Anakin and Cloro sell the same basic thing: an API that asks ChatGPT, Gemini and the other AI answer engines your question and hands back structured data instead of a screenshot. Both pitch one key instead of a separate integration per engine. So for this Anakin vs Cloro comparison, we wanted to know what each one actually returns for the same prompt, and what that costs at scale.
The short answer: on the five engines both cover, Anakin returned 27% more cited sources, answered faster, and at the $500-a-month tier costs less per answer on every engine. Cloro reaches three surfaces Anakin's AI Visibility API doesn't.
Below: what each is built for, the 91-prompt benchmark, the cost math, how the data is handled, and when Cloro is the better pick.
What each one is built for
Cloro positions itself as "the search API for the AI era," a unified layer over ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Copilot, Google AI Overview, Google AI Mode, and classic Google Search and News.
Anakin's AI Visibility API covers ChatGPT, Gemini, Google AI Overview, Google AI Mode, and Perplexity.
Coverage is the first honest trade-off, so it goes upfront. Cloro reaches three surfaces Anakin's AI Visibility API doesn't expose today: Copilot, classic Google Search and Google News. Cloro has since discontinued its Grok endpoint, so Grok is off both lists. A team that specifically needs Copilot answers has a real reason to pick Cloro.
The gap is narrower than it looks, though. AI Visibility runs on Wire, whose catalog covers more than 970 sites and 5,200 actions as of 25 Oct 2026, including eight Google News actions such as News Search and Top Stories under the same API key. New engines show up in the sources list as they land in that catalog, with no separate integration.
The wider comparison is less about matching Cloro engine-for-engine and more about what sits around AI Visibility on Anakin's side. Cloro is a single-purpose API: it queries answer engines and returns the result. AI Visibility runs inside the same platform as URL Scraper, Crawl, Map, the Search API, Agentic Research, Browser API, and Browser Sessions, on top of that same Wire catalog.
So a team that starts with AI-answer tracking and later needs to scrape a competitor's pricing page, watch a listing for changes, or pull data from behind a login doesn't add a second vendor. It calls a different endpoint on the same key.
The same 91 prompts, two APIs
To see what that difference looks like in practice, we ran a paired benchmark: 100 prompts across five intent types (factual, commercial, local, research, informational, 20 each), one live call to each service per prompt, same day, US geo, every documented parameter enabled on both sides. Nine prompts returned an incomplete result from one side or the other and were dropped rather than scored as zero, leaving 91 paired results. Neither service controls which ChatGPT model answers. The split (mostly gpt-5-6 on both sides) was close enough not to be driving the result.
| Anakin AI Visibility | Cloro | |
|---|---|---|
| Engines covered | ChatGPT, Gemini, Google AI Overview, Google AI Mode, Perplexity | Adds Copilot, Google Search, Google News |
| Cited sources (91 paired prompts) | 1,669 | 1,310 |
| Source overlap between the two | 24% | 24% |
| Median latency per call | 17s | 41s |
| Response fields on the same prompt | 25 | 12 |
| Price per 1,000 calls ($500/mo tier, monthly billing) | About $1.43, flat 2 credits per engine (about $0.96 billed annually) | $1.48 to $2.59, 4 to 7 credits by engine, self-published |
Anakin's own paired-run benchmark, run 2026-08-10, 91 of 100 prompts with complete results on both sides. Prices from anakin.io/pricing and cloro.dev/pricing as of 25 Oct 2026. Full methodology and field-level breakdown available on request.
Anakin returned 27% more cited sources on the same prompts. That's the headline number, but the overlap figure next to it matters more: only 24% of the 2,386 distinct sources cited across both services showed up on both sides, and on none of the 91 prompts did the two return an identical source set.
Cloro's 717 sources with no Anakin equivalent skew toward primary medical literature (pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov, 23) and manufacturer pages (hyundaiusa.com, chevrolet.com, 12 each). Anakin's 1,076 skew toward government and standards sources (energy.gov, consumerfinance.gov, 33 each) and vendor documentation (ibm.com, asana.com).
For anyone tracking brand mentions, that's the finding to sit with. A mention missing from one service's results isn't evidence it was missing from the answer. It may just be a source the other service reached and this one didn't.
Where the two diverge most is by intent. Overlap ranged from 21% on research prompts, where Anakin returned 471 sources to Cloro's 286, up to 39% on local prompts, the one category where the two services agree most often.
Beyond raw counts, the response shapes differ. Anakin returns a retrieved-source list separate from what got cited, character-offset citation anchors resolved to a URL, a stable source reference key, and a source-type classification (web, news, forum, academic). Cloro's per-source identifier is a positional index that repeats across the response, so it can't be used to match a citation back to its source the same way.
Cloro's documentation lists a markdown-formatted answer field. Across all 91 paired calls, it never populated in a response. Publication dates were present on 57% of Anakin's cited sources against 55% of Cloro's, and Anakin's carries a full ISO 8601 timestamp where Cloro's is a display string that needs a locale-specific parse.
# 1. Submit the prompt. Returns {"search_id": "...", "status": "running", ...}
SEARCH_ID=$(curl -s -X POST https://api.anakin.io/v1/ai-visibility/search \
-H "X-API-Key: $ANAKIN_API_KEY" \
-H "Content-Type: application/json" \
-d '{
"query": "best project management software for small teams",
"sources": ["chatgpt", "gemini", "google-ai-overview", "ai-mode", "perplexity"],
"country": "us"
}' | jq -r .search_id)
# 2. Poll every few seconds until "status" is "completed"
curl -s https://api.anakin.io/v1/ai-visibility/search/$SEARCH_ID \
-H "X-API-Key: $ANAKIN_API_KEY"Submitting returns a search_id straight away with status: "running". Each engine's answer lands as soon as that engine finishes, so you poll the search every few seconds until status reads completed, then read results[]: one entry per engine with its summary, the raw full_content (where the citations, search sources and citation anchors live), latency_ms and credits_used. The Submit Search reference has the same call in Python and JavaScript.
What does an answer cost?
Anakin's AI Visibility bills each engine that answers at its Wire action rate, a flat 2 credits per engine call as of 25 Oct 2026, whichever engine it is. On the $500-a-month Business plan that's about $1.43 per 1,000 requests billed monthly, or about $0.96 billed annually, and the per-credit rate drops as volume grows.
Cloro prices by credit too, but the credit count depends on the engine: a full ChatGPT response is 7 credits, a ChatGPT web-search response 5, and Perplexity and Gemini 4 each, with a 2-credit surcharge on sync requests. On Cloro's own published numbers, that works out to $1.85 per 1,000 ChatGPT web-search answers on the $500-a-month Growth tier and $2.00 per 1,000 on the $100-a-month Hobby tier. The full ChatGPT response, at 7 credits, runs higher still. Both services bill only for completed requests, and a failed call costs nothing on either side, so that isn't a differentiator worth claiming.
The practical difference is the pricing model itself. Anakin's rate doesn't change by engine, so a Perplexity query and a ChatGPT query cost the same. Cloro's credit multiplier means the engine mix in your workload sets your effective cost, and ChatGPT, the engine most GEO teams query most, is one of the pricier ones on its table. At $100 a month the two land close together: Anakin's Scale plan works out to $2.00 per 1,000 requests, level with Cloro's Hobby rate for ChatGPT web search. From around $500 a month, Anakin's flat rate sits below every per-engine rate Cloro publishes for its Growth tier.
How the data underneath gets handled
Price per answer only matters if the answer comes back clean and complete. That's where the rest of Anakin's infrastructure carries over into AI Visibility. Each engine runs through Wire against the real consumer product, on the same anti-bot layer that defeats Cloudflare, Akamai, PerimeterX, and DataDome across the platform. A run's country setting uses the same geo targeting as the URL Scraper's proxy routing across 207 countries, so a region-specific answer actually reflects that region. The answer isn't one blob of text either: it comes back parsed into fields like citations, search sources and citation anchors. When you want to follow a cited page, the URL Scraper's outputSchema parameter extracts JSON shaped to a schema you define.
The billing model is the same one that applies across Anakin. A source is billed only once it answers, and a failed one costs nothing. One deliberate difference: AI Visibility never serves a cached answer. Engine answers change constantly, so every run queries the engines fresh.
Data in transit and at rest is covered by the same compliance posture as the rest of the platform, SOC 2 Type II, ISO 27001:2022, and GDPR-aligned data processing, and any credential used for an authenticated engine or a logged-in source sits in a vault encrypted with AES-256 and is never returned by the API. None of that is specific to tracking AI answers. AI Visibility inherits the platform's data-handling standard rather than needing its own version.
Cloro's own status page breaks uptime down per engine. On 25 Oct 2026 it showed ChatGPT and Gemini above 99.98%, with lower figures on some other engines. What's published there is a status history, not a contractual SLA: neither the status page nor Cloro's pricing page states a committed uptime guarantee. Anakin publishes a 99.9% uptime SLA, and its Enterprise plan adds custom SLA guarantees. Cloro's site also doesn't carry a public trust or compliance page the way Anakin's does, so SOC 2, ISO 27001, or GDPR posture isn't something a prospective customer can verify from the outside the same way.
When Cloro is the right call
If Copilot visibility is a requirement today, or classic Google Search results need to come back from the same endpoint and in the same response shape as your AI-answer tracking, Cloro covers ground Anakin's AI Visibility API doesn't.
Frequently Asked Questions
What engines does Anakin's AI Visibility API cover?
ChatGPT, Gemini, Google AI Overview, Google AI Mode and Perplexity. The roster is managed on Anakin's side, and new engines appear in the sources list as they land in the Wire catalog.
Does Cloro cover engines Anakin doesn't?
Yes. Cloro's API also returns Copilot, classic Google Search and Google News. Cloro has discontinued its Grok endpoint. Anakin's Wire catalog separately covers Google News through eight actions under the same API key.
How much does Anakin's AI Visibility cost compared with Cloro?
Anakin bills a flat 2 credits per engine call, about $1.43 per 1,000 requests on the $500-a-month Business plan billed monthly, or about $0.96 billed annually. Cloro charges 4 to 7 credits depending on the engine, which works out to $1.48 to $2.59 per 1,000 answers on its $500-a-month Growth tier. Both bill only for completed requests.
Is Anakin's AI Visibility API synchronous?
No. Submitting a prompt returns a search_id immediately, and you poll GET /v1/ai-visibility/search/{id} until the status is completed, or subscribe to the ai.search.completed webhook. Every run queries the engines fresh, since answers are never served from cache.
How was the Anakin vs Cloro benchmark run?
100 prompts across five intent types, one live call to each service per prompt, on the same day with US geo. Nine prompts with an incomplete result on either side were dropped, leaving 91 paired results: 1,669 cited sources for Anakin against 1,310 for Cloro, 24% source overlap, and a median of 17 seconds per call against 41.
The bottom line
For the five engines both APIs cover, the same paired-prompt test showed Anakin returning more sources, more structured metadata per source, and faster responses, on a flat per-engine rate that comes in under Cloro's published per-answer rates at the $500-a-month tier. Cloro's extra surfaces matter if your workload specifically needs Copilot or classic Google Search in one response format.
For a team building AI-visibility tracking into a product, or adding it alongside web scraping already running through Anakin, Anakin's AI Visibility API answers the same question with less integration overhead and a simpler bill. The quickest test is the one we started with: send one of your own prompts to all five engines and look at what comes back.