The 6 Best AI Visibility Tools in 2026: Ranked Honestly

Published: September 8, 2026 | Last updated: September 8, 2026 | 12 min read

By: Graeme Whiles

You signed up for the free trial, connected your domain, and got a score out of 100 that meant nothing to you.

Most people I speak to have done exactly that.

Then the trial ended, the invoice arrived, and nobody in the room could say what the number was supposed to do.

However, the problem is not usually the tool. It is that most people buy one before deciding which question they need answered, and the AI visibility tools market is very happy to sell you a dashboard instead of an answer.

So here is the short version before the long one.

If you already pay for Ahrefs, start with Brand Radar, because you are funding it whether you open it or not.

If you don't, and you really need more than one engine, Profound's Growth plan is the honest entry point. Everything cheaper than that is either one platform or fifteen prompts.

In this guide, I'll show you what you no longer need to pay for, what the six tools worth considering actually track, and what each one costs at the tier you'll really end up on.

Short on time? Here are the key takeaways

• Ahrefs Brand Radar: Best for anyone already paying for Ahrefs.
• Otterly.AI: Best for the smallest budget that still buys something real.
• Semrush AI Visibility Toolkit: Best for teams already standardised on Semrush reporting.
• Profound: Best for enterprise coverage across the most engines.
• Peec AI: Best for prompt-led tracking with clean reporting.
• Scrunch: Best for treating AI crawlers as an infrastructure problem rather than a reporting one.

What you no longer need an AI visibility tool for

Before we dive in, I want to make it very clear. You probably don’t need a paid AI visibility tool. Most people certainly don’t, anyway.

Two of the platforms you want to track now report on themselves, for free, in accounts you already own.

Google Search Console has a generative AI performance report covering AI Overviews and AI Mode. It finished rolling out worldwide on 31 August 2026. It gives you impressions by page, country, date, and device, but no clicks, no click-through rate, no average position, and no queries.

Bing Webmaster Tools has an AI Performance report covering Microsoft Copilot and Bing's AI summaries, live since 10 February 2026. It shows total citations, average cited pages, the grounding queries the AI used to retrieve your content, and citation counts per URL.

Then, in June 2026, Microsoft added citation share, which is the percentage of all citations on a query that went to your site.

That last one matters more than it sounds.

Citation share is the closest thing to free share of voice that anyone currently offers, and it lands in the one category the paid tools charge most for. It does not name the competitor domains taking the rest, so it is not a complete answer, but it is a free one.

You are not buying AI visibility measurement. You are buying the platforms that refuse to report on themselves, which means ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Meta AI and Grok, plus competitor share of voice and sentiment across a prompt set.

I've written separately on what AI visibility is and how to build that free baseline, and on answer engine optimisation if you want the work rather than the measurement.

How I tested these AI visibility tools

I signed up to all six and pointed them at the same domain, running the same prompt set through each so the numbers were comparable.

The prompt set was buying-intent questions a real customer would ask, not brand-name lookups. In my opinion, a tool that finds you when somebody types your own company name is not telling you anything you needed a subscription for.

I ran each one at the tier a small business would actually choose, not the enterprise demo, because the enterprise demo is not the product most people buy. Plus, I like being able to afford my mortgage.

What I was checking for was narrow. Which engines does this cover at the price I paid? Can I see which prompt produced a mention, and can I get the raw data out?

One thing to say before the individual verdicts.

The numbers did not agree with each other.

Run one brand through several of these, and you will get several different answers, and none of them is exactly wrong, because each is sampling a non-deterministic system at a different moment with slightly different prompt phrasing. That is a reason to pick one tool and stay with it, not a reason to distrust all of them.

Three things kept a tool off this list.

No ChatGPT coverage at the entry tier, because that is the platform people actually use. No raw data export, because a number you cannot pull out is a number you cannot report on. And no prompt-level attribution, because "your visibility is 34" without knowing which question produced it is a score, not a finding.

Two things I did not do.

I did not rank them one to six, because the right tool depends entirely on which platforms you care about and whether you already pay for a suite.

The AI visibility tools actually worth paying for

Ahrefs Brand Radar

Best for: anyone already paying for Ahrefs.

Brand Radar tracks mentions and citations across AI Overviews, AI Mode, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Copilot, and reports mentions, citations, AI share of voice and estimated impressions.

The part most roundups miss is the pricing.

Custom Prompts are bundled into every paid Ahrefs plan already: five prompts a day on Lite, ten on Standard, twenty on Advanced and 83 or more on Enterprise. If you have an Ahrefs subscription, you are already paying for prompt tracking and may not have opened it.

Standalone, Custom Prompts start at $50 a month, and the AI Visibility Index is $199 a month. There is also a free AI Visibility Checker, which is the fastest way to see whether you have a problem at all.

It is the best value in the category, and it is not close, as long as you already pay for Ahrefs.

The bundled allowance is the catch.

Five prompts a day on Lite is a smoke test rather than a monitor, and ten on Standard covers one product line. For a real client, you want Advanced or the $199 Index, and at that point you are comparing like for like with Profound on price.

What you give up is depth on the engines that are not Google.

Brand Radar will tell you that you were mentioned. It is thinner than Profound on why.

Otterly.AI

Best for: the smallest budget that still buys something real.

Otterly charges $29 a month on Lite for 15 prompts, tracked daily across ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity and Microsoft Copilot.

Standard is $189 for 100 prompts and adds API and MCP access. Premium is $489 for 400. Enterprise starts at $1,000. Annual billing takes 15% off.

Read the platform list twice, because Claude, Google Gemini and Google AI Mode are not in the core four. They are paid add-ons costing anywhere from $9 to $439 a month depending on your tier.

Fifteen prompts is a smoke test, not a monitor.

Lite is the right price for finding out whether you have a problem and the wrong product for tracking one. The moment you need Gemini or AI Mode, you are into add-ons, and because add-on pricing scales with your tier rather than sitting flat, the cheap plan plus the two engines you actually wanted can cost more than Standard.

Buy Lite for a month to get an answer. Do not build a reporting line on it.

Semrush AI Visibility Toolkit

Best for: teams already standardised on Semrush reporting.

The AI Visibility Toolkit is $99 a month billed annually for 25 custom prompts with daily rankings on one domain, covering ChatGPT, Google AI, Gemini and Perplexity.

You also get AI competitor analysis, prompt research and a site audit for AI readiness, and there is a seven-day trial.

Twenty-five prompts is the number to sit with. That is a small prompt set for a brand with more than one product line.

Buy it if your reporting already lives in Semrush, and not otherwise.

Twenty-five prompts is tight, and one domain means one brand, which rules it out for agencies immediately.

The AI readiness site audit is the weakest part of it. It surfaces the same structured data and crawlability problems your own crawl already found, relabelled as an AI issue.

The reason to pay is that the AI numbers sit next to the organic numbers in a dashboard your team already opens every Monday.

Profound

Best for: enterprise coverage across the most engines.

Profound is the most searched name in this category by a distance.

It also has the widest platform list: ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, Gemini, Copilot, Grok, DeepSeek and Claude, up to nine answer engines on Enterprise.

Starter is $99 a month billed yearly, for 50 prompts, one seat, and ChatGPT only. Growth is $399 a month for 100 prompts and three answer engines. The full nine-engine coverage is Enterprise, on custom pricing.

So the plan that shares a headline price with Semrush's whole toolkit tracks a single platform.

Starter is a demo tier, and I would not pay $99 a month for it.

ChatGPT alone, at the same headline price as a four-platform Semrush plan, is a hard sell, however good the interface is. And it is a very good interface.

The product people mean when they recommend Profound is Growth at $399, and that is the strongest thing in this category if you need real breadth across engines.

So the honest recommendation is Profound at $399, or not Profound at all. The entry tier exists to get you through the door.

Peec AI

Best for: prompt-led tracking with clean reporting.

Peec's tiers are built around prompt volume: 50 on Starter, 150 on Pro, 350 on Advanced, with one, two and five projects respectively. Advanced adds multi-country tracking and a Looker Studio integration. Annual billing takes 15% off, and there is a free trial but no free tier.

The constraint to understand is the model limit.

Every tier below Enterprise is "choose 3 models" from ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Copilot, AI Mode and AI Overviews. You are not buying the whole picture; you are buying three sixths of it, and the choice is yours to make well.

Enterprise opens up Claude Sonnet, GPT-5 Search, Grok, DeepSeek, Qwen and Mistral.

Peec lists its tiers publicly but not its prices, so I am not going to quote a number I cannot source. Ask them directly, and ask what the annual commitment is before you do.

Pick ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini.

That is the whole trick with Peec, and it follows directly from the free baseline. Google AI Overviews and AI Mode are already in your Search Console for nothing, and Copilot is already in Bing Webmaster Tools for nothing. Spending two of your three paid slots on engines that report on themselves for free is the most common mistake I see people make on this platform.

Spend the three you are paying for on the ones that publish nothing.

Do that and Peec is excellent.

The reporting is the cleanest in this group, and the prompt suggestions are genuinely useful rather than padding. The model cap is the only thing stopping it from being the outright recommendation.

Scrunch

Best for: treating AI crawlers as an infrastructure problem rather than a reporting one.

Scrunch is the most expensive on this list and the most different.

Starter is $250 a month on annual billing or $300 monthly, Growth is $417 annual or $500 monthly, and seats are $25 each on top. There is a seven-day trial with no card, which includes 350 custom prompts, three personas and five page audits.

It covers ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, AI Mode, AI Overviews and Meta, and it leans towards agent traffic attribution and page audits for AI discoverability rather than pure prompt tracking.

$250 a month is a lot to pay for something your server logs already tell you.

The agent traffic attribution is the interesting half of Scrunch, and it is also the half you can approximate for nothing by filtering your access logs for OAI-SearchBot, PerplexityBot, ClaudeBot and Google-Extended. If nobody on your team is ever going to do that, Scrunch does it properly and presents it well.

Seven engines including Meta and Claude is the widest self-serve coverage on this list, and a seven-day trial with no card is the most honest onboarding of the six. Try it before you dismiss the price.

What each AI visibility tool costs at entry level

The tier names are doing a lot of work in this category, so here is the entry plan for each, side by side.

Read that table as a question about coverage per pound rather than a ranking.

Two tools charge the same $99 and give you four platforms and one platform, respectively. One gives you seven for $250. And the cheapest real option on the list is the one you may already be paying for without knowing.

AI visibility tool pricing traps worth knowing about

Four things I'd check before entering your card details, in the order they catch people out.

• The entry tier is often a single-platform tier: Profound's $99 Starter covers ChatGPT alone. Confirm which engines are live on the plan you are actually buying, not the one in the comparison table on the vendor's homepage.

• Add-on engines are priced per tier, not flat: Otterly's Claude, Gemini and AI Mode add-ons run from $9 to $439 a month depending on which plan you are on, so the cheap plan plus add-ons can cost more than the next plan up.

• Prompt counts are the real unit of pricing: 15 prompts, 25 prompts and 50 prompts are very different products, and a brand with three product lines and two markets will exhaust a small allowance immediately.

• Annual billing is where the discount lives: Peec, Otterly and Scrunch all discount annual by 15 to 17%, which is a real saving and a real commitment to a category that is changing every quarter.

• The trial length decides what you can learn: seven days is not long enough to see a trend on a system this noisy. Load your prompt set on day one rather than day five, and go in expecting to learn what a tool covers rather than how you are performing.

Who should not buy an AI visibility tool

A disqualifier, because this article will attract people who don't need one yet.

If you have never opened the generative AI report in Search Console, do not buy an AI visibility tool this month.

Pull the free baseline first. Google will tell you your impressions in AI Overviews and AI Mode. Bing will tell you your citations and your citation share.

Your server logs will tell you which AI crawlers are fetching which pages.

Sit with that for a month. If the answer to "where does the brand stand" is still missing after that, you now know exactly which gap you are buying to fill, and you will pick a better tool for knowing it.

The same goes if your structured data disagrees with itself and your key pages run default metadata. AI engines read the same site Google does, and a subscription will describe that problem to you monthly without fixing any of it.

Final Thoughts

The AI visibility tools market is roughly where rank trackers were in 2009: too many products, no agreed unit of measurement, and a lot of confidence for sale.

That will settle. Until it does, buy narrowly.

Pull the free reports from Google and Bing first, because they cover two of the platforms and cost nothing. Then pay for the engines that publish nothing about themselves, which is where a subscription genuinely earns its money.

And check the entry tier before you check the logo.

The thing that surprised me was how little of the price difference is quality.

The interfaces are far more alike than the vendors would like you to believe. What actually separates $29 from $399 is how many engines you are allowed to look at, and you can already see half of them for free.

If you'd like to know exactly where your brand stands across ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity and Copilot before you commit to any subscription, that's what my AI Visibility Audit covers.

You can also run my free AEO readiness score in two minutes to see which foundations are missing first.

Get in touch, or email me directly.

Author Bio

Graeme Whiles is an independent SEO and AEO consultant at GWContent. He has worked with enterprise and SaaS brands, including Originality.ai, Connecteam, 6sense, Practice Better, and Peppr, growing organic traffic and AI search visibility across some of the most competitive categories in B2B. He also built Three Putt Golf Clothing from a blank domain as a live proof of concept for his methodology.

AI visibility tools frequently asked questions

What is the best AI visibility tool?

Ahrefs Brand Radar, if you already pay for Ahrefs, because prompt tracking is bundled into every paid plan and you are funding it whether you use it or not. If you do not use Ahrefs and you need more than one engine, Profound's Growth plan at $399 a month is the strongest product in the category. If your budget is under $50 a month, Otterly's Lite plan at $29 will tell you whether you have a problem, and nothing at that price will do more than that.

Is there a tool that can check my AI visibility score?

Several will sell you one, and I would not build reporting on it. Every platform calculates its score differently, weighting mentions, citations and position in ways you cannot inspect, so a 72 on one tool and a 41 on another can describe the same reality. Ahrefs and Semrush both offer a free AI visibility checker if you want a quick read, but judge yourself on presence rate and share of voice against named competitors instead.

How much do AI visibility tools cost?

Entry plans run from $29 a month for Otterly's Lite tier to $250 a month for Scrunch, with Semrush and Profound both at $99 on annual billing. Enterprise plans across the category are custom priced and start around $1,000 a month. Prompt volume, not features, is what moves you up a tier, and add-on engines can cost more than the plan itself.

How do I get AI visibility without buying a tool?

Use the free first-party reports. Google Search Console's generative AI performance report shows impressions in AI Overviews and AI Mode worldwide since 31 August 2026, and Bing Webmaster Tools shows citations and citation share in Copilot. Add your server logs for AI crawler traffic.

Then fix the things those three sources point at: consistent brand language, quotable declarative content, clean structured data and crawler access. My guide to how to rank in ChatGPT covers the content format.

Are free AI visibility checkers any good?

They are good for one job, which is telling you whether you appear at all. Ahrefs, Semrush and SE Ranking all offer one. What they will not give you is tracking over time, competitor share of voice, or the prompt-level detail that tells you why you appeared. Treat them as a smoke alarm rather than a monitor.