Namebeam
NAMEBEAM
Real numbers. No hype. Receipts.
Run my free check
Namebeam medallion
The Recommendation Files  |  Edition 004

STATE OF THE REFEREES, Q3 2026

The companies that measure AI visibility for a living, graded against The Receipts Standard. Nine publish a number once. Zero publish an ongoing series, a miss, or their variance. The category that sells measurement does not measure itself in public.

Edition 001 published 2026-08-07. Editions 002 and 003 were collected 2026-08-07 as internal drafts and are published inside this edition in full. New editions as the corpus re-runs.
Method

How this report was graded

The rubric is the four questions of The Receipts Standard v1.0: publishes its own number, dated, samples attached, misses at full size. The field is 21 companies: the 19 tools the AI engines themselves recommended in Edition 001, plus seshes.ai (checked 2026-08-08) and RankScore (checked 2026-08-09). Site checks for the 19 ran 2026-08-07 against each company's public website; funding data came from Crunchbase the same day. Every claim carries its date.

Bias, disclosed: Terry Carter built Namebeam. Namebeam is graded at the bottom of this page by the same four questions, and you should read the whole report as biased and check every link yourself. Corrections are printed in the next edition, named and linked.
Table One

The referee axis: 19 engine-recommended tools

Question asked 2026-08-07: does this company publish its OWN performance numbers about ITSELF, dated, in public? Customer case studies and testimonials do not count; funding announcements and dated about-page usage claims do count, and the kind is stated per row. Result: 9 of 19, almost always a one-time milestone that flatters.

ToolPublishes own numbers?What kindEvidence
SemrushYES, datedQuarterly financials (public company): FY2025 revenue 443.6M, ARR 471.4Msemrush.com/news/448771
Peec AIYES, datedGrowth milestones in funding post, 2025-11-18: 1,300+ brands since Feb 2025, 0 to 4M+ ARR in 10 monthspeec.ai/blog/we-raised-21m-series-a
OtterlyYES, datedLaunch milestone 2024-12-18: over 1,000 usersotterly.ai/blog/ai-search-monitoring-software
MangoolsYES, dated2018 case study: own signup and traffic numbers from a Product Hunt launchmangools.com/blog Product Hunt case study
BirdeyeYES, datedAbout page: 200,000 businesses, 100M ARR (2023)birdeye.com/aboutus
ProfoundYES, datedSeries A post 2025-06-18: thousands of marketers, ~10 pct of referral traffic from AI conversationstryprofound.com/blog/series-a
Athena HQYES, datedOwn study 2026-05-28: citation engine scored against 1,761 articles, R2 0.81athenahq.ai/blog/the-science-of-ai-citation
AhrefsYES, datedOwn index metrics with dates: 12M Copilot prompts July 2025, five AI indexes sizedahrefs.com/blog/new-features-july-2025
SE RankingYES, datedAbout page usage claims: 1,000,000+ SEO pros (2024)seranking.com/about-us.html
SpyFuNO EVIDENCE FOUNDDatabase size stats only, nothing about the company itselfnone found 2026-08-07
ConductorNO EVIDENCE FOUNDCustomer case studies onlynone found 2026-08-07
Scrunch AINO EVIDENCE FOUNDTestimonials and a client count without datesnone found 2026-08-07
CheckMyAINO EVIDENCE FOUNDTestimonials onlynone found 2026-08-07
CabbageSEONO EVIDENCE FOUNDEducational blog onlynone found 2026-08-07
xfunnel.aiNO EVIDENCE FOUNDStudies of engines, nothing on itselfnone found 2026-08-07
FrizerlyNO EVIDENCE FOUNDUndated trust badge onlynone found 2026-08-07
FinseoNO EVIDENCE FOUNDThird-party stats onlynone found 2026-08-07
PromptRushNO EVIDENCE FOUNDUndated brand count onlynone found 2026-08-07
search-visibility.aiNO EVIDENCE FOUNDPublishes engine studies, nothing on its own platformnone found 2026-08-07
Table Two

The new names on the map

CompanyCheckedFinding
seshes.ai2026-08-08Sells LLM brand tracking ("Track Your Brand On LLMs"; Visibility Score, Citations, Share of Voice). No public pricing, no transcripts, no publishing of its own numbers found on the homepage that day.
RankScore (rankscore.co, product "Artemis")2026-08-09AI SEO agent with visibility tracking, $99 one-time lifetime deal. Conflicting customer counts on its own site the same day: 4,000+ on one page, 5,000+ on another. Undated result screenshots. No published series, no published misses.
Table Three

The money, checked 2026-08-07

The category has absorbed over 400 million dollars of verified funding, includes one unicorn, and two of the nineteen recommended tools were acquired by bigger platforms inside nine months. Source: Crunchbase, dated as shown; funding data can lag or miss rounds. The largest claim (Profound) was verified directly on its full profile.

ToolTotal fundingLast roundStatus notes
Conductor$210.6M$150M, 2021-11-16Acquired by WeWork 2018, since spun out
Profound$154.5MSeries C $96M, 2026-02-24, led by LightspeedUnicorn; launched Profound Index benchmark 2026-06-29
Birdeye$93MSeries C $60M, 2022-03-101001-5000 employees
Peec AI$29.1MSeries A $21M, 2025-11-18Berlin; founded Jan 2025
Scrunch AI$19MSeries A $15M, 2025-07-22Acquired by Sitecore, announced 2026-06-03
Athena HQ$2.7MSeed $2.2M, 2025-03-15Y Combinator, Bain Capital Ventures
xfunnel.ainone listednoneAcquired by HubSpot 2025-10-31
SE RankingundisclosedPrivate equity (Camber Partners), 2021-09-15amount not public
Otterlynone listednonebootstrapped per profile; Austria
Finseonone listednonefounded 2024-04; no financials section

What the money table says: the smart money already voted, consolidation already started, and per Table One not one funded vendor publishes an ongoing dated series of its own numbers or a single miss. The money proves the market is real. The silence proves the standard is open.

The Question Nobody Answers

Variance

The category's own press has said no vendor publishes its variance. Dashboards sell snapshots; a snapshot that moves overnight is noise wearing a suit, and none of the twenty-one companies above publishes how much its numbers move day over day.

Variance count for the field

0 of 21 publish it. Namebeam does: measured drift of 1.9 percent between the 2026-08-05 and 2026-08-06 corpus runs, receipt in the public repo. If answers swing, every undated snapshot in this category is selling a moment and calling it a measurement.

Printed On Purpose

The gap this report prints about itself

The samples-attached axis of the Receipts Standard was not graded per vendor in this edition; the site checks asked the publishes-own-numbers question only. That column gets graded in the next edition, and this paragraph is the dated record that we had not done it yet. One day of checking per company, public websites only; a company may publish numbers somewhere we did not look.

The Same Knife

Namebeam, graded by its own standard

Publishes its own number: YES. Our five-engine check scored zero of five, dated July 31, 2026, public at proof.namebeam.ai.
Dated: YES. Every claim carries its date.
Samples attached: YES. Raw transcripts in the append-only corpus at github.com/mrcrtr1979-droid/namebeam-visibility-index.
Misses at full size: YES. As of this edition Namebeam still has zero third-party mentions and zero paying customers, printed here on purpose, again. The referee grades itself first or it is not a referee.
Standing Offer

Get your row corrected

Any company in this report that publishes a dated, ongoing series of its own numbers, or a single miss at full size, gets its row corrected in the next edition, named and linked. The four questions are free to use, at namebeam.ai/the-standard. Matching the standard costs nothing but honesty.

Run the free check. Get the dated receipt.
Free. No card, no signup. The same kind of dated receipt we publish on ourselves.
Method Notes

How this page works. Editions 002 (referee axis) and 003 (funding axis) were collected 2026-08-07 as internal drafts and are published here in full for the first time; nothing in them was altered beyond formatting. This report grades public evidence, dated per row; it is not advice to buy or avoid any tool named above, including ours. Vendor pricing, plans, and publishing practices change over time; treat every figure as dated as shown, not as a live quote. Namebeam is an educational and marketing service and does not guarantee rankings, traffic, or revenue.