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AI search interfaces and visibility dashboards

9 Best AI Visibility Tools to Track Brand Mentions in AI Search (2026)

Your page holds position one for a query you spent a year earning. Someone asks ChatGPT the same question and your brand never comes up. Both of those can be true at the same time, and your rank tracker will not tell you about the second one.

Updated: July 24, 2026 | Search Science | Reviewed by James Profits

Top Pick

The best AI visibility tool overall is Profound, which tracks up to nine answer engines and ties AI crawler activity to your analytics. For most teams Peec AI is better value at $95 a month with unlimited seats, and Otterly.ai is the cheapest useful entry at $29.

TL;DR
  • Top pick: Profound, for engine coverage and crawler attribution at its Enterprise tier
  • Best value: Peec AI at $95 a month, six engines available, unlimited seats on every plan
  • Best budget start: Otterly.ai at $29 a month, or Rankscale at 20 euros if you need Claude
  • Best for agencies: Peec AI's agency plans or Otterly's agency partner program, both built for multiple client workspaces
  • Price range across the field: 20 euros a month at the low end to more than $800 a month for full engine coverage through Ahrefs Brand Radar
  • The criterion that decides it: which engines a tool covers and which ones cost extra. Three of these nine don't cover Claude at any price.

On This Page

What AI Visibility Tools Actually Do

Every tool in this category does a version of the same thing. It runs a set of prompts your buyers might realistically type, sends them to the major AI engines, reads the answers, and reports on what it found. Four measurements come out the other side:

  • Mentions. How often an engine names your brand at all
  • Citations. Which specific URLs the engine pulled from
  • Sentiment. Whether the description of you is favorable, neutral, or unflattering
  • Share of voice. How much of the conversation you own against named competitors

The distinction that trips up most first-time buyers is the one between mentions and citations. Knowing ChatGPT mentioned you is a vanity number. Knowing it cited your pricing page and not your comparison guide is something you can act on Monday morning. Tools that only count mentions give you a dashboard. Tools that trace citations give you a work queue. That difference drives more of our ranking than any other single factor.

Here is the same distinction against the tools you already use:

Traditional SEO tools AI visibility tools
Track position on a results pageTrack mentions inside an answer
Measure keyword rankingsMeasure share of voice against competitors
Report on organic trafficReport on citations and referenced URLs
Watch competitor rankingsWatch which brands answer engines name

A few terms you'll meet while shopping. GEO (generative engine optimization), AEO (answer engine optimization), and LLMO all describe the same practice this category serves. An answer engine is any system that responds with a synthesized answer rather than a list of links. A prompt set is the list of questions a tool runs on your behalf, and it matters more than most buyers expect. Query fan-out is the set of background searches a model runs while composing one answer. AI crawlers like GPTBot, ClaudeBot, and PerplexityBot are the bots that read your pages on behalf of those engines. And Google AI Overviews and Google AI Mode are two different surfaces, so a tool covering one does not necessarily cover the other.

Selection Criteria

We scored every tool against six weighted criteria. These are the same columns you'll find in the comparison table below.

  • Engine coverage (25 percent). How many of ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Google AI Mode, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude, and Copilot the tool tracks, and whether any of them cost extra
  • Citation and source tracking (20 percent). Whether the tool shows the URLs behind an answer or stops at the mention
  • Share of voice (20 percent). Competitive benchmarking against a named competitor set
  • Pricing transparency and entry cost (15 percent). Whether prices are published at all, and what the cheapest usable plan costs
  • Prompt depth and refresh cadence (10 percent). How many prompts you can track and how often they rerun
  • Setup and reporting (10 percent). Time to first data, exports, and white-label options for agencies

How We Chose

We shortlisted twelve tools and kept nine. Similarweb and Evertune were cut for fit rather than quality, since both aim at brand and market intelligence buyers more than at SEO teams. SE Ranking was cut because Ahrefs Brand Radar and the Semrush AI Toolkit already cover the "it's bundled into the suite I pay for" case, and three of those would have crowded out a specialist.

Each tool was scored against the six weighted criteria above. Engine coverage and citation tracking carry the most weight because they determine whether the data produces work or only produces charts. "Best for" means fit to a buyer profile, not a scoreboard. The tool at number seven may be the right purchase for you, and the profiles say so where that applies.

Disclosure. Search Science does not sell an AI visibility platform. We receive no affiliate compensation or referral fees from any tool on this list. We do sell AI Search Optimization services, which is why we track this category closely. Most roundups ranking for this search term are published by companies selling one of the tools they rank, and they place their own product first [2][3].

What we did not do: run a controlled head-to-head benchmark of all nine against one identical prompt set. Anyone claiming that in a blog post is overstating it. What we did was verify published capabilities, engine coverage, and pricing posture against each vendor's own documentation, then cross-check against independent coverage where it exists. We confirmed prices directly on vendor pricing pages for six of the nine.

Reviewed July 2026. Pricing and engine coverage change often in this category, so we refresh this list every six months and verify prices against vendor pages on each review date.

Quick Comparison

Prices marked with an asterisk come from independent reporting and were not confirmed on the vendor's own pricing page at time of review. Rankscale prices in euros. All figures verified July 2026 and subject to change.

#ToolBest forEngines trackedEntry pricePricing model
1ProfoundEnterprise teams needing every major engine1 to 9 by tierPublished. Starter $99/month and Growth $399/month billed yearly, Enterprise customFlat tiers, plus credits for Agents
2Peec AIAgencies and multi-client work3 of 6, all at EnterprisePublished. Brands $95 to $495/month, agencies $245 to $795/month, Enterprise customFlat tiers, plus paid engine add-ons
3Scrunch AITechnical teams tracking AI crawlersNot publishedPublished. Core $250/month, Agency Core $500/month, Enterprise custom on both tracksFlat tiers
4AthenaHQSingle-market teams wanting broad coverage7 or more, including ClaudeCredit-based. Self-Serve reported at $295/month, Enterprise custom. NOT CONFIRMED ON VENDOR PAGECredit-based
5Otterly.aiSmall teams making a first purchase4, plus 2 as add-onsPublished. Lite $29/month, Standard $189/month, Premium $489/month, Enterprise custom, about 15 percent off annualFlat tiers, plus paid engine add-ons
6ZipTieContent teams wanting page-level fixes3, no Gemini or ClaudeFrom $69/month, Enterprise custom. ENTRY PRICE NOT CONFIRMED ON VENDOR PAGEFlat tiers
7Ahrefs Brand RadarTeams already paying for Ahrefs6, no ClaudeRequires an Ahrefs base plan from $129/month, then $199/month per AI index or $699/month for all. NOT CONFIRMED ON VENDOR PAGEAdd-on stack
8Semrush AI Visibility ToolkitSemrush teams tracking one domain4, no ClaudePublished. $99/month per domain billed annually, additional seats from $45/monthAdd-on, priced per domain
9RankscaleBudget teams, and anyone needing ClaudeAbout 20, including ClaudePublished. Essential EUR 20, Pro EUR 99, Growth EUR 385, Enterprise EUR 780 per monthCredit-based

Three things the table can't hold. Seats vary more than price does: Profound's entry tier includes one, Semrush charges from $45 for each additional, and Peec, Otterly, and Rankscale include unlimited team members on every plan. If several people need access, that difference outweighs the sticker price. Pricing models aren't comparable: a flat tier, a credit pool, and an add-on stack behave differently as you scale, and the three credit-based tools here each define a credit differently. None of the nine has a free-forever tier, though several offer trials.

The Nine Tools, Ranked

1. Profound

In short:

The deepest coverage in the category, if your budget reaches the Enterprise tier. The $99 plan tracks one engine.

Best for: Enterprise brands and agencies that need visibility across every major answer engine, not two or three

Standout: Agent Analytics, which ties AI crawler activity to your own CDN and analytics stack through integrations with Cloudflare, Akamai, AWS, Fastly, Vercel, Netlify, and Google Analytics [4]

Key features: Answer Engine Insights, Prompt Volumes, ChatGPT Shopping visibility, credit-based content Agents, all-time history, separate agency plans with per-client workspaces [4]

Pricing: Starter $99/month and Growth $399/month, both billed yearly, with custom Enterprise pricing [4]

Pros: Widest engine list of anything here, published self-serve entry pricing, instant setup, unlimited domains on crawler tracking, CSV and JSON exports from the Growth tier up

Cons: The tier gating is steep. Starter tracks ChatGPT alone with 50 prompts, a single seat, and no exports. Growth adds Perplexity and Google AI Overviews for three engines total. Everything else, meaning Gemini, Claude, Copilot, Grok, Google AI Mode, and DeepSeek, requires an Enterprise conversation [4]. Credit-based Agent pricing also makes your monthly total harder to forecast.

Profound takes the top slot on capability, and we want to be precise about what that means. At Enterprise it tracks up to nine answer engines and connects crawler behavior to real traffic, which nothing else on this list matches [4]. But the published $99 price is doing marketing work. If you sign up at that tier expecting the platform Profound is known for, you'll get ChatGPT tracking and little else. Read the plan comparison before you budget. For a mid-market team that needs Gemini and Claude coverage without a sales cycle, slots 2 and 5 on this list are the more realistic starting points.

2. Peec AI

In short:

The best value for agencies and multi-engine tracking, as long as three engines covers what you need.

Best for: Agencies managing several clients, and in-house teams that want more than one engine without paying per seat

Standout: Source and citation analysis that sorts every cited URL into editorial, corporate, community, reference, or your own site, then runs a gap analysis showing where competitors get cited and you don't [5]

Key features: Visibility, Share of Voice, Sentiment, and Position tracked per engine, Query Fanouts showing the background searches a model runs, robots.txt crawlability checks against more than 40 AI bots, server-log crawl insights, dedicated agency plans with per-client projects [5]

Pricing: Brands from $95/month (Starter) to $495/month (Advanced), Enterprise custom. Agencies from $245/month to $795/month. Annual billing saves about 15 percent [5]

Pros: Unlimited users on every brand tier, six mainstream engines available, published pricing on both the brand and agency tracks, citation gap analysis that produces a to-do list, and a crawlability checker anyone can run without signing up

Cons: Every plan below Enterprise caps you at three engines chosen from six, and a fourth costs $35 to $165 per month depending on your tier [5]. Claude, Grok, DeepSeek, and Mistral are Enterprise-only. There's no free tier, and Peec's own comparison page states it is pursuing SOC 2 certification rather than holding it [5].

The clearest way to see the value here is a seat-by-seat comparison with slot 1. Peec's $95 Starter plan gives you three engines of your choice and unlimited team members. Profound's $99 Starter gives you ChatGPT and a single seat [4][5]. That gap matters most for agencies, where seat fees and client separation decide whether a tool is usable at all. Peec also scrapes the assistant interfaces instead of calling model APIs, so what it records is closer to what a real user would see [5]. The three-engine cap is the thing to price out before you commit. Work out which engines you need first, then add the add-on cost to the sticker price.

3. Scrunch AI

In short:

The pick for technical teams who want to see what AI crawlers do on the site, not only what AI answers say about the brand.

Best for: Technical SEO leads and agencies instrumenting AI search as a real channel, with server logs and referral traffic in the picture

Standout: The Agent Experience Platform and agent traffic analysis, which treat AI crawlers as an audience to serve rather than a line item in a log file [6]

Key features: Prompt monitoring and citations, site maps showing how AI consumes your pages, agent traffic analysis, insights, product-level shopping visibility, AI search trends [6]

Pricing: Core $250/month for brands, Agency Core $500/month, custom Enterprise pricing on both tracks [6]

Pros: The crawler and agent-traffic layer is the most developed on this list, the agency track has published pricing rather than a quote form, and the module set is built for implementation instead of reporting alone

Cons: Core costs roughly two and a half times Peec's Starter plan. Scrunch publishes plan prices but does not publish which AI engines each tier covers, so you'll confirm that on a sales call before you can compare it against anything else here. Broader model coverage sits behind an Enterprise contract.

Most tools on this list watch one side of a citation, the answer. Scrunch watches both, recording where your brand shows up and which bots read the pages that got cited. For a team that already thinks in crawl budgets and log files, that's the difference between knowing you have a problem and knowing which page caused it. The gap in its public documentation is the frustrating part. Every other tool in the top five tells you what engines you get for your money before you talk to anyone.

4. AthenaHQ

In short:

The widest engine coverage you can buy without a sales call, priced on credits that make the sticker price a floor.

Best for: Single-market teams that want broad engine coverage plus a workflow that assigns work rather than displaying charts

Standout: The Action Center, which converts citation and visibility gaps into structured, trackable tasks [7]

Key features: Prompt tracking across ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Google AI Mode, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude, and Copilot, share of voice and mention rate, citation analysis, competitor benchmarking, unlimited topics, revenue attribution through GA4 and Shopify [7][8]

Pricing: Credit-based. Self-Serve reported at $295/month, Enterprise custom [7][8]

Pros: Broadest self-serve engine list here, unlimited seats and topics, an action layer with real structure behind it, and revenue attribution that connects AI citations to sessions and conversions, which most tools on this list don't attempt

Cons: Credits are the catch. One AI response consumes one credit, so tracking a prompt set across eight engines burns credits eight times as fast as tracking it on one. The Self-Serve plan covers a single country. There's no free tier. Independent reviewers also disagree about which features the entry plan includes, which tells you something about the state of the documentation.

Here's the arithmetic that matters. If you track 100 prompts across eight engines, one full run costs 800 credits. Run that twice a month and you've spent most of a Self-Serve allowance before you've asked the platform a single ad-hoc question [7]. AthenaHQ is a strong product with an honest ceiling problem: the more of its engine coverage you actually use, the faster you leave the plan you signed up for. Budget by expected credit burn, not by the monthly price, and get the number in writing before you commit.

5. Otterly.ai

In short:

The cheapest honest entry into AI visibility tracking, and the only tool here that publishes its prices, its add-ons, and its limits on one page.

Best for: Solo marketers and small teams testing whether AI search matters for their category before committing real budget

Standout: Unlimited team members on every tier, including the $29 plan. Most tools charge per seat or cap you at one [9]

Key features: Four core engines, tracking across more than 50 countries, GEO URL audits, Looker Studio reporting, a live MCP server and public API from Standard up, and an agency partner program with client workspaces and pitch environments [9]

Pricing: Lite $29/month for 15 prompts, Standard $189/month for 100, Premium $489/month for 400, Enterprise custom, about 15 percent off annual billing [9]

Pros: Lowest real entry price on this list, unlimited seats, agency workspaces without an enterprise contract, a prompt calculator that helps you buy less rather than more, and add-on costs disclosed on the pricing page instead of discovered at checkout

Cons: Gemini and Google AI Mode are paid add-ons on every plan, so the six-engine positioning is four included and two purchased [9]. Prompts are the real ceiling, and 15 on Lite covers roughly one brand in one market. Lite has no API or MCP access. Claude isn't available at any tier.

The clearest way to place Otterly is against our top pick. Lite costs $29 and covers four engines with unlimited seats. Profound's Starter costs $99 and covers ChatGPT with one seat [4][9]. Both figures come from the vendors' own pricing pages. That doesn't make Otterly the better platform, since Profound's ceiling is far higher, but it does mean the cheapest useful data in this category costs about a third of what the category leader charges for less. Price the add-ons you need before comparing anything, because $189 plus Gemini is a different number than $189.

6. ZipTie

In short:

Three engines by choice, not by limitation, paired with the most practical optimization layer on this list.

Best for: Content and SEO teams that want visibility data attached to specific page-level fixes

Standout: A content optimization module that turns a citation gap into a brief telling you what to change on which page [10]

Key features: Real-browser monitoring across Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT, and Perplexity, citation share and brand mention tracking, competitive benchmarking, query generation built from your Search Console data, multi-region tracking across the US, UK, Canada, Australia, India, and Brazil [10]

Pricing: From $69/month, Enterprise custom

Pros: Second-lowest entry price here, focused coverage of the three surfaces carrying most AI search volume, capture through a real browser rather than model APIs, and an optimization layer built for people who have to make the fix themselves

Cons: Three engines is the narrowest coverage in this lineup, with no Gemini, Claude, Copilot, or Google AI Mode at any price. Pricing above the entry tier isn't documented consistently in public sources. Query generation leans on Search Console history, so a newer site with thin organic data gets less from it.

The distinction worth understanding is between a tool that tracks three engines because that's all it has built and a tool that tracks three because those are the three that matter to its users. ZipTie says plainly which surfaces it covers and that it will add engines as they gain traction [10]. It also captures results through a browser rather than an API, on the argument that API responses don't match what a person actually sees. Peec makes the same case at slot 2, and it's a real methodological split in this category worth asking any vendor about. If your buyers research in ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google, ZipTie covers your ground at a fraction of what the broader platforms cost.

7. Ahrefs Brand Radar

In short:

The only tool here that can tell you whether AI citation tracks with link authority, sold at a price that undercuts the reason to bundle.

Best for: Teams already paying for Ahrefs who want AI mentions cross-referenced against backlink and branded-search data

Standout: That cross-reference. No dedicated AI visibility platform on this list can show you whether the domains cited in AI answers are the same domains carrying authority in your niche [12]

Key features: Share of voice over time, most-cited domains by topic, brand and topic search across a large prompt database, correlation with Ahrefs core datasets, a beta layer for YouTube, TikTok, and Reddit sold separately [11][12]

Pricing: Requires an active Ahrefs base plan starting at $129/month, then $199/month per AI index or $699/month for all indexes [11][12]

Pros: No new vendor or login, historical trend data that most standalone tools can't match, and the deepest surrounding dataset in this category by a wide margin

Cons: Add the base plan to the all-index add-on and you're past $800 a month before anything else. Claude, Grok, and DeepSeek aren't covered at any price. Public sources also disagree about whether custom prompt checks come with the bundle or cost extra, which is a poor look on a product at this price [11]

Bundled tools are supposed to be the cheap option. Here the arithmetic runs the other way. Full engine coverage through Brand Radar costs more than most dedicated platforms on this list charge for the same engines, and roughly twenty times Otterly's entry tier [9][11]. That's the consolidation tax, and it's worth paying only if the cross-reference with Ahrefs' own data is the thing you actually need. One tip if you already subscribe: AI Overview detection sits inside Rank Tracker on the base plans, so you can check whether your tracked keywords trigger an AI Overview without buying Brand Radar at all [12].

8. Semrush AI Visibility Toolkit

In short:

The easiest add for a team already living in Semrush, priced per domain in a way that punishes agencies.

Best for: In-house teams already standardized on Semrush who track a single domain

Standout: The AI readiness site audit, which flags technical problems like crawler blockers keeping AI engines from reading your pages. Most dedicated trackers don't attempt this [13]

Key features: AI Visibility Score, prompt research, competitor research, brand performance and sentiment, AI readiness site audit, 25 custom prompts with daily rankings, up to 300 reports per day [13]

Pricing: $99/month per domain billed annually, additional seats from $45/month [13]

Pros: No new vendor to onboard, AI data sitting beside the keyword and position reports your team already reads, an audit layer that comes from Semrush's technical SEO heritage, and the cheapest entry among the bundled options here

Cons: Pricing is per domain, and additional domains cost the same as the first. Twenty-five prompts is a tight starting allowance. There's no free trial of the toolkit, so you buy before you test. Claude and Copilot aren't in the engine list, which covers ChatGPT, Google AI, Gemini, and Perplexity [13].

Run the agency arithmetic before you get attached. Five clients means five domains at $99 each, roughly $500 a month for AI visibility, sitting on top of whatever Semrush plan you already carry. Slot 2 and slot 5 both sell multi-client workspaces designed for exactly that job, at prices that don't scale linearly with your client count. The bundled options are worth comparing directly, too: Semrush asks $99 for four engines, Ahrefs asks $699 for six, and both require a base subscription underneath [11][13]. If you're already paying Semrush and you're tracking one brand, this is a reasonable $99. If either of those conditions is false, look at the dedicated tools first.

9. Rankscale

In short:

The cheapest entry in this lineup and the broadest model list, if you can manage a credit model where Claude costs eight times what ChatGPT costs.

Best for: Budget-conscious teams, and anyone who needs Claude coverage without an enterprise contract

Standout: Published per-engine credit rates. Rankscale tells you what each engine costs to query before you buy, which no other tool here does [14]

Key features: Around twenty models across browser-based and API engines, brand dashboards, web audits, query fan-out tracking, sources analysis, Scout recommendations, unlimited team seats, white-labeled dashboards and REST API on higher tiers, exports to CSV, Sheets, and Looker Studio [14]

Pricing: Essential 20 euros, Pro 99 euros, Growth 385 euros, Enterprise 780 euros per month. Prices are in euros [14]

Pros: Lowest starting price on this list, the widest model coverage including Claude, DeepSeek, Grok, Copilot, and Mistral, unlimited seats on every tier, and credit costs published per engine so you can model your bill in advance

Cons: The credit model means your engine mix sets your cost. ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and Google AI Mode each cost 0.25 credits per query. DeepSeek costs 1. Claude costs 2 [14]. A Claude-heavy tracking cadence empties a plan several times faster than the credit total suggests. Prices are euro-denominated, and there's no free tier.

Rankscale sits at 9 on predictability, not on capability. On raw coverage it beats most of this list, and it's the only tool here offering Claude on a self-serve plan, which matters if your buyers use it. The problem is that a credit pool is a budget you can overspend without noticing. Do the arithmetic before you subscribe: multiply your prompt count by your engines, weighted by the rates above, by your refresh cadence. Rankscale gives you the numbers to do that, which is more than most of the field offers.

What AI Visibility Tools Cannot Do

Before you spend anything, know what none of these tools will do for you.

They can't make an engine recommend you. Every product here measures. None of them controls the answer. Any vendor promising placement in AI results is selling something the technology doesn't offer [3].

Answers vary by session. The same prompt returns different responses to different users at different times. Every number in every one of these dashboards is a sample, not a count [3].

Your prompt set determines your results. This is the limitation buyers underestimate most. One reviewer measured the same brand in two different tools and got different share of voice figures, because the tools ran different prompts [8]. Whoever writes your prompt list decides what you learn, and a lazy prompt set produces confident numbers about nothing much.

They can't reach the training data. You can publish, correct the record on reference sites, and earn citations. You cannot edit what a model already learned.

Measuring a gap doesn't close it. A thin archive doesn't get more visible by being watched more carefully. Every tool on this list produces a to-do list. Someone still has to do it.

How to Choose

In short:

Pick on the engines your buyers actually use, price the program rather than the plan, and check seats and client workspaces before features.

Sticker price is not program cost. The advertised number is a floor on most of this list. Price it out this way: prompts times engines times refresh cadence, then add per-seat charges, per-domain charges, and any engine sold as an add-on. Otterly at $189 plus a Gemini add-on is a different number than $189. Semrush at $99 becomes $495 across five client domains. Ahrefs at $129 becomes $828 once you add every index.

Credit models aren't comparable. Three tools here price on credits and define the word three ways. Rankscale publishes a rate per engine, so Claude costs eight times what ChatGPT costs. AthenaHQ charges one credit per AI response, so adding engines multiplies burn directly. Profound uses credits only for its content Agents. Never compare two credit pools without reading both definitions.

Seats and clients decide the shortlist. Peec, Otterly, and Rankscale include unlimited team members on every tier. Profound's entry plan includes one. Semrush bills per domain. If you're an agency, this narrows the field before you've looked at a single feature.

The Claude gap eliminates a third of this list. ZipTie, Ahrefs Brand Radar, and the Semrush toolkit don't cover Claude at any price. Rankscale, AthenaHQ, and Peec at Enterprise do. If your buyers work in Claude, that one fact does most of your filtering.

Decide whether you want a monitor or a workflow. Most tools here report and stop. A few build the content workflow into the same platform, and the bundled suites assume you already have one. Be honest about whether your team will act on a dashboard every week, because a tool nobody opens on Thursday is the most expensive line item you'll buy.

By situation:

Three wrong reasons to buy: because a tool lists twenty engines when your buyers use two, because the sticker price looked lowest, or because you don't have content worth citing yet and hoped a dashboard would fix that.

That last one is the real work. These tools will tell you which of your pages get cited, which competitors get named instead of you, and which third-party sources the engines lean on. Closing those gaps means publishing content the models will actually reference, structuring it so it can be parsed, making sure AI crawlers can reach it, and earning mentions on the sources those engines trust. That's implementation, not monitoring. If you'd rather have a team handle it, our AI Search Optimization services cover that work, and the crawler-access side of it sits with technical SEO.

Verdict

The best AI visibility platform in this lineup is Profound. It tracks up to nine answer engines, ties AI crawler behavior to your own analytics stack, and does both at a depth nothing else here matches.

The best platform and the right first purchase are different tools, though, and this article would be dishonest if it pretended otherwise. Profound's published $99 tier tracks ChatGPT alone with one seat. The capability that earns it slot one lives at the Enterprise tier, behind a sales conversation. For most teams reading this, the sensible move is to spend $29 for a quarter, learn where you actually stand, and then decide whether you need a platform at ten times the price.

By use case:

A word on the order. Engine coverage carried the heaviest weight, pricing transparency mattered, and brand recognition earned nothing. Ahrefs and Semrush sit at 7 and 8 because their AI modules are narrow and expensive next to dedicated platforms, not because either company is weak at what it's known for.

One caveat on all of it. We confirmed prices directly on vendor pages for six of these nine tools. Across the sources we reviewed, prices and engine lists in this category moved noticeably between February and July 2026. Check the current numbers before you buy anything here.

If you'd rather start with where your site actually stands, our free SEO audit covers technical and on-page issues that affect both traditional and AI search, with no card required.

Reviewed July 2026. Next review January 2027.

About the author. James Profits is the owner and lead SEO strategist at Search Science, a Omaha digital marketing agency he founded in 2004. He has led local SEO, technical SEO, and AI Search Optimization engagements for more than 20 years, and reviews every Search Science client campaign personally.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the best AI visibility tool?
The best AI visibility tool overall is Profound, which tracks up to nine answer engines and connects AI crawler activity to your analytics. For most teams Peec AI offers better value at $95 a month with unlimited seats, and Otterly.ai is the cheapest useful starting point at $29 a month.
What are AI visibility tools?
AI visibility tools run a set of prompts across AI engines like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Google AI Overviews, then report on whether and how your brand appears in the answers. They measure four things: how often you are mentioned, which URLs the engine cited, whether the description of you is favorable, and how much of the conversation you own against competitors.
How are AI visibility tools different from SEO rank trackers?
A rank tracker measures where your page sits on a results page. An AI visibility tool measures whether your brand appears inside a generated answer, which follows different retrieval and citation logic. A page can rank first on Google and never be mentioned by ChatGPT for the same question.
How much do AI visibility tools cost?
Entry pricing across the tools we reviewed runs from 20 euros a month to $250 a month, with enterprise tiers quoted on request. Full engine coverage costs considerably more than entry pricing suggests. Ahrefs Brand Radar requires a base plan from $129 a month plus $699 a month for all AI indexes, which is the most expensive path to complete coverage in this comparison.
What is the cheapest AI visibility tool?
Rankscale has the lowest entry price at 20 euros a month, and Otterly.ai is the cheapest dollar-priced option at $29 a month. Both include unlimited team seats. Neither offers a free-forever tier, and neither entry plan covers every engine, so price the add-ons or credits you will actually need before comparing on the sticker figure.
Which AI engines should I track?
Track the engines your buyers use, not the longest list you can buy. For most US business audiences that means ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, and Google AI Mode at minimum, with Perplexity and Gemini close behind. Adding engines raises cost on every credit-based tool and on several flat-rate tools that sell engines as add-ons.
Which AI visibility tools cover Claude?
Of the nine tools we reviewed, Rankscale and AthenaHQ cover Claude on self-serve plans, and Peec AI covers it at the Enterprise tier. ZipTie, Ahrefs Brand Radar, and the Semrush AI Visibility Toolkit do not cover Claude at any price. If your buyers use Claude, that single requirement removes a third of the field.
Can I check my AI visibility for free?
There is no free-forever plan among the nine tools we reviewed, though several offer trials. You can get a partial read without paying anything: Peec AI's crawlability checker tests your robots.txt against more than 40 AI bots without a signup, and Ahrefs subscribers can see which tracked keywords trigger an AI Overview inside Rank Tracker on a base plan. The simplest free check is asking the engines your buyers use what they recommend in your category, and noting who gets named.
Do I need a separate tool if I already pay for Ahrefs or Semrush?
Not necessarily, and you should run the math before adding a vendor. The Semrush AI Visibility Toolkit costs $99 a month per domain on top of your plan. Ahrefs Brand Radar costs $199 a month per AI index or $699 for all of them, on top of a base plan from $129. Dedicated tools covering comparable engines start well below both. The bundled option wins on workflow, not on price.
Which AI visibility tools work for agencies?
Peec AI, Otterly.ai, and Scrunch AI all sell dedicated agency plans with per-client workspaces and published pricing. Profound and Rankscale offer agency tiers as well. Avoid per-domain pricing models if you manage several clients, since the cost scales linearly with your client count.
How often should I check my AI visibility?
Weekly is enough for most brands, and every tool here refreshes at least that often on paid plans. Daily tracking matters in fast-moving categories or during a campaign. Remember that AI answers vary by session, so a single day's reading is a sample rather than a verdict, and trend lines are more useful than individual numbers.