Wellows review (2026): an AI search agency's scorecard
We review Wellows against the four parts of every AI search program we run: prompt research, citations, AI crawler access and AI-referred traffic. Strong on citations and outreach, silent on crawlers and attribution.
Wellows is one of the more thoughtful citation tools we've looked at this year. It doesn't stop at telling you whether an engine cited you. It tells you which kind of citation it was, who else got cited, and which cited pages you could approach to get included next time.
We only do AI search, and every program we run has four parts: the prompts we track, the citations behind the answers, whether AI crawlers can reach the client's pages, and the traffic that comes back. So that's how we reviewed it.
Sources: wellows.com/pricing and wellows.com/llms.txt (last updated 23 September 2026), read on 25 October 2026. Promptwatch facts are from its llms.txt, re-checked on 21 October 2026.
The short version
| Program part | Wellows | What it means for a program |
|---|---|---|
| Prompts | Partial | Unlimited prompts, five engines, no demand data by design |
| Citations | Strong | Explicit and implicit split, sentiment, outreach targets |
| AI crawler access | Not published | You'd need a second source for bot activity |
| AI-referred traffic | Not published | Wellows itself says citations often don't turn into referral visits |
Wellows covers two of the four parts, and covers one of them very well. Promptwatch, the platform we run client programs on, covers all four. The details follow.
Prompts: generous limits, deliberate gaps
Every Wellows plan includes unlimited prompts, projects and seats. You pay for a monthly balance of AI answers, where one answer is one prompt asked of one engine on one day. Engines and cadence (daily or weekly) are set per project, and regions are measured separately without a plan cap. Prompts are split into branded and non-branded, which is the first thing we'd ask for anyway.
The engines are ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Google AI Mode, Perplexity and Gemini. Wellows says it doesn't track Claude or Microsoft Copilot, and Grok isn't on the list. Answers are collected from each engine's public interface, logged out with web search on, rather than from APIs alone. Runs are daily or weekly, not real time.
On prompt research, Wellows takes a stance we respect even though we work differently. It publishes no prompt search volumes, because it says nobody has credible prompt volume data. Its free tools (a Query Fan-Out Generator and a Prompt Audit among them) help you build a set, but they sit outside the platform.
Promptwatch brings that research inside the workspace: search volumes and difficulty scores per prompt, query fan-outs, topics, tags and personas, with country tracking on every paid plan and state or city tracking from Business and on agency plans. We treat volumes as a ranking signal, not gospel. When a client can afford 50 prompts, though, a signal beats a guess.
Citations: the reason to look at Wellows
This is where Wellows earns its place. It extracts every source from an answer's citation list, reads those pages, and sorts what it finds.
An explicit citation is the engine citing the client's own page. An implicit citation is the engine citing a third-party page (a review site, a roundup, a forum thread) that mentions the client. A cited third-party page that doesn't mention the client at all becomes an implicit citation opportunity: an outreach target with contact emails and a template, with Reddit, YouTube, LinkedIn, Medium and Quora listed apart from publisher sites. Each cited page that does mention the brand gets a sentiment label.
The scores follow from that. The AI Visibility Score is your share of citations against up to ten tracked competitors. The Citation Score blends explicit and implicit citations, weighted by intent and competitor share of voice. Content Opportunities flag prompts where competitors are cited and you aren't, and KIVA, the built-in writing agent, drafts the page against your Search Console data and can send it to WordPress for editing.
Promptwatch's citation analytics go to page and domain level, with Reddit and YouTube citations, offsite mentions, citation type breakdowns and citation trends over time. Wellows' explicit and implicit framing is cleaner for outreach planning, and we'd credit it for that. Promptwatch's trend view is what we use when a client asks what changed since last quarter.
AI crawler access: not covered
This is the part that decides whether the citation work can pay off. If GPTBot or PerplexityBot can't fetch a page, or keeps hitting errors on it, the best outreach campaign in the world won't get that page cited.
Wellows does not publish AI crawler logs or a crawl-to-citation path. Promptwatch's Agent Analytics reads real-time crawler logs through Cloudflare, AWS CloudFront, Fastly, Vercel, Netlify, Akamai, Google Cloud CDN or a custom HTTP endpoint, tracks errors, and follows a crawl through to a later citation. It's included from Professional ($245/mo) on brand plans and on every agency plan.
AI-referred traffic: not covered, and Wellows says why it matters less to them
Wellows publishes no visitor analytics tying AI-referred sessions to conversions. Its own FAQ admits that rising citations often don't show up as referral traffic, because AI answers resolve where they are. That's honest, and it matches what we see.
It's also the reason we measure the visits that do arrive. Promptwatch's visitor analytics installs with a small script or GTM template, tracks conversions, and lines AI-referred sessions up against the prompts and citations that produced them. Essential includes 200K visitor events.
Price
Wellows repriced in September 2026 and dropped per-domain plans. Basic is $29/mo for 1,800 answers, Standard $97 for 6,500, Growth $249 for 18,000 and Scale $497 for 36,000, plus custom plans. Every plan has all five engines, every feature, white-label reporting and a 7-day trial. There's no free plan. If the balance runs out, collection pauses until the billing date, and unused answers don't roll over.
Wellows is the cheaper way in. Promptwatch's paid brand plans start at Essential ($95/mo), with a free Explore plan limited to 10 prompts on ChatGPT.
Who Wellows suits
A team whose AI search work is mostly digital PR and content: find the cited pages, get onto them, write the missing page. The outreach list alone saves days of manual research.
How we'd run it
For a client program, we'd run the whole thing on Promptwatch, because the crawler logs and the traffic attribution are the half of the job Wellows doesn't publish, and they're the half that explains a drop or justifies a budget. Wellows' implicit citation framing is a useful idea to borrow whichever tool you use: for every prompt you're losing, list the cited third-party pages that don't mention you yet, and start there.