# Blog

> Notes on Cheap Seats and on how AI assistants recommend products.



## Pages

- [AI visibility tools compared](https://cheapseats.dev/blog/ai-visibility-tools-compared/index.md): Cheap Seats, Peec AI, Profound, Otterly.AI, Scrunch, Ahrefs Brand Radar, Semrush, Elmo and Limelit Open compared row by row, from each tool's own pages, as of October 2026.
- [Cheap Seats vs. Promptfoo for AI visibility](https://cheapseats.dev/blog/cheap-seats-vs-promptfoo/index.md): Promptfoo is a general LLM evaluation and red-teaming tool. Cheap Seats is an open-source tracker built for one job, finding out whether AI assistants recommend your product. When each fits, and what you'd build to make Promptfoo do Cheap Seats' job.
- [How many runs do you need to trust an AI visibility number?](https://cheapseats.dev/blog/how-many-runs-to-trust-ai-visibility/index.md): AI answers change every time you ask. What the research says about that variance, the arithmetic for how far one run and a week of runs can be trusted, and what to do about it.
- [Why AI visibility scores differ between tools](https://cheapseats.dev/blog/why-ai-visibility-scores-differ/index.md): The same ten AI answers can read 30%, 40% or 50% visible, and a share of voice of 20% to 33%, depending on the tool. Denominators, matching, sampling and history, worked through.
- [A free, open-source AI visibility tracker](https://cheapseats.dev/blog/free-open-source-ai-visibility-tracker/index.md): Cheap Seats is a free, MIT-licensed AI visibility tracker you run yourself. What it costs to run, a five-minute quickstart, a real graded answer and fix, and how it compares with HubSpot's AEO Grader, Ahrefs' free checker and Amplitude AI Visibility.
- [Why I built Cheap Seats](https://cheapseats.dev/blog/why-we-built-cheap-seats/index.md): An open-source project I wrote to make my own product better, inspired by Gauge and others. Free, and always will be, on the Claude subscription you already have.