BrightLocal AI Visibility Tracking: Local SEO and AI Search Features (2026)
A buyer's walk through BrightLocal's Local AI Visibility module: setup, 20 prompts, the score, sources, Citation Builder, scheduling, and price by billing.
BrightLocal's answer to AI search is a module called Local AI Visibility. It lives in the same account as BrightLocal's rank tracker, citation tools and review management, and it is included on the Track, Manage and Grow plans. This guide goes through it the way a buyer meets it: adding a location, choosing prompts, reading the score, then the competitor and source views, the link to Citation Builder, scheduling and price. After that comes the part a feature list doesn't show.
Everything here comes from brightlocal.com/pricing, the module page, BrightLocal's llms.txt and its help center articles on plans, metrics, prompts, scheduling and export, all read on 20 October 2026. BrightLocal says more AI platforms are planned, so recheck those pages if you are reading this much later.
Setup: one location at a time
The unit in BrightLocal is a business location. You pick the location and the module anchors every query to it. The point is that the answers it collects belong to that place, and the score you get is that location's score, not an average across your brand.
That design makes it quick to start. It is also the first constraint you will hit: a town where you have no address has nothing to anchor prompts to.
Prompts: suggested, editable, capped at 20
BrightLocal suggests prompts from the business category. You can keep them, edit them or swap them at any time, up to 20 per location. Each prompt is tagged branded (your business name is in it) or unbranded (a buyer asking for a type of service), and each one gets its own numbers.
The cap is hard. There is no add-on to buy more. For one storefront with one main service, 20 is plenty. It pinches when a location sells several services, or when you want the same need phrased the way different customers ask it. Our guide to writing local prompts for AI tracking helps you spend the 20 slots on questions people actually ask.
The score and what sits under it
Each location gets a visibility score from 0 to 100. BrightLocal builds it from four inputs: how often the location is mentioned, where it appears in the answer, how positively it is described, and how strongly it is recommended. BrightLocal's own reading is that above 75 means consistent recommendation and below 50 means the location is mostly absent.
Under the score sit mention rate, share of voice and average position, split by platform and by prompt. The first run is a snapshot. From the second run you get a trend view you can filter by period, platform and prompt type. Use the prompt type filter early. A strong branded score can hide weak unbranded results, and unbranded prompts are the ones new customers type.
Engines
Three: ChatGPT, Google AI Mode and Google AI Overviews. Gemini, Perplexity and Claude are not tracked. BrightLocal says it plans to add platforms but gives no date on the pages we read.
Competitors
Local competitors are detected automatically from the answers, so the comparison set is the businesses AI actually names near that location rather than a list you typed in. For each one, the module writes an AI explanation of why it outranks you. Read those as a hypothesis. They are a model's interpretation of the answers, and no AI engine publishes how it picks local businesses.
The AI sources leaderboard
This is the view we would open first. It ranks the directories AI cites for your category and shows, source by source, where your location is listed and where it is missing. A directory that keeps appearing in answers, with competitors on it and you absent, is a concrete lead.
Citation Builder and action items
From a gap on the leaderboard you can send the missing listing to Citation Builder, BrightLocal's pay-as-you-go citation service, without leaving the account. The module also produces prioritized action items. Two caveats apply. Citation Builder is paid per use and isn't part of the plan price. And no engine documents that a new directory listing changes its answer, so watch a few runs before counting a listing as a win.
Scheduling
Reports run weekly, monthly or on demand. A manual refresh uses one manual report run. The pages we read list no daily option. That suits a monthly local SEO review. It is slow when you want to see whether last Tuesday's change did anything.
Plans and price by billing
The module costs nothing extra on Track, Manage and Grow. It only exists on BrightLocal's new platform and is not on the legacy plans (Single Business, Multi Business, SEO Pro, Simply Listings).
| Plan (1 location) | Monthly billing | Annual billing | What the plan adds |
|---|---|---|---|
| Track | $41/mo | $369/yr ($31/mo) | Local AI Visibility, rank tracking for up to 100 keywords and four competitors, geo-grid for up to five keywords, citation tracking, GBP audit |
| Manage | $54/mo | $485/yr ($40/mo) | Track plus AI Insights, listings sync, GBP post scheduling |
| Grow | $65/mo | $584/yr ($49/mo) | Manage plus review monitoring, review generation, review widgets |
Track for 2 to 5 locations costs $62 a month or $558 a year, and prices rise by location band up to 100 locations. Above 100 locations pricing is on request, and the help center says custom plans don't include Local AI Visibility automatically. The trial runs 14 days and needs no card. Watch the headline number: $31 a month is the annual rate. One location on monthly billing is $41.
What it doesn't cover
The help center says export and white-label are on the roadmap, not live. Results stay inside BrightLocal. If you report to a client or a manager in your own format, that is a real cost in copying numbers by hand.
The module measures answers and stops there. The pages we read don't describe AI crawler logs, so you can't see whether GPTBot or PerplexityBot fetched your location page. They don't describe AI-referred traffic or conversions either, which means a rising score and a quiet booking calendar can't be connected or ruled out. Source detail is about directories, with no page-level view of the Reddit threads, YouTube videos or competitor pages being cited. And three engines leaves Gemini, Perplexity, Copilot and Claude out of the report.
None of that makes it a bad buy. For an existing BrightLocal customer it is an easy yes: switch it on, set your 20 prompts, and bring the sources leaderboard to your next citation sprint. If answers vary a lot across your service area, our Local Falcon vs BrightLocal comparison covers the grid approach.
When Promptwatch is the better choice
The gaps above are where Promptwatch earns its place. Its monitors run daily, and every paid plan can track any of the supported engines: ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Google AI Mode, Gemini, Perplexity, Copilot, Amazon Alexa and Meta AI through their real interfaces, plus Claude, Grok, DeepSeek and Mistral via API. State and city monitors start on Business ($579/mo) and are on every agency plan from Kick-off ($199/mo). On Business, Agency Scale and Enterprise you can pin a monitor to exact coordinates, with a radius between 20 m and 5 km, so ChatGPT, AI Overviews and AI Mode answer as if asked from the storefront.
It also covers what happens around the answer. Agent Analytics logs IP-verified AI crawler visits with a citation rate per page, from Professional ($245/mo). Visitor analytics ties AI-referred visits to conversions on every paid plan. Citation Trends sorts each cited source into one of 20 source types, including a Directory type for listing and review sites, so the directory question BrightLocal answers sits next to Reddit, YouTube and your own pages. Excel and CSV exports, scheduled PDF reports and a Looker Studio connector (from Professional) get the data out of the app.
Our split for most local buyers: keep BrightLocal for rankings, listings and reviews, and treat its module as a free monthly check. When the brief outgrows three engines and 20 prompts, or someone asks whether AI answers bring in customers, start Promptwatch's 7-day free trial on monthly billing and run the same location prompts side by side.