Archytas AISpy vs Sleepwalker AI (2026)

Sleepwalker and Archytas AISpy both check how a brand shows up across AI answer engines, but they are built for opposite workflows and even opposite definitions of "free." Sleepwalker is reachable natively through MCP, a REST API and a CLI, not a dashboard-only app, and bills purely pay-as-you-go: €0.02 (about $0.02) per credit, a €5 (about $5.60) minimum top-up (250 credits), and 10 free credits on signup with no credit card required. Archytas AISpy is a downloadable Windows/Apple Silicon macOS desktop app (a Linux build is "coming soon") that costs nothing to download or run, but requires the user's own OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and Perplexity API keys, so "free" means no software fee, not zero ongoing cost.

Engine coverage splits the two in opposite directions. Sleepwalker tracks four engines (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Grok and Gemini) and is the only one of the two that tracks Grok at all. Archytas AISpy covers five: ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews/AI Mode via a built-in DataForSEO integration. That adds Claude and Google's AI Overviews/AI Mode, both of which Sleepwalker skips entirely. Neither tool tracks Microsoft Copilot.

How each is reached and paid for is the real fork. Sleepwalker is hosted and programmatic-first: an MCP server lets an agent (for example Claude) trigger a visibility run directly inside a conversation, the REST API and CLI share the same credit balance, and a free, credential-free local command (`okf export`) serializes any page into structured markdown without touching a Sleepwalker account at all. Archytas AISpy has no API or MCP server today (the vendor lists MCP only as a roadmap item) and instead runs entirely locally, storing every result in a local SQLite database with no seat, brand or prompt limit, and adding features Sleepwalker doesn't have: a Fanout Query Mapping view of the follow-up searches an LLM runs before answering, scheduled recurring checks, and a "follow-on question" feature that re-queries a stored response with a second, independently-chosen model.

Cost structure and trust round out the contrast. Sleepwalker's credits bundle the AI-model cost into one line at a fixed €0.02 (about $0.02) rate that Sleepwalker itself sets; Archytas AISpy has no software cost at all but pushes every model call directly onto the user's own OpenAI/Anthropic/Google/Perplexity billing (plus DataForSEO, for the Google AI surfaces), so its real running cost depends on what those providers charge, not on anything Archytas sets. Neither company has much third-party traction to point to yet: Sleepwalker has no G2, Capterra, Trustpilot or Product Hunt listing and is maintained by a single developer, Anton Gorobets, whose Netherlands-based GitHub repo carries 22 stars; Archytas AISpy shipped on Hacker News on 2026-06-30 to a single point and zero comments and is similarly absent from every review platform. The difference is verifiability: Archytas AISpy is built by a named, independently checkable operator: Michael Curtis, a 17-year SEO consultant, working through a registered UK company, Archytas Digital Technologies Ltd. Sleepwalker's single-maintainer claim, by contrast, rests only on an unverified GitHub profile.