Best AI Search Visibility Tools (2026): Honest Comparison

By Minel Gunesoglu, founder of Is My Brand in AI · Last updated August 21, 2026. Otterly, Peec AI, Profound, AthenaHQ, Scrunch and Writesonic pricing was checked against each vendor's own page on August 1, 2026; other figures are approximate, so verify before you buy.

TL;DR: AI search visibility tools track what your rank tracker can't: whether ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Google AI Overviews name and cite your brand. Otterly.ai ($29/mo, price read from its own page on 1 August 2026) is the best entry point; Peec AI and AthenaHQ suit teams; Profound suits enterprises. Compare on engine coverage first: in our 48-answer test, tracking ChatGPT alone showed 14% of the pages the four engines cited.

If you searched for an AI search visibility tools comparison, this is the category you mean: the trackers and monitors that tell you, on an ongoing basis, whether AI engines name and cite your brand. They are not broad GEO platforms, and they are not normal SEO rank trackers. Their sharper job is to measure your share of AI voice, your citations, and your missing source opportunities so you can see whether the work you do in AI search visibility is actually moving the needle.

Below you get eleven tools compared on the four things that decide the bill (engine coverage, citations versus mentions, prompt caps and refresh rate), a per-tool honest read, and one section no other comparison in this category has: our own measurement of what a narrow-coverage plan actually costs you in missed pages. If you want the broader category of GEO platforms, which bundle strategy, content generation and workflow on top of tracking, see our separate roundup of the best GEO tools. And if you have not yet measured your own baseline by hand, start with how to measure AI search visibility before you shortlist anything here.

One disclosure up front, because it matters: I'm building in this space, so the picks below are on merit, not on any payout, and there are no affiliate links anywhere on this page — every tool is named as plain text.

How we compared these tools

Six criteria, in the order they change the decision:

1. Engine coverage on the plan you would actually buy, not on the enterprise tier. This is the criterion most comparisons under-weight, and the section below puts a number on it using our own data.
2. Citations or mentions. Whether the tool records the exact pages and domains an engine cited, or only counts how often your name appears in the prose.
3. Prompt volume. The cap on how many questions you can track. This is where the real cost hides, because a genuine buyer-question set is bigger than the cheap tiers allow.
4. Refresh frequency. Daily, weekly, or on demand.
5. Price, read from the vendor's own page on a stated date. Otterly, Profound, AthenaHQ and Scrunch prices on this page were read from each vendor's own pricing page on 1 August 2026; Peec AI's tiers were read on 23 August 2026. Figures for other tools are labelled approximate. Where a figure is an estimate, it is labelled as one. Where a vendor publishes no price at all, this page says so instead of inventing a range.
6. Who it is honestly for. Several tools here are the wrong purchase for most readers, and saying which is the useful part of a comparison.

Two things we do not claim. We have not run all eleven products side by side for a quarter, so where a capability comes from a vendor's own documentation rather than our use of it, it is written as the vendor's claim. And nothing on this page is ordered by commission, because there are no affiliate links on it.

What an AI search visibility tool actually tracks

Strip away the marketing and a citation-tracking tool does some mix of four things:

• Brand mentions. You give it a set of prompts ("best CRM for startups"), it runs them across AI engines on a schedule, and reports how often your brand is mentioned, in what position, and with what sentiment.
• Citations. Which specific pages and domains the model links to or names as its source. This is the part regular AI SEO tools miss entirely — and the part that tells you why a competitor gets recommended (often a Reddit thread or a third-party roundup, not their homepage).
• Share of AI voice. Your visibility versus named competitors, so you know whether you're winning or losing the category inside AI answers.
• Bot / crawl analytics. Some tools also watch whether AI crawlers (GPTBot, PerplexityBot, ClaudeBot) are actually fetching your pages — a leading indicator of whether you can be cited at all.

When you compare these tools, four things separate good from oversold: engine coverage (ChatGPT-only is not enough in 2026), refresh frequency (daily versus weekly), prompt volume (the caps are where the real cost hides), and whether it tracks citations and sources or just counts mentions. Keep those in mind as you read the table.

Mentions or citations: which one should you be tracking?

The distinction decides which tool you need, so settle it before you look at prices. "AI citation tracking" is the sharper name for what most of these tools really do. It is not just counting how often a model mentions your brand. It tracks which exact pages and domains a model cites as its source, and whether that source is you or a competitor's Reddit thread. For a dedicated comparison of the tools built specifically for this, see our best AI citation tracking tools roundup. And to monitor those mentions by hand for free before you pay for anything, follow our guide on how to track brand mentions in ChatGPT.

Why it became the metric to watch in 2026: ranking on Google no longer guarantees you are cited in AI answers. In our own cross-engine study the four engines shared almost none of the same sources on the same questions, so where you rank and where you get cited are not the same problem. AI search has also fragmented across engines. Goodie's 2026 AI search traffic report found ChatGPT's share falling from 89.1% to 62.6% between mid-2025 and spring 2026, with Claude taking second place — though read that as what it measures: AI referral traffic arriving at a panel of B2B brand sites, not AI search overall. Similarweb, counting visits to the platforms themselves, puts the same trend at roughly 76% to 53%. Counting mentions on a single engine no longer tells you the truth.

That is the case for citation tracking specifically. A tool that tracks citations across engines shows you why you are cited or skipped, which is the source gap you can actually fix (the playbook for closing it is in how to get cited by ChatGPT). On this page, Otterly.ai, Peec AI, AthenaHQ and Profound track citations rather than just mentions; the free checkers (Ahrefs, Semrush and Frase) give a one-time citation snapshot to start.

How many engines do you need to track? We measured what one engine misses

Every comparison in this category, ours included, tells you engine coverage matters. None of them tells you how much it matters, so the advice collapses into "buy more coverage," which happens to be what every vendor wants you to hear. We measured it instead.

In early August 2026 we ran twelve B2B SaaS buyer questions through ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Google's AI Overview and logged every source each answer displayed: 48 answers, 322 links, 193 distinct domains. The full dataset is public under CC BY, and the method is written up in how to measure AI search visibility.

The engines are barely reading the same pages. Of the 193 domains, exactly four were cited by all four engines anywhere in the study: zapier.com, reddit.com, monday.com and project-management.com. 151 of the 193 (78%) turned up on one engine and no other. Taken question by question, the figure is the same: 78% of the domains cited on a given question came from a single engine.

That turns "how many engines do I need" into arithmetic. In our Cross-Engine Citation Study, for each question we took the full set of domains the four engines cited between them, then asked how much of that set each subscription shape would have shown you (mean across the twelve questions):

Computed from the August 2026 round of that study; the rows are in the published dataset.

The sharper way to read the same table is what each engine contributes that no other engine does. Drop Perplexity and coverage falls to 63%, so Perplexity carries 37 points on its own. Drop Google's AI Overview and you land at 76%, a 24-point contribution. Drop ChatGPT and you still see 92%; drop Gemini and you still see 91%. In this sample ChatGPT was worth 8 points of unique coverage and Perplexity 37, which is close to the inverse of how the two are usually priced and marketed.

What that means for the plans on this page

• A ChatGPT-only plan is the weakest coverage per dollar in this data. Profound's $99/mo Starter tier covers ChatGPT alone. In our sample that one engine showed 14% of the pages cited on a question, and showed no source at all on five of the twelve questions (all three "X vs Y" comparisons and both how-to questions). The coverage argument for Profound begins at the $399/mo Growth tier, not the $99 one.
• Perplexity and Google's AI Overview are the pair to secure first. Together they reached 82% of the cited set, the best two-engine result by a wide margin. A plan covering both is doing most of the job; a plan covering neither is not worth its price whatever else it does.
• Check what is base coverage and what is a paid add-on. Otterly's base plans cover ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews (plus Copilot, which we did not measure) from about $29/mo. Those three of our four engines land at 91%. Gemini and Google AI Mode are add-ons from $9/mo, and Gemini's unique contribution in our data was 9 points, so that upsell is real but small. Buy it if your buyers are on Gemini, not because the number looks incomplete without it.
• Breadth past four engines is untested here. AthenaHQ's whole pitch is nine-model coverage. We measured four, so this data neither supports nor contradicts the value of engines five through eight. If your audience lives on Copilot or Claude, our numbers do not cover you and you should not use them to talk yourself out of that coverage.

Limits, stated plainly. 48 runs, one run per engine-question pair, US English, B2B SaaS buyer questions, collected 6 and 7 August 2026. One run per pair cannot separate a stable pattern from a lucky draw. ChatGPT and Google's AI Overview hide some sources behind a "+N" badge, so the counts are a floor. The percentages describe the pages these four engines cited between them, not the whole web. One caveat cuts specifically against Gemini's numbers here, and it is worth stating because a purchase decision hangs on it: 15 of Gemini's citations named a publisher without giving a link. A name with no URL can never be matched to another engine's domain, so it counts as unique by default. Gemini's 13% coverage and 9-point unique contribution are therefore the least reliable figures in this section, and both understate its overlap with the other three. And source lists move: on the same twelve questions, 48% of the sources Perplexity cited in June were gone seven weeks later. This is a reason to weight engine coverage when you pick a plan, not a number to put in a board deck.

The best AI search visibility tools at a glance

Now the honest, tool-by-tool read.

Otterly.ai — best entry point

Otterly.ai is the most approachable way into ongoing tracking. It monitors brand mentions, citations and share-of-AI-voice across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews and Copilot — by far the gentlest on-ramp in this comparison.

It's monitoring-first, with daily tracking on every plan rather than minute-by-minute, which is fine for a small brand watching a handful of prompts and a limitation if you need to catch shifts the day they happen.

Pricing

Otterly.ai starts at $29/mo. Tiers run about $29 / $189 / $489 per month, rising with prompt volume, and a trial is available. The $29 Lite tier tracks 15 prompts. Claude, Gemini and Google AI Mode are add-ons rather than base coverage, from $9/mo to $439/mo — check which engines you need before you assume the base plan covers them. Every plan includes unlimited team members.

Engine coverage

Otterly.ai covers four engines on its base plans: ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews and Copilot. Claude, Gemini and Google AI Mode cost extra.

Pros

• Cheapest real starting price for true citation tracking
• Simple to use
• Solid engine coverage for the money
• Share-of-voice built in
• Unlimited seats on every tier

Cons

• Lower prompt counts on the cheap tier (15 on Lite)
• Lighter on "what to do next" than the analytics-heavy or enterprise tools below
• Weekly-ish refresh rather than daily
• Three engines are paid add-ons

Who it's for

Otterly.ai fits solo marketers and SMBs graduating from a one-time check to light, affordable ongoing monitoring.

Peec AI — best for marketing teams that want analytics

Peec AI positions itself as AI search analytics for marketing teams, and that's the right frame: it does visibility, position and sentiment tracking with competitor benchmarking, in a clean dashboard built for people who already live in marketing analytics. One thing to know before you shortlist it: Peec's prices only appear once its pricing page renders, so a quick look with scripts blocked shows tier names and features but no numbers, and you may conclude you have to sign up or ask sales.

The reason to choose it over a pure monitor is the analytics layer and the team ergonomics. If your stakeholders expect charts they can drop into a board deck, Peec is built for that audience.

Pricing

Peec AI starts at $80/mo. Its published tiers are Starter $80, Pro $205 and Advanced $420 a month billed annually ($95, $245 and $495 billed monthly), with Enterprise above them. The numbers only appear once the pricing page renders, so a plain fetch — or a quick look with scripts blocked — shows nothing. Read from peec.ai/pricing on 23 August 2026. Its two stated selling points are unlimited seats and a daily refresh.

Engine coverage

Peec AI is multi-engine, but top engines can cost extra depending on the plan.

Pros

• Strong analytics and competitor benchmarking
• Team-friendly dashboards built for reporting
• Unlimited seats
• Daily refresh — faster than most tools here
• Multi-engine

Cons

• Publishes no prices at all, so you cannot compare it on cost without a sales conversation
• A tracker and analytics tool first — shows you where you stand better than it hands you a to-do list
• Top engines can cost extra depending on plan

Who it's for

Peec AI fits in-house marketing teams that want serious multi-engine analytics and can tolerate asking for a price.

Profound — best for enterprises with budget

Profound is the enterprise pick for AI-search intelligence. What you pay for is depth: prompt-level data, citation analysis, and a recommendation layer aimed at large brands that need to defend a category position across many engines and markets. Its distinguishing asset is panel data on real prompt volumes that no other tool here ships.

Pricing

Profound starts at $99/mo. Its self-serve tiers on annual billing are $99/mo Starter (one seat, ChatGPT only) and $399/mo Growth (three seats, three engines). Enterprise is custom and sales-led above that. The Starter tier's single-engine limit is the catch — three engines means the $399 plan.

Engine coverage

Profound covers one engine at $99 and three at $399. Broader coverage is an enterprise conversation.

Pros

• Deepest analytics and recommendations in this list
• Panel data on real prompt volumes, unique here
• Built for scale, enterprise-grade controls
• Prompt-level citation analysis

Cons

• No free self-serve entry
• $99 Starter covers ChatGPT only — the useful multi-engine tier is $399/mo
• Pricing and onboarding assume an enterprise buyer
• Overkill, and overpriced, for a single small brand

Who it's for

Profound fits enterprise brands with a global footprint and the budget to match.

Scrunch AI — best for crawler / bot analytics

Scrunch AI combines visibility monitoring with something most pure trackers skip: AI bot-crawl analytics. Alongside tracking your mentions, it watches whether AI crawlers are actually fetching your pages — which matters because a model can't cite a page it never crawled.

Pricing

Scrunch AI's published plan is Core at $250/mo, with Enterprise on request. It also ships GA4 referral attribution, which Profound does not emphasise — so you can tie AI referrals to sessions you already measure.

Engine coverage

Scrunch AI is multi-engine, and adds crawler tracking for GPTBot, PerplexityBot and ClaudeBot.

Pros

• Monitoring plus crawler-behavior insight in one place
• Useful for diagnosing why you are not being cited, not just that you aren't
• GA4 referral attribution
• Enterprise controls at below-enterprise pricing

Cons

• Higher entry price than the value picks — roughly 9× Otterly's entry tier
• The crawler angle only pays off for teams technical enough to act on it

Who it's for

Scrunch AI fits teams that suspect a technical or crawlability problem is hurting their citations and want data to confirm it.

AthenaHQ — best for engine breadth

AthenaHQ's headline is coverage. If your buyers are split across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Copilot and the long tail of newer assistants, casting the widest net is its core argument.

Pricing

AthenaHQ costs about $295/mo (approximate — verify current). That places it in the mid-market band alongside Scrunch AI, well above the $29 entry tier and well below enterprise pricing.

Engine coverage

AthenaHQ states visibility across 9 models — the widest coverage on this page, and the reason to pick it over a cheaper monitor. Its pricing page names eight (ChatGPT, Perplexity, AI Overviews, AI Mode, Gemini, Claude, Copilot, Grok) with more available on request.

Pros

• Broadest engine coverage in this comparison
• Tracks citations as well as mentions
• Mid-market pricing rather than enterprise pricing
• One dashboard instead of several

Cons

• Breadth only pays off if your audience genuinely spreads across many engines
• A brand whose buyers cluster on one or two engines is paying for unused coverage
• Roughly 10× the entry price of Otterly.ai

Who it's for

AthenaHQ fits teams whose audience uses a wide spread of AI engines and who want one dashboard for all of them.

Rankscale.ai — best on the tightest budget

Rankscale.ai is the budget monitor, aimed at solos and small teams who want some ongoing signal without committing to a mid-market spend.

Pricing

Rankscale.ai starts at $20/mo (Essentials, as listed August 2026) — the lowest recurring price on this page, below even Otterly.ai's $29 entry tier.

Engine coverage

Rankscale.ai's coverage and prompt limits are tighter than the mid-market tools. Read the tier details before assuming parity with a $295/mo product.

Pros

• Lowest recurring price here for continuous monitoring
• Easy to justify as a solo founder
• Always-on rather than a one-time snapshot

Cons

• Tighter prompt and engine limits than the pricier tools
• Thin public documentation compared with the larger tools
• Less analytics depth than tools at 10× the price

Who it's for

Rankscale.ai fits cost-conscious solos and small teams who want a cheap, always-on pulse on their AI visibility.

Knowatoa — cheapest entry into ongoing tracking

Knowatoa is the cheapest way onto the ongoing-monitoring ladder rather than a one-time snapshot. Most trackers are paid-only because running prompts at scale costs money.

Pricing

Starter is $59/mo and Growth is $199/mo, with Enterprise on request; each plan starts with a free trial. Read from knowatoa.com/pricing on 23 August 2026. Note that this is a trial, not a free tier — every free option on this page is a one-time check.

Engine coverage

Knowatoa covers AI search monitoring across engines, with plans separated by volume rather than by feature.

Pros

• The lowest paid entry point for ongoing monitoring, not a snapshot
• A free trial lets you learn what tracking is worth before committing
• Simple two-tier structure with no add-on maze

Cons

• The trial ends; there is no free tier to fall back to
• You will outgrow Starter if you track many prompts across many engines
• Less analytics depth than the paid mid-market tools

Who it's for

Knowatoa fits anyone who wants continuous tracking at the lowest paid entry point, with a trial to test it first.

Writesonic — best for tracking plus content in one

Writesonic added a GEO module that combines visibility tracking with content generation. The pitch is one roof for measuring visibility and producing the content that improves it.

Pricing

Writesonic's GEO module starts at about $79/mo (approximate). That sits between the budget monitors and the mid-market analytics tools — but you are buying a writing product with tracking attached, not a tracker with writing attached.

Engine coverage

Writesonic tracks GEO visibility across engines as part of a wider content platform rather than as its core product.

Pros

• Tracking and content production under one login
• Reasonable entry price for what the GEO module includes
• Shortens the loop between "we are not cited here" and publishing something about it

Cons

• A do-everything platform is less sharp at pure citation tracking than a focused monitor
• You pay for content features whether or not you use them
• Tracking is a module, not the product's centre of gravity

Who it's for

Writesonic fits content teams that want to measure visibility and act on it — write, fix, publish — without juggling two products.

Free one-time checkers — Ahrefs, Semrush, Frase

Before any subscription, several established tools offer a free one-time AI visibility check — a snapshot rather than ongoing monitoring:

• Our AI Readiness Check — free, no signup, nothing stored. It runs seven deterministic checks on a page you give it and scores whether an AI engine can actually reach and parse it. It answers "can they read me," not "do they mention me," so it is the cheapest first step before you pay for tracking. Disclosure: this is ours.
• Ahrefs AI Visibility Checker — a free check for existing Ahrefs users and anyone who wants a quick share-of-voice baseline.
• Semrush AI Visibility Checker — a free one-time snapshot from inside the Semrush ecosystem.
• Frase — a free check, with the full report typically gated behind an email.

These are commodity tools in the best sense: they cost nothing, they give you a real baseline, and they're the right first move before you pay anyone for continuous tracking. They won't catch week-over-week change — that's what the paid monitors above are for — but for "where do I stand today?" they're hard to beat on price.

AI visibility platforms vs one-time checkers: which do you need?

The category splits cleanly in two, and picking the wrong half is the most common way to waste money here.

A one-time checker answers "does any AI engine name me right now?" It runs your brand once, hands back a snapshot, and costs nothing. That is the correct tool if you have never measured this before, because the first answer is usually blunt enough to act on without paying anyone.

An AI visibility platform answers a different question: "did that change this week, across several engines, against my competitors, and why?" It re-runs a fixed prompt set on a schedule and keeps the history. Everything in the comparison table above is a platform; the free checkers below are snapshots.

The practical rule: start with a snapshot. Move to a platform only when you have a specific reason to watch a trend — a competitor displacing you, a content push you want to measure, or a client who needs a monthly report. Paying for a platform before you have that reason buys you a dashboard you will not read.

Where Is My Brand in AI fits (honestly)

Two things from us, framed straight. Our AI Readiness Check is free and needs no signup — give it a URL and it runs seven deterministic checks on whether an AI engine can reach and parse that page, then scores it. It reads the live page rather than guessing, and nothing is stored. Our llms.txt generator builds a valid llms.txt file, though the llms.txt explainer is honest about that file's limits: Google has said it ignores it.

For the baseline question — "do AI engines name us yet?" — run one of the free one-time checks above (Ahrefs, Semrush or Frase), and for continuous, multi-engine tracking the paid platforms above are still where you go. That's the honest state of it.

Free vs paid vs DIY: do you actually need to pay?

There's a live debate about what this category should cost. In June 2026, SEO expert Lily Ray pointed out (on X) that more people are questioning the price of LLM-tracking tools and building their own cheaper versions with AI coding assistants. She added, fairly, that rolling your own isn't realistic for most business owners. She's right on both counts, so here are the three tracks actually open to you, honestly.

Free. A one-time checker (Ahrefs, Semrush, Frase) tells you where you stand today at zero cost. For a solo founder, or a brand just starting to care about AI search, that is genuinely enough for a while. You get a baseline, fix the obvious gaps, and re-check now and then. No subscription required.

Paid. A monitor like Otterly.ai (about $29/mo) earns its keep when "where do I stand today?" becomes "did a rival displace me this week, across five engines, and why?" That repetition (dozens of prompts, multiple engines, competitor share-of-voice, week over week) is the thing free checks can't do. If you manage this for clients or defend a category, you pay because doing it by hand costs more than the subscription.

DIY (build your own). This is the new third option, and it is real. The AI engines expose APIs, so a developer can script a handful of prompts, run them on a schedule, and log the answers to a spreadsheet for the price of the API calls. If you are technical, want full control, and only need to watch a few prompts, this can replace a cheap tier.

But be clear-eyed about what a home-built tracker is not, because this is where Lily Ray's caveat bites:

• It is a maintenance job, not a one-off. Engines change their output, rate limits, and access rules constantly. A script that works today breaks quietly next month, and you find out when your data is already wrong.
• You rebuild the boring parts yourself: competitor share-of-voice, sentiment, a dashboard your team can read, alerts when something shifts. That is most of what you are actually paying a tool for.
• Your time is not free. A few hours a month babysitting a scraper is a real cost, and for most non-technical owners the tool never gets built at all, or gets abandoned once the novelty fades.

The honest rule of thumb:

• Start free, always. Run a one-time check before you spend anything (see the free checkers above).
• Build your own only if you are technical, want control, and your needs are small and stable. It fits engineers, not most marketers or founders.
• Pay when ongoing, multi-engine, competitor-aware tracking starts changing your decisions, or when your time is worth more than the cheapest tier. At about $29/mo, a tool often wins on time alone.

If the prices in this category feel high, that instinct is not wrong. But for most people the answer is not to build a scraper. Start with a free check, generate a free llms.txt so engines can parse your pages, and pay only once the data is steering real decisions.

How to choose a search visibility tool

The right tool depends far more on your situation than on a feature checklist.

If you're a solo founder: Start with a free one-time check (Ahrefs, Semrush or Frase) to get a baseline, fix the obvious gaps, and generate a free llms.txt. If you want always-on monitoring at the lowest real spend, Rankscale.ai starts at $20/mo and Knowatoa at $59/mo, both with a free trial first. You probably don't need more until tracking changes week over week actually change your decisions.

If you're an in-house marketing team: Move to Otterly.ai (about $29/mo entry) for approachable monitoring, or Peec AI when you need analytics depth and team-ready dashboards, keeping in mind you will have to ask for a price. Pick AthenaHQ (about $295/mo) if your audience is genuinely spread across many engines, or Scrunch AI (about $250–300/mo) if you suspect a crawlability problem and want bot-crawl data. If you also produce a lot of content, Writesonic's GEO module (about $79/mo) keeps tracking and writing under one login.

If you're an enterprise: Profound for the deepest intelligence and recommendations across markets. Self-serve starts at $99/mo, but the enterprise feature set is custom and sales-led, so expect a call.

The decision framework, regardless of size: pick the cheapest tool that covers the engines and prompt volume you actually need. Coverage and volume, not brand name, are where the real cost lives, and an under-spec'd cheap plan that misses your buyers' favorite engine is a false economy. Our own measurement above gives you the order to buy coverage in: Perplexity and Google's AI Overview first (82% of the cited pages between them), then ChatGPT or Gemini for single-digit gains each.

How much do AI visibility tools cost?

Entry-level monitoring starts at $29/mo (Otterly.ai Lite, 15 prompts) and $20/mo (Rankscale Essentials). The mid-market — analytics depth, more engines, more prompts — runs roughly $250–$300/mo (AthenaHQ $295, Scrunch $250 annual). Profound's self-serve tiers are $99/mo Starter and $399/mo Growth, with custom enterprise pricing above that. Writesonic bundles tracking with content from $79/mo. Peec AI starts at $80/mo.

Three things inflate the real bill beyond the sticker price, and every one of them is easy to miss:

• Engines sold separately. Otterly's base plans cover four engines; Claude, Gemini and Google AI Mode are add-ons from $9 to $439/mo. If AI Mode is the surface you care about, budget for it.
• Per-seat multipliers. Semrush's AI Visibility Toolkit is $99/mo per domain (extra users start around $45), so team cost depends on domains and seats, not a flat per-head multiple, and sits on top of the underlying subscription.
• Prompt caps. The cheap tiers track 15–25 prompts. A real buyer-question set is bigger than that, and overage is where the tier jump happens.

Pricing in this category moves fast — new tiers, repackaged plans, engines split out as add-ons. The figures above were checked against each vendor's own pricing page on August 1, 2026; confirm before you commit.

Profound and Peec AI alternatives

If you landed here because a specific tool priced you out, the honest shortlist is short.

Alternatives to Profound. Profound's draw is depth — panel data on real prompt volumes that nobody else ships. If you want that depth on a smaller budget, AthenaHQ ($295/mo) is the closest analytics-led substitute, and Scrunch AI ($250/mo annual) matches it on enterprise controls with GA4 referral attribution Profound does not emphasise. If the $99 Starter tier is already enough, note it only covers ChatGPT — three engines need the $399 Growth plan.

Alternatives to Peec AI. Peec's appeal is unlimited seats and a daily refresh, which is genuinely hard to match. The nearest substitute on team economics is Otterly.ai ($29/mo Lite, unlimited team members on every plan), though it refreshes weekly rather than daily. For analytics depth over seat count, AthenaHQ is the swap. And with Peec's tiers now published, the comparison many people actually want — is Peec cheaper than the alternatives? — is one no honest page can answer for you; you have to ask them.

If you want out of paid tooling entirely, the free one-time checkers below plus a manual prompt set will carry a small brand a long way. That is the option most vendor comparisons leave out.

Frequently asked questions

What's the difference between a search visibility tool and a GEO platform? A search visibility tool has a narrow, sharp job: monitor whether AI engines mention and cite your brand, and track your share of voice over time. A GEO platform bundles that tracking with strategy, content generation and workflow. This page covers the trackers; for the broader platforms, see the best GEO tools.

Are there any free AI search visibility tools? For ongoing monitoring there is no free tier on this page — running prompts at scale costs money, and Knowatoa's $59/mo Starter is the cheapest paid entry. For a free one-time check, Ahrefs, Semrush and Frase all offer one. Our own llms.txt generator is free too (it fixes technical hygiene rather than tracking visibility). Start with a free check, then pay only when continuous tracking earns its keep.

How much do AI search visibility tools cost? Entry-level monitoring starts around $29/mo (Otterly.ai) or $20/mo (Rankscale.ai Essentials). Mid-market analytics and broad-coverage tools sit in the roughly $250–$300/mo range (AthenaHQ, Scrunch AI); Peec AI's Advanced tier ($420/mo) sits just above this band. Profound's self-serve plans are $99/mo and $399/mo, with enterprise scope custom-priced after a sales call. All figures are approximate — verify current.

Which AI engines should a visibility tool cover? At minimum, ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews, since that's where most buyers are. Our own test of 48 AI answers in August 2026 sharpens the order: across twelve buyer questions, tracking Perplexity alone would have shown 56% of the pages the four engines cited between them, Google's AI Overview 41%, ChatGPT 14% and Gemini 13%. Perplexity plus Google's AI Overview together reached 82%. A single-engine plan, and a ChatGPT-only plan in particular, leaves most of the cited set unseen. Copilot and Gemini matter for many audiences too. If your buyers are spread widely, a broad-coverage tool like AthenaHQ (8+ engines) is worth the premium; if they cluster on one or two engines, don't pay for breadth you won't use.

How do I measure my AI visibility before buying a tool? By hand, free, in an afternoon. Fix a set of 10 to 20 questions your buyers actually ask, run them on each engine, and log whether you appear, who appears with you, and which pages the engine cited. Our step-by-step guide to how to measure AI search visibility covers the four KPIs worth recording and the trap most guides skip: the engines show wildly different numbers of sources per answer, so a blended citation-share figure is not comparable across them.

Do I need an AI search visibility tool if I'm a small brand? Probably not at first. Run a free one-time check, fix the obvious gaps (a clear answer up top, genuine mentions, inclusion in third-party roundups), generate a free llms.txt, and re-check occasionally. A paid monitor earns its place once you're tracking many prompts across multiple engines continuously, or managing visibility for clients.

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Search visibility tools for AI search have matured fast: in 2026 you can pick from about $29/mo monitors, mid-market analytics players, and sales-led enterprise intelligence, plus genuinely free one-time checkers to start. But the tool is the easy part. What actually moves your visibility is the work the data points you toward: a clear answer on every page, real mentions where your buyers talk, and inclusion in the lists models trust. For that strategy, see how to rank on ChatGPT and the broader AI search visibility guide. And before you buy anything, take your own free reading first: how to measure AI search visibility walks through the manual method and the four KPIs worth logging. Pick the cheapest tool that covers the engines you need, start with the free check, and let the data, not the sales call, decide when to upgrade.

This guide is part of our series on AI search visibility and AI search optimization. Written by Minel Gunesoglu, founder of Is My Brand in AI (more about us). Last updated August 21, 2026. Pricing for Otterly, Profound, AthenaHQ and Scrunch was read from each vendor's own pricing page on August 1, 2026; Peec AI's tiers were read on 23 August 2026. All other figures are approximate, so verify current numbers on each vendor's site. The engine-coverage measurement comes from our own cross-engine citation study, collected 6 and 7 August 2026.