Best AI Visibility Tools I've Compared (2026)

Two years ago nobody tracked whether ChatGPT mentioned their brand. Now there are more than forty tools that will sell you a dashboard for it, most of them launched after January 2025, and the pricing ranges from free to $3,000 a month for what looks like the same chart.

I compared 14 of them for this roundup. I priced every one on its own pricing page on October 9, 2026, mapped which AI engines each tool actually queries, and read the fine print on prompt limits, which is where the real cost hides. I didn't run all 14 in production, and I'll say so plainly rather than pretend otherwise. If you'd rather hand this to someone, my comparison of GEO agencies covers the teams that do it as a service.

One finding reshaped the whole post: a lot of the prices you'll read in other roundups aren't on the vendors' pricing pages at all. Profound gets quoted at $99 a month across a dozen articles. Its pricing page shows a free seven-day trial and a custom Enterprise tier, and nothing else. I've marked every number below as either vendor-published or sales-gated.

Nobody paid to be here and there are no affiliate links in this post.

What Are AI Visibility Tools (and How They Differ from Rank Trackers)?

AI visibility tools run a fixed list of prompts through ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Google AI Overviews and similar engines on a schedule, then record whether your brand got mentioned, how it was described, and which URLs the model cited. Rank trackers tell you where a page sits for a keyword. These tell you whether a model says your name at all.

The gap matters because the two things come apart. A page can sit at position three in Google and never appear in an AI Overview for the same query, because the model assembled its answer from a Reddit thread and two comparison posts instead. Tracking one and assuming the other is how teams end up surprised. Reddit turns up in those answers often enough that there are now agencies that work Reddit threads as a channel of their own.

Under the hood they all do roughly four jobs. They store your prompt set and re-run it on a cadence. They parse each answer for brand mentions and sentiment. They extract the cited sources so you can see who's being quoted instead of you. And most now report share of voice against named competitors. The differences are engine coverage, how many prompts you get, and whether anything in the product tells you what to do next. Some are plain answer engine optimization dashboards with no recommendation layer at all.

You'll see four labels for the same shelf. "AI visibility tools" and "AI search monitoring tools" are the generic ones. "AEO tools" usually means the same product sold to SEO teams, and "GEO tools" is what the newer entrants call themselves. I've ignored the labels and sorted by what each product measures.

The money behind this is real. Gartner predicted in February 2024 that traditional search engine volume would drop 25% by 2026 as people move queries to chatbots. And Ahrefs found that 43.8% of all AI chatbot citations point at "best X" listicles, across 26,283 URLs and 750 queries, which tells you something about where models go looking when someone asks them to recommend a vendor.

How I Evaluated These AI Visibility Tools in 2026

I started from the tools named in the roundups currently ranking, the G2 AI visibility category, and the vendor lists inside three competitor comparisons. That produced 31 candidates. Seventeen got cut: content optimizers wearing a tracking badge, two that had folded since their last blog post, and a handful that were rank trackers with one AI column added.

The 14 that survived were scored on six things, weighted in this order.

Engine coverage came first, because a tool that only queries ChatGPT is measuring a third of the problem. I checked which engines each product queries on its cheapest paid plan, not on Enterprise, and whether Gemini and Google AI Mode cost extra. Several charge separately for exactly the engines you'd want.

Pricing transparency came second, and it separated the field more than any feature did. Five of the 14 publish a full price list. Profound and Brandlight publish none. Peec AI shows plan names with no numbers. When a vendor hides pricing in a category this young, you're the one funding their price discovery.

Then prompt volume, which is the real meter on most of these. A $29 plan tracking 15 prompts costs about $2 per prompt per month, and a $295 plan tracking 3,600 works out to eight cents. Then the citation and source reporting, because knowing a model recommended a competitor is less useful than knowing which page it read. Then seats and client sub-accounts for agency use.

Crawlability sat underneath all of it. The OppAlerts study of roughly 167,000 domains found Common Crawl presence correlates at +0.165 with AI search visibility, ranking sixth among all signals, which is a reminder that these tools measure an outcome your technical setup produces. A dashboard won't fix a site the models can't read.

Profound is first because it queries nine engines including Claude and DeepSeek, its prompt-demand data is the only dataset here that estimates how often people actually ask a given question, and it's the tool the largest brands in this category have standardized on after raising $155 million. It's also the one I can tell you least about on price, which is a genuine mark against it. Peec AI and Rankscale are better value if you're spending your own money.

AI Visibility Tools Compared (2026)

Prices below are the cheapest paid plan, checked on each vendor's own pricing page on October 9, 2026. "Sales-gated" means the vendor publishes no number. Annual billing knocks 15% off at most of them.

The engine list is where the cheap plans get expensive. This is what each tool queries on its entry tier, before add-ons.

Three things fall out of those two tables. Rankscale gives you 17 engines for $20 while Otterly charges $29 for four and then bills $9 to $149 extra for Gemini, which makes the headline price close to meaningless. The suite add-ons from Ahrefs and Semrush look cheap until you remember they sit on top of a base subscription you also pay for. And only Scrunch and Rankscale include Claude on an entry plan, which matters if your buyers use it.

The Best AI Visibility Tools in 2026

Profound: Best for Enterprise AI Search Intelligence

www.tryprofound.com

Profound is an AI search intelligence platform that tracks brand mentions across nine engines and pairs them with prompt-demand estimates, so you can see which questions people ask before you decide which ones to optimize for. It's built for enterprise marketing teams with a budget and a procurement process.

Pricing is the weak point. The pricing page lists a free seven-day trial covering 50 prompts across ChatGPT, Gemini and Google AI Overviews, then Enterprise on request. The $99 a month figure that circulates in other comparisons doesn't appear anywhere on their site, so treat it as folklore until a sales rep confirms it for you.

What you get for the money is the broadest engine list here, including Claude, DeepSeek and Exa, plus Conversation Explorer for reading the actual prompts driving mentions. The catch beyond price: it's aimed at teams tracking thousands of prompts, and the product's complexity shows if you're a two-person marketing function.

Funding: $155 million raised at a reported $1 billion valuation. G2 4.6. Reported Fortune 500 customer base.

Peec AI: Best for Agencies Running Multiple Brands

peec.ai

Peec AI is an AI visibility analytics platform built around multi-brand reporting, with project switching and competitor share-of-voice views that agencies use to run client reviews. It suits teams tracking several brands who want one login and clean exports.

Starter runs $95 a month for 50 prompts across three engines of your choosing from a list of six, with a free trial first. The plan tiers are named on the pricing page (Starter, Pro, Advanced, Enterprise) but the numbers aren't published alongside them, which is an odd choice for a product this far along.

Reviewers rate it the highest in the category on G2, and the recommendation layer is better than most: it tells you which sources drove a competitor's mention rather than just logging that it happened. Choosing three engines of six is the real constraint. Drop Gemini to keep Perplexity and you've got a blind spot in the engine with the most users.

Funding: $29 million raised, with reported ARR above $4 million inside ten months. G2 4.9, the highest rating of the 14.

Otterly.AI: Best for the Cheapest Real Entry Point

otterly.ai

Otterly.AI is an AI search monitoring tool that tracks brand mentions and link citations across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Copilot and Google AI Overviews from $29 a month. It fits solo founders and consultants who want a real dashboard without a four-figure commitment.

Lite is $29 a month for 15 prompts, Standard is $189 for 100, and Premium is $489 for 400. Annual billing drops Lite to roughly $25. Gemini and Google AI Mode aren't in the base package at any tier, and adding them costs between $9 and $149 a month depending on the plan, so price it with the add-ons before you compare it to anything else.

Fifteen prompts goes faster than you'd think. One product category with three competitor comparisons and a few buying-intent questions and you're done. But the interface is the friendliest here, setup takes about ten minutes, and the link-citation view shows which of your pages models quote.

G2 4.8. Four engines on the base plan, with Gemini and Google AI Mode priced as add-ons.

Scrunch: Best for AI Crawler and Agent Traffic

scrunch.com

Scrunch is an AI visibility platform that monitors how AI crawlers and agents read your site, alongside standard mention tracking across seven engines. It's the right pick when you suspect models are misreading your pages rather than ignoring them.

Starter is $250 a month billed yearly, and it includes ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, Google AI Mode, Google AI Overviews and Meta AI with no engine add-ons. That's the most complete engine list at a published price in this comparison.

The agent-traffic reporting is what you're paying for, and nothing else here does it properly. It shows which bots hit which URLs and what they retrieved, which turns a vague "we're not showing up" into a specific rendering or robots problem. Against that, $250 is a lot for a small team, and the mention analytics are thinner than Peec's.

G2 4.6. Seven engines on the entry plan, including Claude and Meta AI.

Ahrefs Brand Radar: Best for Teams Already Paying for Ahrefs

ahrefs.com/brand-radar

Ahrefs Brand Radar is an AI citation and brand mention tracker sold as an add-on to any Ahrefs plan, covering Google AI Overviews, AI Mode, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Copilot. It makes sense for SEO teams who already live in Ahrefs and want AI data in the same tab.

The add-on is $199 a month on top of your existing Ahrefs subscription, free or paid. Six engines are included with no per-engine charges, and the data sits next to your backlink and keyword reports, which is the actual argument for it.

Sharing a login with the rest of your SEO stack removes a reporting step, and the citation data joins up with the referring-domain data in a way a standalone tool can't match. But $199 on top of a base plan makes it one of the pricier options once you add it up, and it's a monitoring product with no recommendation layer.

G2 4.5 for Ahrefs. Six engines included, no per-engine add-ons.

Semrush AI Visibility Toolkit: Best for Existing Semrush Users

www.semrush.com

The Semrush AI Visibility Toolkit tracks brand presence across ChatGPT, Google AI, Gemini and Perplexity as an add-on for Semrush subscribers, priced per domain. It's for marketing teams standardized on Semrush who don't want a fourteenth vendor in procurement.

Pricing starts at $99 a month per domain per sub-user, which is the detail to watch. Agencies running ten clients are looking at ten line items, not one, and that arithmetic turns a cheap-looking add-on into the most expensive option in this roundup at any scale.

For a single brand it's good value and the reporting is familiar if your team already builds Semrush decks. Four engines is fewer than Rankscale gives you for a fifth of the price, though, and Claude isn't among them.

G2 4.5 for Semrush. Priced per domain per sub-user, which compounds for agencies.

AthenaHQ: Best Free Tier in the Category

athenahq.ai

AthenaHQ is a generative engine optimization platform with the most usable free plan here: 300 credits across five engines with unlimited team members, no card required. It suits teams who want to find out whether this category is worth paying for before they pay for it.

The free Essential tier covers five engines and 300 credits. Starter is $295 a month with 3,600 credits and 11 models, which works out to about eight cents per tracked prompt and is the best per-prompt rate above the free tier. Enterprise adds SSO, audit logs and multi-region support on request.

Eleven models on Starter is the broadest coverage in that price bracket, and the free tier does enough to run a real test on. The jump from free to $295 is steep with nothing between, so a team that outgrows 300 credits has a decision rather than an upgrade. Funding is modest at around $2.2 million, which is worth knowing in a category this prone to shutdowns.

Funding: roughly $2.2 million raised. Free tier covers 5 engines and 300 credits with unlimited seats.

Rankscale: Best for Engine Coverage on a Small Budget

rankscale.ai

Rankscale is an AI visibility tracker that queries 17 or more engines on every plan, including the $20 a month entry tier, with credits that roll over instead of expiring. It's the value pick for anyone paying out of their own pocket.

Essentials is $20 a month, Pro is $99 with 1,200 credits, Growth is $385 with 5,500, and Enterprise is $780 with 12,000. Annual billing takes 15% off. Every engine is available on every tier, which is the opposite of how most of this category prices.

Getting Claude, Gemini, Perplexity and a dozen others for $20 undercuts tools charging five times as much for four engines. Against that, it was founded in 2024 and has raised under a million dollars, the reporting is plainer than Peec's, and credits get consumed faster than you'd expect once you track competitors alongside your own brand.

Founded 2024. Roughly $915,000 raised. 17+ engines on every tier, with credits that roll over.

Evertune: Best for Statistically Significant Sampling

www.evertune.ai

Evertune runs over a million prompts per brand per month to produce AI visibility data with enough volume to be statistically meaningful rather than anecdotal. It's built for large brands who need numbers that survive a CFO's questions.

It starts at $3,000 a month, the most expensive entry price in this comparison by a factor of ten. For that you get roughly 1.25 million prompts per brand per month, which is the entire argument for the product and the reason the price looks the way it does.

Everything else here samples. Running 50 prompts against an engine whose answers shift daily gives you a reading with error bars wide enough to drive through, and Evertune's volume is the only honest answer to that problem in this list. But $3,000 a month puts it out of reach for most teams, and you're buying sampling rigor rather than workflow.

Funding: $19 million Series A led by Felicis. Roughly 1.25 million prompts per brand per month.

Brandlight: Best for Enterprise Brand Intelligence

www.brandlight.ai

Brandlight is an AI brand intelligence platform focused on narrative accuracy and citation drivers, aimed at enterprise brand teams who care what models say about them as much as whether they're named. Pricing is entirely sales-gated.

No pricing, engine list or prompt allowance appears publicly, which is why it sits here rather than higher. It has raised $30 million, so the company isn't going anywhere, but I can't tell you what it costs or what it queries without going through a sales process.

The differentiator, as far as the public material goes, is analyzing how a model characterizes you rather than counting mentions, which is a real gap in most of these products. I'd treat it as a shortlist candidate for a brand team with budget and a legal interest in AI-generated claims, and I'd ask for the engine list in writing.

Funding: $30 million raised. No public pricing, engine list or prompt allowance.

ZipTie: Best for Configurable Reporting

ziptie.dev

ZipTie is an AI visibility tool with per-engine pricing, so you build a plan from the engines and prompt volumes you want instead of taking a preset bundle. It fits teams who need two engines tracked deeply rather than six tracked shallowly.

The Starter preset lands at $35.63 a month, and the odd number is a clue to how it works: you're assembling a plan rather than picking a tier. Each engine you add changes the bill, which makes it one of the few tools here where the cheapest configuration is genuinely cheap.

Building your own bundle means no paying for engines your buyers don't use. It also means the comparison with everything else in this table is approximate, since no two ZipTie plans cost the same. The reporting depth is the draw, and it's the tool to look at if you've been frustrated by dashboards you can't reshape.

Per-engine pricing from $35.63 a month. Plans are configured rather than tiered.

Trakkr: Best for Small Teams That Want One Number

trakkr.ai

Trakkr is an AI prompt tracking tool for small businesses, covering four engines at $79 a month with a 14-day free trial. It's for a founder or a one-person marketing team who wants a weekly score and no configuration.

Flat $79 a month, four engines, 14-day trial, no card to start. The prompt allowance isn't published, which is the main thing I'd want clarified before buying, since prompt volume is what actually determines whether $79 is cheap or expensive here.

Simplicity is the pitch and it delivers on it. Setup is minutes and the reporting is a single trend line most people can read without training. Four engines and an undisclosed prompt cap make it hard to recommend over Rankscale at a quarter of the price unless the interface is worth the premium to you.

$79 a month flat, four engines, 14-day free trial. Prompt allowance not published.

Similarweb AI Search Intelligence: Best for Traffic Data Alongside AI Mentions

www.similarweb.com

Similarweb AI Search Intelligence adds AI mention tracking across four engines to Similarweb's traffic and market data, so you can read AI visibility next to actual referral numbers. It suits teams who already buy Similarweb for competitive research.

Entry pricing starts around $99 a month, though Similarweb's packaging varies by contract and the AI module is often quoted as part of a larger deal rather than a line item. Expect a sales conversation rather than a checkout page.

Seeing whether AI mentions move real traffic is the one question most of these tools can't answer, and pairing mention data with Similarweb's referral estimates gets closer than anything else here. Four engines is modest, the data is modelled rather than measured, and the price depends on what else you're buying.

G2 4.4. Four engines, usually quoted as part of a wider Similarweb contract.

Nightwatch: Best for Rank Tracking and AI Monitoring Together

nightwatch.io

Nightwatch is a rank tracker that added AI search monitoring across four engines, letting one tool cover classic keyword positions and AI mentions. It's for SEO teams who'd rather not run a second subscription for the AI half.

Plans start at €112.38 a month, and the AI monitoring is bundled into the wider rank-tracking product rather than priced separately. For teams already shopping for a rank tracker, that bundling is most of the value.

Consolidation is the appeal and the limitation. You get both datasets in one place with one bill, and the rank tracking is strong with granular location targeting. But the AI side is less developed than a dedicated tool's, four engines is the floor for this category now, and you're buying a rank tracker that also does AI rather than the reverse.

G2 4.7. Four AI engines, bundled into the rank-tracking product.

Best AI Visibility Tools for B2B SaaS

B2B SaaS has a specific version of this problem. Your buyers ask models comparison questions ("best X for Y", "X vs Y", "alternatives to X") far more than they ask informational ones, and those prompts resolve to listicles and review sites rather than your own pages. So the tool you want is the one that reports cited sources well, not the one with the prettiest mention chart.

On that basis I'd shortlist three. Peec AI, because its source attribution tells you which comparison post drove a competitor's mention, which is the actionable version of this data. Rankscale, because 17 engines for $20 lets you track a long prompt list cheaply while you work out what matters. And Scrunch, if your docs or product pages are large and you suspect crawlers are the bottleneck.

Skip Evertune and Brandlight unless you're past Series C. Skip the Semrush add-on if you're an agency, because per-domain pricing punishes you for having clients. And if the answer turns out to be that you need more third-party coverage rather than better dashboards, that's a content and link problem, which is what a SaaS SEO agency would handle rather than a tracking tool.

How to Choose an AI Visibility Tool

Start with prompt volume, not price. Divide the monthly cost by the prompts included and compare that number instead of the headline. Otterly's $29 for 15 prompts is about $1.93 each. AthenaHQ's $295 for 3,600 credits is roughly eight cents. Those two products look two orders of magnitude apart on price and they're closer than that on value.

Then check which engines are in the base plan. Gemini as a $149 add-on changes the maths on a $29 tool completely, and four of the 14 here price engines separately. Write down the engines your buyers actually use before you shop, because paying for Meta AI coverage you'll never read is the most common waste in this category.

Think about what the tool tells you to do next. Most of them are thermometers. They report that your mention rate fell 4% and leave the diagnosis to you. The ones with source attribution (Peec, Profound, Scrunch) at least point at which pages models read, and since the OppAlerts data puts link and authority signals in seven of the top ten correlates of AI visibility, the fix usually turns out to be earning coverage on the sources models already trust. My roundup of link building services covers who does that work.

And work out who needs a login. Agencies want client sub-accounts and per-brand reporting, which Peec does best and the Semrush add-on handles worst. A solo consultant can ignore all of that and buy on prompt volume alone.

What AI Visibility Tracking Can't Tell You

Every tool here samples a moving target, and the vendors are quieter about that than they should be. Three limits are worth knowing before you build a report on top of one.

Prompt volume is a guess. Nobody has ChatGPT query data the way everyone has Google keyword data, so when a tool shows you a prompt's "demand", it's modelled from search volume and inference. Profound's dataset is the most serious attempt at it and it's still an estimate. Pick prompts because you know your buyers ask them, not because a tool scored them highly.

Answers are personalized and volatile. The same prompt run twice an hour apart can return different brands, and run from a different account it can return different brands again. A 50-prompt sample is a weather report, not a measurement. This is the honest case for Evertune's million prompts, and the honest reason a cheap tool's week-over-week chart shouldn't drive decisions.

And the fixes being sold around these dashboards are mostly unproven. Paying for an llms.txt file as a core deliverable is the clearest example: Google's John Mueller said in June 2025 that no AI system currently uses llms.txt, and rewrites that add no new facts or sources give models nothing fresh to cite. A tool that shows your mention rate dropping won't tell you that the remedy you bought doesn't work.

None of which argues against tracking. AI citation tracking should be a standard deliverable in every SEO retainer by now, and an agency that can't tell you how many times ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini cited you last month isn't paying attention. It's the interpretation that needs a human. That's the part SAASY LINKS handles as a retainer rather than a subscription.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are the best AI visibility tools in 2026?

Profound leads for enterprise teams with nine engines and prompt-demand data, Peec AI is strongest for agencies at $95 a month, and Rankscale offers the best value at $20 a month for 17-plus engines. Otterly.AI is the cheapest standalone entry at $29 a month, and AthenaHQ has the only free tier worth running.

How much do AI visibility tools cost in 2026?

Published entry prices run from $20 a month (Rankscale) to $3,000 a month (Evertune), with most landing between $79 and $295. Profound and Brandlight publish no pricing at all. Compare cost per tracked prompt rather than headline price, since a $29 plan with 15 prompts costs more per prompt than a $295 plan with 3,600.

Is there a free AI visibility tool?

AthenaHQ has the strongest free plan with 300 credits across five engines and unlimited team members, no card required. Profound offers a free seven-day trial covering 50 prompts, and Trakkr runs a 14-day trial. Ahrefs Brand Radar needs a paid $199 a month add-on even on a free Ahrefs account.

What is the difference between AEO tools and GEO tools?

Nothing meaningful at the product level. "AEO tools" and "GEO tools" describe the same category as "AI visibility tools", and the label usually reflects which audience the vendor sells to rather than what the software measures. Compare engine coverage and prompt volume instead of the naming.

Which AI engines should an AI visibility tool track in 2026?

ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Google AI Mode, Perplexity and Gemini cover the bulk of real usage, and Claude matters for technical and developer audiences. Only Scrunch, Rankscale and AthenaHQ include Claude on an entry plan. Check whether Gemini costs extra, because Otterly and ZipTie both price engines separately.

Can Ahrefs or Semrush replace a dedicated AI visibility tool?

For a single brand, yes. Ahrefs Brand Radar covers six engines for a $199 a month add-on and Semrush's toolkit covers four from $99 per domain, both sitting beside your existing SEO data. Agencies should be careful with Semrush, since per-domain pricing multiplies across clients.

How many prompts do I need to track?

Plan on 50 to 100 prompts for a single product with a handful of competitors, which rules out most $29 plans. Track your category's comparison queries first, since those convert and are the ones models answer with listicles. Add informational prompts later once you know which categories you appear in.