution, or daily monitoring on a tight budget.