Anakin vs Cloro: more sources, or more surfaces

Both Anakin and Cloro sell the same basic thing: an API that queries ChatGPT, Gemini, and the other AI answer engines on your behalf and hands back structured data instead of a screenshot. The pitch on both sides is the same too, one key instead of nine separate integrations. The difference shows up once you look at what each API actually returns for the same prompt, and what that costs at scale.

What each one is built for

Cloro positions itself as "the search API for the AI era," a unified layer over ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Grok, 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, and it is worth saying upfront: Cloro reaches four surfaces Anakin does not yet expose publicly, Grok, Copilot, Google Search, and Google News. A team that specifically needs Grok or Copilot coverage today has a real reason to pick Cloro. That gap is not standing still on Anakin's side either. The catalog behind AI Visibility runs on Wire, which already covers 987 sites and 5,321 actions and grows every day, so new surfaces land under the same product rather than through a 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. 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 is not adding a second vendor. It is calling a different endpoint on the same key.

How the data underneath gets handled

Querying an answer engine is one part of the job. Getting a clean, complete response back every time is the harder part, and it is where the rest of Anakin's infrastructure carries over into AI Visibility. Every call runs through the same anti-bot layer that defeats Cloudflare, Akamai, PerimeterX, and DataDome across the platform, with proxy routing across 207 countries so a region-specific answer actually reflects that region. Structured output is not limited to the fixed citation and source fields either: the outputSchema parameter lets a call extract JSON shaped to a schema you define, on top of the default response.

The billing model is the same one that applies across Anakin, not a special case for this endpoint. JavaScript rendering is included rather than a surcharge, a call is billed only once it succeeds, and repeat requests hit a cache that runs up to 30 times faster than a cold fetch. 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, 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. It is the same data-handling standard applied to every product on Anakin, which is the point: AI Visibility inherits it rather than needing its own version.

Cloro's own status page reports historical uptime above 99.99% on most engines over a trailing 90-day window, broken down per engine. What is 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's is a platform-wide 99.9% SLA. Cloro's site also does not carry a public trust or compliance page the way Anakin's does, so SOC 2, ISO 27001, or GDPR posture is not something a prospective customer can verify from the outside the same way.

The same 91 prompts, two APIs

Anakin 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 returned 27% more cited sources on the same prompts. That is 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 is the finding to sit with: a mention absent from one service's results is not evidence it was absent from the answer, it may just be a source the other service reached and this one did not.

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 cannot 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.

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", "google-ai-mode", "perplexity"],
    "country": "us"
  }'

The call fans one prompt out across every engine you name and returns each source's answer, citations, and completion status once the job resolves.

What it costs

Anakin's AI Visibility starts at $0.95 per 1,000 requests, a flat rate regardless of which engine answered, and the per-request cost drops at higher volume. Cloro prices by credit, and a credit's value depends on which engine you are querying: a full ChatGPT response runs 7 credits, a ChatGPT web-search response runs 5, Perplexity and Gemini run 4 each. On Cloro's own published numbers, that works out to $1.85 per 1,000 ChatGPT answers on the $500/month Growth tier and $2.00 per 1,000 on the $100/month Hobby tier, using the cheaper web-search variant. The full ChatGPT response, at 7 credits, runs higher still. Both services bill only for completed requests, a failed call costs nothing on either side, so that is not a differentiator worth claiming.

The practical difference is the pricing model itself. Anakin's rate does not 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 changes your effective cost, and ChatGPT, the engine most GEO teams query most, is one of the pricier ones on their table.

When Cloro is the right call

If Grok or Copilot visibility is a requirement today, or if classic Google Search and Google News tracking need to live in the same API as AI-answer tracking, Cloro covers ground Anakin does not.

The bottom line

For the five engines both APIs cover, the same paired-prompt test shows Anakin returning more sources, more structured metadata per source, and faster responses, at roughly half Cloro's published per-answer cost. Cloro's four additional engines matter only if your workload specifically needs Grok, Copilot, Google Search, or Google News. 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 is built to answer the same question with less integration overhead and a simpler bill.