12 Best AI Visibility Tools for SEO Teams in 2026

I asked Perplexity which image CDN is best for a WordPress site, and it cited one of my own sites back to me.

Not the one I expected. It pulled from theimagecdn.com and named BunnyCDN, Cloudflare, Imgix, Jetpack, ShortPixel and EWWW. TheGuideX, which has a far more detailed post on that exact question, was nowhere in the answer.

That is the whole problem in one screenshot. I could not have guessed that, and neither can you. You cannot look up your position in an AI answer the way you look up a ranking.

So a category of tools appeared to measure it for you. Twelve of them, give or take, and the lists reviewing those tools are mostly recycled from vendor marketing pages.

I did the boring thing instead. I opened all 12 pricing pages myself, in one day, read the real numbers off the real DOM, and worked out what each one actually tracks rather than what it claims.

The short version

My picks, if you want the answer without the reading:

• Best data: Ahrefs Brand Radar — the biggest index by far, with a genuinely free checker.
• Best value: Nightwatch — Claude, Gemini, Perplexity and ChatGPT all included from €79.
• Cheapest real tracking: Otterly.AI — $29 a month, 15 prompts, four platforms.
• Do not buy anything yet if nobody is asking AI about your category. More on that below, because it applies to more of you than the vendors would like.

What do AI visibility tools actually do?

Strip the dashboards away and every one of these does the same four things. The differences are in how well, how often, and how honestly.

1. Run a prompt list on a schedule. You define the questions your buyers ask ("best CRM for a small agency"), the tool fires them at each engine daily or weekly, and records the answers. This is the engine room. Everything else is a view on top of it.
2. Detect whether you were named, and how. A mention means the engine said your brand out loud. A citation means it linked your page as a source. These are different problems with different fixes, and most dashboards blur them.
3. Log which sources got cited. This is the most useful and least advertised feature. It tells you which pages — usually not yours — are teaching the model its answer.
4. Compare you to competitors. Share of voice across the prompt set, so you can see who owns the category rather than just whether you exist.

On top of that sit the features that actually separate the tools: sentiment (are you named as the good option or the cautionary one), personas (Scrunch lets you ask as different buyer types), content audits (Otterly scores a URL for AI-readiness before you publish), and API or MCP access if you want the data in your own stack.

The metrics, and which one you actually want

Vendors use these words loosely. They are not interchangeable.

Mention rate and citation rate come apart more than you would think. Semrush found that almost 62% of AI citations are "ghost citations" — your page feeds the answer but your name never appears in it. So a tool that counts only mentions will tell you your content is doing nothing, while it quietly does most of the work.

Check which one your dashboard is counting before you celebrate or panic.

Why two tools give you two different numbers

This is the part that matters most and gets written about least. Point two trackers at the same brand in the same week and they will disagree. Not because one is broken — because they are not doing the same thing.

• Some run their own prompt engines and scrape the output. Cheap, broad, and closest to what a real user sees, but it is scraping, with everything that implies.
• Some use official APIs. Conductor claims direct partnerships with OpenAI and Perplexity. Cleaner data, but an API answer is not always what a logged-in human gets.
• Some buy third-party panel data. Different population, different answer.
• And they all sample different prompts, at different times, on different engines.

Stack that on top of answers that are genuinely random (next section) and disagreement is the expected outcome, not a bug. It also means you cannot mix tools and compare the numbers. Pick one, stay on it, and treat its output as an internally-consistent trend line rather than a measurement of reality.

The 12 best AI visibility tools compared

Every price here was read off the vendor's own page on 16 July 2026. Prices in this category move fast, so treat them as dated, not permanent — that is exactly how the recycled lists got theirs wrong.

Read the prompts and engines columns before the price column. Prompts × engines × sampling frequency is what you are actually buying — the dashboard is just how it is drawn. Profound's 1 in the engines column is not a typo, and Surfer's 25 prompts refresh weekly, not daily.

Why the number you are buying moves on its own

Before you spend anything, understand what these tools can and cannot know. This is the part no vendor puts on the pricing page.

AI answers are not stable. Researchers at the University of St. Gallen re-ran identical prompts across ChatGPT, Gemini, Google AI Mode and Perplexity, minutes apart, and found the cited sources overlapped by only 32-43%. Not day to day — minutes apart, same prompt. Model randomness alone accounts for most of the movement.

Zoom out and it gets worse. Profound tested around 80,000 prompts per platform and found 40-60% of cited domains are completely different a month later for the same questions: 40.5% on Perplexity, 59.3% on Google AI Overviews.

So when a dashboard shows your visibility fell from 34% to 28%, that may be a real drop, or it may be Tuesday.

This is an argument for the tools, not against them. One check is noise. The only way to see a signal is to sample the same prompts repeatedly and watch the trend. That is literally the product.

But it also tells you which spec matters, and it is not the dashboard. It is prompts × engines × how often they sample. Everything else is decoration.

The tools, one by one

Pick 1

01

Ahrefs Brand Radar — the biggest data set

Best for: Teams that want the largest prompt index and a free way to check before paying anything.

If you want the most data, this is where it is. Ahrefs indexes 402M+ prompts a month and derives them from real search behaviour rather than making them up.

Read the index breakdown before you believe the headline, though. Of those 402M prompts, 316.8M are Google AI Overviews. ChatGPT is 14.4M, Perplexity 14.4M, Gemini 14.4M. So "the largest AI visibility database" is 79% one surface. If AI Overviews is where your customers are, that is a genuine advantage. If you care mainly about ChatGPT, the gap between Ahrefs and everyone else narrows a lot.

On features, the differentiator is search-backed prompts. Most tools invent the questions they test; Ahrefs derives them from real Google search behaviour, so you are measured against what people actually ask rather than what a product manager imagined. The reports break out mentions by platform, the topics that trigger them, and the domains and pages cited alongside you — that last one is where the actual work comes from. It also tracks mentions and citations separately, which many tools do not.

The free AI Visibility Checker is real and needs no signup, which makes it the sensible first move for anyone. It is a one-time snapshot that funnels to the paid product, and it is still the best free thing here.

The honest catch: the pricing is genuinely confusing. The Brand Radar page sells "Select platforms" at $398/mo and "All platforms" at $699/mo, while the main pricing page advertises Brand Radar "from $199/mo" — an entry point the Brand Radar page never shows you. And it does not track Claude at all.

Free checker, no signupFrom $398/moon ahrefs.com

Try Ahrefs Brand Radar

Pick 2

02

Nightwatch — the most engines per euro

Best for: Teams that want Claude, Gemini, Perplexity and ChatGPT tracked without paying enterprise for the privilege.

This is the value pick, and it is not close. Nightwatch tracks ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, AI Mode and AI Overviews on every tier, including the €79 entry plan.

Compare that to the field: Profound wants enterprise money for Claude, Peec wants enterprise, Writesonic wants enterprise, Otterly charges an add-on, and Ahrefs, Semrush, SE Ranking and Surfer simply do not do it. Nightwatch charges €79.

Entry gives you 50 prompts and 1,500 AI responses a month. Professional is €159 for 150 prompts, Agency €399 for 500. Seats are unlimited on all of them, which quietly matters when rivals charge per head.

The honest catch: it is priced in euros, there is no free tier (14-day trial, no card), and the AI tracking is younger than the rank tracking it is bolted onto. Also, the $32/mo figure floating around their blog is the rank-tracking floor, not this.

14-day trialFrom €79/moon nightwatch.io

Try Nightwatch

Pick 3

03

Otterly.AI — the cheapest real tracking

Best for: Solo marketers and small teams who want a genuine tracker for the price of lunch.

At $29 a month, Otterly is the cheapest ongoing tracker I could verify anywhere in this category.

Lite buys 15 prompts across ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity and Copilot. Standard is $189 for 100 prompts plus API and MCP access. Premium is $489 for 400. Annual billing knocks 15% off, and team members are unlimited on every tier.

Fifteen prompts is genuinely thin. But 15 prompts sampled properly beats 100 prompts you never bought, and it is enough to establish whether you exist in AI answers at all.

Standard adds the features worth naming: API and MCP access, so you can pull the data into your own stack instead of screenshotting a dashboard, plus 5,000 GEO URL audits a month that score a page for AI-readiness before you publish it. Otterly also runs a genuinely useful free GEO toolkit — prompt research, Google AI Mode query fan-out, a crawler simulation that tells you whether GPTBot and ClaudeBot can actually fetch your site, and a content check. Fair warning from using them: every one of those tools emails you the result rather than showing it on screen, so they cost you an address.

The honest catch: Claude, Gemini and AI Mode are all paid add-ons rather than included, so the real price climbs once you want full coverage. The tracker itself has no free tier, only a trial — the free toolkit is a separate lead-gen funnel, not a way to track anything over time.

Free trialFrom $29/moon otterly.ai

See Otterly pricing

Pick 4

04

Semrush AI Visibility Toolkit — if you already pay Semrush

Best for: Teams already inside Semrush who want AI visibility on the same bill.

$99 a month per domain, billed annually, for 25 custom prompts tracked daily. Daily is the important word — plenty of pricier tools refresh weekly.

There are two doors and they are not cross-referenced. The standalone toolkit is $99/mo for 25 prompts. The main pricing page instead bundles AI visibility into SEO+AI plans from $165.17/mo with 50 prompts a day. Which is better depends entirely on what else you use, and the vendor does not make that comparison easy.

The honest catch: no Claude. Extra domains are another $99 each, and +50 prompts costs $60/mo, so it scales expensively. Worth knowing too: Semrush now owns Backlinko, Traffic Think Tank and Search Engine Land — three of the pages currently ranking for this exact search. Two of them put Semrush at number one and neither says who owns them.

$99/mo per domain25 prompts, dailyon semrush.com

Try Semrush

Pick 5

05

Scrunch — Claude without enterprise pricing

Best for: Teams that need Claude and Meta tracked on a self-serve plan and can carry $250 a month.

Scrunch covers ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, AI Mode, AI Overviews and Meta on its public tiers, which is the broadest coverage here short of Rankscale.

Starter is $250/mo annual ($300 month-to-month) for 350 custom prompts, 1,000 industry prompts, 3 personas and 3 users. Growth doubles most of that at $417/mo annual.

The feature worth paying for here is personas. You ask the same question as different buyer types, because an engine answers "best project tool" differently for a solo freelancer than for a procurement lead at a bank. Nobody else at this price does it, and if you sell to more than one kind of buyer it is the difference between a number and an insight. The 1,000 bundled industry prompts also mean you are not starting from a blank prompt list, which is the step most teams quietly never finish.

One practical note that half the internet has not caught up with: scrunchai.com 301-redirects to scrunch.com. If a list still sends you to the old domain, that list has not been checked recently.

The honest catch: $250 is a serious jump from Otterly or Nightwatch, and the 5-page audit limit on Starter is stingy. It used to be demo-gated, so older reviews describing a sales-call wall are out of date.

7-day trial, no cardFrom $250/moon scrunch.com

See Scrunch pricing

Pick 6

06

Rankscale — the widest engine list

Best for: Anyone who wants ten engines including Claude, Grok and DeepSeek without an enterprise contract.

Ten engines on self-serve: ChatGPT, Perplexity, AI Mode, AI Overviews, Gemini, DeepSeek, Mistral, Claude, Grok and Copilot. Nobody else on this page offers that range without a sales call.

Essentials starts around $20/mo, Pro is $99, Growth $385, and Enterprise is publicly priced at $780 — a rarity worth applauding in a category addicted to "contact us".

The honest catch: it bills in credits, not prompts, so you cannot compare it like-for-like with anything else here. Pro gives 1,200 credits (up to 4,800 AI responses) a month. The Essentials tier is thinly documented, and it is a smaller vendor than the names above it.

Try Pro freeFrom ~$20/moon rankscale.ai

See Rankscale pricing

Pick 7

07

Profound — the enterprise name with a misleading entry price

Best for: Enterprise teams who will actually pay for the top tier, where the product genuinely is excellent.

Profound appears on every list in this category, usually at the top. The product is strong. The $99 entry tier is not what people think it is.

Look at the screenshot rather than my summary. Starter: $99/month, billed yearly, "ChatGPT tracking only", 50 prompts. One engine. Growth at $399 gets you three (ChatGPT, Perplexity, AI Overviews). Claude, Gemini, Copilot, Meta, Grok and DeepSeek are all enterprise-only, where you get up to ten.

While I was here I checked what the ranking lists say Profound costs. The page currently sitting at number two for this search says $499/mo. Traffic Think Tank says "$499/month for 200 prompts". The real Starter price is $99. That is not a small drift, it is wrong by five times, and it is on the pages most people read.

The honest catch: the $99 tier tracks one engine, and both self-serve prices are annual-billed only — I could not verify a monthly rate at all.

From $99/mo (annual)ChatGPT only at entryon tryprofound.com

See Profound pricing

Pick 8

08

Peec AI — the one every listicle prices wrong

Best for: Marketing teams that want a clean dashboard and can live with three models.

Peec is a good product with a genuinely nice interface, 2,500+ teams on it, and a price nobody reports correctly.

Every list I read prices it at €89/€199. The live page says $95 / $245 / $495. The lists are a full pricing revision behind, and they are all behind in the same way, which tells you they are copying each other rather than checking.

Starter is 50 prompts, Pro 150, Advanced 350. Users are unlimited on all tiers and countries cost nothing extra, which is unusually fair.

The honest catch: every self-serve tier says "choose 3 models" — you pick three from ChatGPT, AI Mode, AI Overviews, Copilot, Perplexity and Gemini, and each extra model is a paid add-on ($35-165/mo depending on tier). Claude is enterprise-only. So the real cost of full coverage is well above the sticker.

From $95/mo3 models includedon peec.ai

See Peec AI pricing

Pick 9

09

HubSpot AEO — the cheapest paid tracker

Best for: Small teams who want the simplest possible entry and no CRM commitment.

$50 a month for 25 prompts across ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity, and — the part that surprised me — no HubSpot subscription required.

Free for 28 days, then $50/mo ($45 annual). The free AEO Grader gives you a one-time score out of 100 across sentiment, presence quality, brand recognition, share of voice and market position.

Name check, because this trips up half the internet: the free tool used to be called AI Search Grader and is now the AEO Grader. If a post recommends "HubSpot AI Search Grader", it is recommending a name that no longer exists.

The honest catch: three engines only. No Claude, no Copilot, and — oddly for a tool at this price — no AI Overviews, which is the biggest surface of all.

Free AEO Grader + 28 days$50/moon hubspot.com

See HubSpot AEO

Pick 10

10

SE Ranking — the $89 that is really $218

Best for: Teams already on SE Ranking who want AI tracking bolted onto their existing plan.

The AI Search add-on is $89/mo for 200 prompts. That number is real and it is also not the price.

It is an add-on, not a product. It sits on top of a base plan: Core at $129/mo or Growth at $279/mo. So the realistic entry is $129 + $89 = $218/mo, not $89. The base plans do include some AI tracking on their own (Core gives 100 prompts daily), which muddies the comparison further.

There is a genuinely useful free check on the tracker page — five attempts a day, no signup.

The honest catch: the add-on maths is buried, no Claude, and the pricing page moved. Both /prices.html and /prices/ now 404; pricing lives at /subscription.html. If a list links you to the old URL, it has not been checked.

5 free checks a day$218/mo realisticon seranking.com

See SE Ranking AI Search

Pick 11

11

Surfer AI Tracker — check which tier you are buying

Best for: Surfer users who want AI tracking beside their content workflow.

Five engines, decent dashboard, and one trap on the pricing page.

The $49 Discovery tier does not include AI visibility tracking. The real entry for AI tracking is Standard at $99/mo, which gives you 25 prompts refreshed weekly. Pro at $182 moves you to 50 prompts daily.

Weekly refresh is the problem. Given cited domains move 40-60% a month, 25 prompts checked once a week is four samples a month per prompt. Otterly gives you daily-ish tracking for $29.

The honest catch: all prices are annual-billed, weekly refresh at the entry tier is weak for the money, and there is no Claude or Copilot.

$99/mo for trackingWeekly refresh at entryon surferseo.com

See Surfer pricing

Pick 12

12

Writesonic — a writing platform with tracking attached

Best for: Content teams that want AI visibility tracking bundled with article generation.

$79/mo (annual) for 50 prompts, plus 15 AI articles a month. That bundle is the point — this is a content tool that added tracking, not a tracker.

Perplexity is not on any self-serve tier. Starter, Basic and Growth track ChatGPT, Gemini and Google AI Overviews only. Claude, Perplexity, Grok, DeepSeek, Copilot and Meta all need enterprise. For a tool sold on GEO, leaving Perplexity off every self-serve plan is a strange call.

The honest catch: annual billing only on the published prices, and you are partly paying for article generation whether you want it or not.

From $79/mo (annual)No Perplexity self-serveon writesonic.com

See Writesonic pricing

Conductor and BrightEdge — the ones that will not tell you

Both have real products. Conductor's AI Search Performance claims official API partnerships with OpenAI and Perplexity rather than scraping, which is a genuine data-quality argument. BrightEdge has AI Catalyst built on its Generative Parser.

Neither publishes a price. Conductor says its pricing is "value-based and transparent" and then does not print a number. BrightEdge is contact-sales only.

If you are big enough for these, you have a procurement team. If you are not, the twelve above are your market.

Which free AI visibility checker should you use?

All the free tools are one-shot diagnostics that funnel you toward a paid plan. That is fine — they are still the right first move, because they cost nothing and they tell you whether you have a problem worth paying to watch.

Start with Ahrefs' checker. It covers the most platforms and asks for nothing. One honest note from doing this myself: it is protected by a Cloudflare human check, so it is built for a person clicking, not a script.

Otterly's toolkit is the most interesting of the four and the only one with a price. Its AI crawler simulation answers a question none of the others touch — whether GPTBot, ClaudeBot and PerplexityBot can physically fetch your pages, which is worth knowing before you spend a month wondering why you are invisible. Its query fan-out tool shows how Google AI Mode explodes one question into several sub-queries, which is genuinely the mechanism behind AI Overviews. But I ran all four and each one ends the same way: "we will email you when results are ready." Useful, not free.

None of these is ongoing tracking. A snapshot of a number that moves 40-60% a month tells you almost nothing on its own. Use it to find out whether you exist, not to measure progress.

Do you actually need one of these?

Here is the part the vendor blogs will not write.

If nobody asks AI about your category, you will pay $99 a month to watch a zero. AI referral traffic is still a low single-digit share of most sites' referrals. The traffic that does arrive tends to convert well, but "converts well" on a tiny base is still a tiny number.

Buy a tracker when you have something to defend: a category people genuinely ask AI about, competitors who are getting named instead of you, and a budget for the GEO work the tool will tell you to do. A dashboard does not move anything by itself.

Two things to fix before you spend a rupee on tracking:

1. Your attribution. AI assistants strip referrers, so a large share of AI sessions land in GA4 as "Direct". If you have not built a channel group that catches chatgpt.com, perplexity.ai, claude.ai and gemini.google.com, you are already blind to traffic you have. That fix is free, and I have written the exact GA4 rule (plus the two traps that break it) in the guide on AI dark traffic.
2. Search Console. Google's generative AI performance report landed in June 2026 and covers AI Overviews and AI Mode. Be clear about its limits: it reports impressions only — no clicks, no CTR, no position, no queries. It is also rolling out to a subset of sites. It is free, though, and it is Google's own data.

My position: most small sites should do the free checks, fix attribution, and spend the $99 on getting mentioned instead of on watching whether they were. Mentions are what move AI visibility. A dashboard is not a mention.

What actually moves your AI visibility

The tool tells you where you stand. It does not tell you what to do, and the answer is less exotic than the category implies.

Off-site mentions do the heavy lifting. Ahrefs studied 75,000 brands and found branded web mentions correlate with AI Overview visibility at 0.664, against 0.218 for backlinks — roughly three times stronger. Correlation is not causation and one study is not a law, but the direction is consistent with everything else in this space: get named in the places models read.

That is why unlinked brand mentions matter more here than they ever did for classic SEO, and why the work that gets you cited by answer engines is mostly old-fashioned: be genuinely worth citing, be specific, be somewhere the model can read you.

One more number worth carrying. Semrush found that almost 62% of AI citations are "ghost citations" — your page is used as a source but your brand name never appears in the answer. So a tool that only counts brand mentions is missing most of what your content is doing, and a tool that only counts citations is missing the mentions. Check which one your dashboard is counting before you celebrate or panic.

How I checked this

Every price, engine list and plan limit here was read off the vendor's own live page on 16 July 2026, in one sitting. Where a page was JavaScript-heavy and returned nothing useful to a fetch — Peec and SE Ranking both were — I read the rendered DOM in a real browser instead.

Third-party lists were used only to find URLs, never as a source of fact. That decision is the entire reason this post disagrees with the ones above it.

What I could not verify, I have said so rather than guessed: monthly (non-annual) rates for Profound, Writesonic and Surfer are not published; Ahrefs' $199 Brand Radar entry point is advertised on one page and absent from the other; and whether Peec bills in euros outside the US, I do not know.

Prices in this category go stale in weeks. Mine will too. Check the vendor page before you buy, which is the same advice that would have saved the pages currently ranking above this one.

Final take

If you want the most data and a free way to start, use Ahrefs Brand Radar — just know that 79% of its index is AI Overviews. If you want the most engines for the money, Nightwatch at €79 includes Claude when almost nobody else does. If you want the cheapest real tracking, Otterly is $29.

And if you are a small site with no AI presence yet, buy nothing. Run the free checkers, fix your attribution, and put the money into being worth citing.

Whatever you pick, judge it on prompts, engines and sampling frequency — and re-check the price yourself before you pay. Every list above this one got at least one of those wrong.