Comparison

The best AI visibility tools in 2026, compared on what you actually get

Nine tools, ranked on one thing you can check yourself: what the cheapest plan includes. Which engines, how many prompts, how often it looks, and what it costs. Every figure below is from the vendor's own pricing page, read on 21 September 2026, and we say where we fall short too.

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How we ranked them, and why we are first

A vendor putting itself first on its own comparison page is worth nothing unless the criterion is stated and checkable. So here it is.

We ranked on the entry plan, because that is the plan most people reading this will buy first, and because it is where the category hides its trade-offs. Every tool here tracks ChatGPT. The differences are in what else is included before you pay more.

On that criterion we come first because ours is the only entry plan on this page that carries all six engines with nothing sold as an add-on. Otterly sells Claude, Gemini and Google AI Mode separately. Peec limits a project to three models. Profound's free tier runs ten prompts once, on ChatGPT only, and the paid tier is an Enterprise quote. AthenaHQ includes eleven engines, which is more than we do, at $295 a month, which is ten times what we charge.

If your criterion is different, the ranking changes. For the widest engine list, Athena. For agent tooling and an enterprise rollout, Profound. For staying inside a suite you already pay for, Ahrefs or Semrush. We have written each entry so you can make that call, and the measurement rules we hold ourselves to are public.

The nine tools

In rank order. Prices are monthly, in US dollars, as published.

  1. 1.AIMentionTracker

    $9/mo, 2 questions

    Best for
    Anyone who wants all six engines from the first day, on the first plan.
    Engines
    ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, Google AI Mode. All six on every plan.
    What it does
    Tracks whether each engine names your brand in answers to the questions your buyers ask, and which pages it cites. Every answer is stored in full. Every rate carries its sample size, and under five checks it shows the fraction rather than a percentage. Sentiment is rated per mention with the sentence that produced it kept beside the rating, and cited-but-not-named is reported as its own state because it needs different work from being absent.
    Where it falls short
    Two questions on the entry plan is a floor, not a starting point, and there is no API key issuance yet. Five engines run six days a week and Claude twice, because Claude costs seven to ten times more per answer. If you need agent traffic analytics, shopping visibility or content generation, none of that is here and we do not pretend otherwise.

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  2. 2.Otterly

    $29/mo Lite, 15 prompts

    Best for
    Solo marketers who want a fast setup and mostly care about ChatGPT and Perplexity.
    Engines
    Four included: ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity, Copilot. Claude, Gemini and Google AI Mode are paid add-ons.
    What it does
    Otterly is genuinely simple to start with, and the Lite plan tracks daily. It watches four engines out of the box and pairs monitoring with content briefs and crawlability checks. Standard at $189 adds API and MCP access and agent analytics.
    Where it falls short
    The engine list is the catch. Claude, Gemini and Google AI Mode are extras on every plan, priced per engine, so a small team that wants the full picture pays for three add-ons on top of Lite. The other thing to know is that Copilot is one of the four included engines, and Copilot's answers are mostly Bing's, which you may or may not care about.

  3. 3.Peec AI

    Plans start with 50 prompts

    Best for
    Agencies who want a clean client-facing dashboard and are happy choosing three models.
    Engines
    Choose three models per project on Starter and Pro. ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude, Copilot, AI Overviews, AI Mode, Grok and DeepSeek are on the menu.
    What it does
    Berlin-built, daily tracking, unlimited users, and the interface is the thing reviewers keep mentioning. It covers visibility, position and sentiment across a wide list of models and keeps screenshot audit trails, which makes client reporting easy to trust.
    Where it falls short
    You pick three. That is the design, not a limitation they hide, and it is fine for a team that knows which three matter. It is a problem the moment a client asks why they were named on Gemini and not on Perplexity and you were not watching Gemini. Prompt volumes come from clickstream estimates rather than measured AI conversations, which is the same proxy everyone uses, and they are honest about it.

  4. 4.Rankscale

    $20/mo Essentials; $99/mo Pro with 1,200 credits

    Best for
    Teams that want a credit-based model and will use the Looker Studio connector.
    Engines
    ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude, Copilot, AI Mode, Grok, DeepSeek.
    What it does
    Everything runs on credits, one per engine query, so you decide the trade-off between prompts, engines and frequency yourself. Pro covers up to 4,800 answers a month, Growth at $385 adds a REST API and white-label options, and there is a seven-day free trial with no charge until day seven.
    Where it falls short
    Credits cut both ways. A team that tracks 40 prompts on eight engines daily burns 9,600 credits a month and is on Growth before they have finished onboarding. The calculator on the pricing page is worth using before you pick a plan, because the headline prices do not tell you what you will actually pay.

  5. 5.AthenaHQ

    $295/mo Starter, 3,600 credits

    Best for
    Companies that want eleven models and prescriptive fixes, and have $295 a month to start.
    Engines
    Eleven on Starter: ChatGPT, Perplexity, AI Overviews, AI Mode, Gemini, Claude, Copilot, Grok, DeepSeek, Meta AI, Mistral.
    What it does
    The widest engine list on this page, and an Action Center that turns findings into recommended fixes. One credit is one AI response, so 3,600 a month is generous at the entry tier. There is a free tier with 300 credits and five engines to try it on.
    Where it falls short
    The price. $295 is the cheapest paid plan, which is ten times ours and roughly ten times Otterly's. That buys a lot, and for a mid-sized marketing team it may be the right call. For a founder checking whether ChatGPT knows their product exists, it is a lot of tool. The recommendations engine is also the part that is hardest to verify from outside, and we would want to see its working before trusting it.

  6. 6.Ahrefs Brand Radar

    Included in Ahrefs Lite+ from $199/mo; prompt tracking from $50/mo

    Best for
    Teams already paying for Ahrefs who want AI mentions next to their backlink data.
    Engines
    ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude, Copilot, AI Overviews, AI Mode.
    What it does
    Two products under one name. The AI Visibility Index maps your presence across an index Ahrefs says covers 454 million prompts, with no setup, and is useful once your brand already appears in AI search. Tracked prompts are the ones you define, refreshed daily, from $50 a month on top of a paid plan.
    Where it falls short
    Ahrefs describes the index numbers as directional, modelled signals rather than measured performance, and that is the right description. The index is built from People Also Ask questions and Ahrefs' keyword data rather than from real AI conversations, so it tells you about the market more than about your specific questions. It is a very good SEO tool that has added AI visibility, and it reads that way.

  7. 7.Semrush AI Visibility Toolkit

    Add-on to a Semrush subscription

    Best for
    Agencies that live in Semrush and do not want another login.
    Engines
    Five engines on Brand Performance; Prompt Tracking covers fewer.
    What it does
    Share of voice, sentiment and prompt tracking bolted onto the SEO platform 100,000-plus teams already use. If your reporting is already in Semrush, that convenience is real.
    Where it falls short
    The AI coverage is narrower than the surrounding suite makes it look. Brand Performance updates weekly rather than daily, and Prompt Tracking covers fewer engines than the headline. It is a reasonable first look for a Semrush shop and a weak primary tool for anyone else.

  8. 8.Profound

    Free trial: 10 prompts, run once, ChatGPT only. Everything else is Enterprise, custom priced.

    Best for
    Enterprises with a budget for a demo-led sale and a team to run agents.
    Engines
    Up to nine on Enterprise. The trial is ChatGPT only.
    What it does
    Profound is the best-funded company in this category and the most complete platform on the page. Prompt Volumes runs on what it says is 1.9 billion real user prompts, it tracks up to nine engines, and the agent layer will run the content pipeline that fills the gaps it finds. For a large team with a mandate to do AEO at scale, it is the serious option.
    Where it falls short
    There is no self-serve paid plan. The free tier runs ten prompts once, on ChatGPT only, which tells you almost nothing, and the next step is a demo and an Enterprise quote. That is a deliberate choice about who they sell to, and it means anyone below that size is not the customer. It is also worth reading their own comparison of these tools, which ranks Profound first and is more candid about rivals than most vendor content manages.

  9. 9.Scrunch

    Not published

    Best for
    Agencies drawn by the referral program more than the product.
    Engines
    Not published on a page we could read.
    What it does
    Monitors brand visibility across answer engines, adds site auditing, and runs what it calls an Agent Experience Platform that serves an AI-optimised version of a page to crawlers without changing what humans see. The agency partner program is the distinctive part: referral commission, prospecting licences, co-marketing funds.
    Where it falls short
    We could not load a pricing page, and serving crawlers a different version of a page than humans see is a practice Google has spent twenty years calling cloaking. Scrunch will have a view on why this is different. Read that view carefully before you turn it on for a client.

Three things to check before you pick any of them

These are the questions we would ask a vendor, including us.

Does it keep the answers? A percentage on a chart is a summary of something that was said. If the tool threw the text away, you cannot check the number, and neither can the vendor. We store every answer in full for this reason, and we would treat any tool that does not as reporting a rumour.

Does it separate cited from named? Your page can be in the sources while a competitor is in the sentence. That is the most common surprising finding in this category and it needs different work from being absent. A tool that merges the two into one score has averaged away the thing you would act on. This is why citation tracking is its own measurement here.

Does it show the denominator?Assistants generate each answer fresh, so a single check is a coin flip. “Named in 40% of answers” means nothing without the count behind it. Ask every vendor how many checks sit under each number, and whether they show a fraction when it is small. Our rule is on the visibility tracking page: under five, we show two of four, not fifty per cent.

Questions people ask when comparing these

Answered from the same pricing pages.

What is an AI visibility tool?
Software that asks AI assistants the questions your buyers ask, records whether your brand is named in the answer and which pages are cited, and reports that as a rate over time. The useful ones separate being named from being cited, keep the full answer text, and show you how many checks sit behind every number.
How did you rank these?
On what the cheapest plan actually includes, read from each vendor's own pricing page on 21 September 2026: which engines, how many prompts, how often it checks, and the price. We are first because ours is the only entry plan on the page that carries every engine with nothing sold as an add-on. That is one criterion. If your criterion is agent tooling or an enterprise sales process, Profound is the answer and we say so.
Which tool tracks the most engines?
AthenaHQ, with eleven on its $295 Starter plan. Rankscale and Peec list eight or nine but Peec limits you to three per project. We track six, all on every plan, and deliberately not Grok, Llama or DeepSeek, which answer without live retrieval and are not comparable to the others.
Which is cheapest?
Ours at $9 a month for two questions, then Rankscale's $20 Essentials and Otterly's $29 Lite. Otterly's price is for four engines; adding Claude, Gemini and Google AI Mode costs extra on every plan. Cheapest per question is a different calculation and depends on how many engines you want per prompt.
Do any of these measure real ChatGPT prompt volume?
No. Nobody can. The assistants do not publish how often a question is asked, and no panel observes it at scale. Profound cites a 1.9 billion prompt dataset; Ahrefs says its index numbers are modelled and directional; Peec uses clickstream estimates; we use Google search volume for the phrasing and call it search volume. Every figure in this category is a proxy. The honest tools say which proxy.
Should I just use Semrush or Ahrefs since I already pay for them?
If you want a first look, yes, and both are decent for it. If AI visibility is a thing you will act on weekly, the coverage gaps matter: Semrush updates Brand Performance weekly across five engines, and Ahrefs' index is built from keyword data rather than AI conversations. A dedicated tool is worth it once you have found something in the SEO suite worth chasing.

How we measure, in more detail

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On every plan

  • Every answer stored in full, with its citations.
  • Every rate shown with the number of checks behind it.
  • Cited-but-not-named reported as its own state.