If you are a marketing team asking “which AI visibility tool is easiest to set up?”, the honest answer depends on what “set up” means to you. Most of the self-serve trackers — Otterly.AI, Peec AI, Rankscale — take about five minutes: create an account, add your brand and competitors, type in the buyer prompts you want tracked, pick a frequency. The slow part is not the software. It is you writing the prompt list.
Prescy’s free ChatGPT check skips both. You enter your website, it reads the site and generates the buyer questions for you, and it asks ChatGPT eight of them straight away — about a minute, no account, no card. It is built for B2B SaaS marketing leads whose buyers ask ChatGPT and Perplexity for recommendations, and who do not want an onboarding call or a prompt-writing session before they see a single result. It replaces the “brainstorm 20 prompts in a spreadsheet” step and the sales-led setup on enterprise tools. The proof point: you see whether ChatGPT names you — named in X of 8, with the domains it cited — before you have signed up for anything.
Key takeaways
- The self-serve AI visibility trackers all set up in roughly five minutes; the real cost is writing the prompt list yourself.
- Prescy’s free check needs no account and no prompts — enter a domain, get a ChatGPT result in about a minute.
- Paid Monitor builds its 60 buyer questions from your site and category; you trim the list, you do not draft it.
- Monitor’s first source map is same-day, not a week-one wait, and the trial is 14 days with no card.
- If price is your first constraint, Otterly.AI Lite at $29/month is cheaper and runs daily — setup speed is not the only axis.
What actually makes a tracker slow to set up
“Five-minute setup” is close to true for every self-serve tool in this category. The friction is in four places, and only one of them is really about the product:
- Writing the prompt list. Most tools ask you to supply the buyer questions on day one. A good list of 15–50 prompts that reflects how your buyers actually phrase things is an afternoon of work, and a weak list quietly drags every metric down afterwards.
- Account and billing before any result. If you have to enter a card and pick a plan before you see whether the tool tells you anything useful, the “setup” is really an evaluation you cannot run.
- Engine and frequency configuration. Choosing which three engines to track, or which add-ons to pay for, is a decision you are not equipped to make before you have seen the tool work.
- Enterprise implementation. On the larger platforms, a Starter plan may only cover one engine, and multi-engine tracking starts with a call and a yearly contract.
How Prescy’s setup actually goes
Two stages, and the first one asks nothing of you but a URL.
The free check
- Enter your website on the free check. Prescy reads the site to work out your category — if it reads cleanly, it goes straight to asking; if it cannot read enough, it shows one screen to confirm what you sell and who buys.
- It asks ChatGPT eight buyer questions a customer in your category would actually type, once each. About a minute. Nothing to install, no card, no account.
- You get named in X of 8 for your brand, and the domains ChatGPT cited — with presence or absence marked. That is the whole result, and you reached it without signing up.
Monitor, if you continue
- Create an account with a one-time email code — there is no password to set. The 14-day trial does not take a card.
- Confirm the business details Prescy pulled from your site. Monitor then generates 60 buyer questions from your site and how buyers in your category ask. You remove the two or three that do not sound like your buyers; you do not write the list from scratch.
- Add up to 10 competitors to measure against. The first source map — the cited pages deciding your category — is same-day, not a week-one dashboard wait.
At no point do you sit down to author prompts. You edit a generated set. That is the part of setup Prescy removes.
Where the self-serve trackers still win
Easiest to set up is not the same as best value, and it is worth being straight about the trade-offs:
- Otterly.AI Lite is $29/month and runs daily across four core engines. If budget is your first constraint, it is genuinely cheaper, and its brand and competitor discovery is automatic.
- Peec AI and Rankscale also auto-discover competitors and cover more engines — Rankscale advertises 17+. If broad daily monitoring across many models is the job, those are built for it.
- Prescy is $99/month, weekly, two engines on purpose. It samples ChatGPT up to five times and Perplexity five times on each buyer question every week, because those are the two engines it can query reliably and get traceable citations back from. The ranked source queue is built on those citations. A wider engine count it could not cite from would grow the report without making the queue more useful.
So: if “easiest to set up” means “least work before I know whether this tool has anything to tell me,” start with the free check and skip the prompt-writing. If it means “cheapest way to start daily monitoring across many engines,” Otterly is the shorter answer.