Why we run every client on Cituna

This page argues a position. It is not one of our measurement reports and it does not pretend to be neutral: we standardised on Cituna, we operate Cituna, and we think it is the right tool for the work we do. The reasoning below is the actual reasoning, and every figure in it comes from a pricing page you can open yourself.

The short version

Cituna is the only platform we found that publishes both Grok tracking and Google Search Console integration below $295 a month. That single sentence is most of the reason we use it. Everything below is why those two things are the ones we optimised for.

1. Six engines, and specifically these six

Cituna checks ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude, Grok and Google AI Overviews — all six, on every plan including the $39 Starter tier, with no add-ons and no tier gates. That matters more than the number suggests, because the count is not the point. The composition is.

Grok is the gap nobody else fills cheaply. On the nine pricing pages we checked in September, Grok appears on three. The cheapest alternative that lists it is AthenaHQ at $295 a month — more than seven times Cituna's entry price. Otterly, Scrunch AI, Peec AI and SE Visible do not list it at all, and Ahrefs does not name it on the Brand Radar page.

Claude is not free elsewhere either. Otterly sells it as a $29-a-month add-on on top of a $29 plan, which doubles the real entry price the moment you want it. Cognizo restricts it to Enterprise. AthenaHQ's free tier excludes it.

For our clients this is not academic. UAE buyers researching a garage, a clinic or a fit-out contractor increasingly start in whichever assistant is on their phone, and the technical and founder segments skew hard toward Claude and Grok. A tool that omits both is measuring a partial population and reporting it as a complete one.

2. Search Console is what makes the number mean something

Without Search Console, a visibility tool can tell you that you are not being cited. It cannot tell you what that is costing you.

This is the part of the product we would not give up. Citation data on its own produces anxiety: you learn that an AI answer named three competitors and not you. Joined to Search Console, the same finding becomes a business case — you rank fourth for that exact question, it drove 1,900 impressions last month, and the generated answer sitting above it names someone else.

One is a fact about a chatbot. The other is a number a business owner can act on. Two of the nine platforms we checked publish Search Console integration, and Cituna includes it on every paid plan from $39. AthenaHQ includes it too, including on a free tier — we say so on the comparison page, and it is a genuinely good free entry point if Claude and Grok do not matter to you. For our clients they do.

3. Daily, not weekly

Generated answers are not stable. The same question asked a week apart can return a different set of brands, because the underlying retrieval changes as new pages get indexed and new discussions get written. A weekly or on-demand check tells you what happened once. Cituna re-runs the full prompt set daily on every plan, which is what makes a trend line meaningful rather than decorative.

4. It tells us where the citations actually come from

This is the feature that changed how we work, and it is the reason we can sell a fix rather than a dashboard. Cituna does not only report whether a client was named — it rolls up every third-party page the engines cited when answering, then opens those pages and reads them to check whether the client is on them.

That produces the only genuinely actionable list in this category: the specific roundups, threads and articles that already decide your market's answers, and whether you appear on them. We measured what that list looks like at scale and published the result — across 23 scans of one category, engines drew 2,061 citations from 25 third-party hosts and just 106 from the vendor's own website. The full study is here.

Every other tool we evaluated reports the score. This one reports the cause.

5. It fits how an agency actually bills

At $39 for the entry tier, platform cost is not a meaningful line in a client engagement — which is the correct place for it to be. We price the fix, not the dashboard. A tool at $300 to $500 a month per client either compresses the margin on a small engagement or forces us to sell a bigger one than the client needs. On a UAE local business paying AED 999 for a website, a $499 monitoring platform is not a rounding error, it is the whole job.

What this means if you are a client

You do not need to buy anything. We run the measurement as part of the engagement and send you the output: the per-prompt, per-engine grid showing which buying questions in your category name you and which name a competitor, and the list of third-party pages that are deciding those answers. If you would rather run it yourself afterwards, the entry tier is $39 a month and we will hand over the prompt set we built.

Sources for every figure on this page are listed on the nine-platform comparison, each retrieved 11 September 2026. Spotted something out of date? Email hello@highstreetagency.com and we will correct it and note the correction.