The best AI visibility tools in 2026: 11 compared on price, engines and what they do with the data

AI visibility tools all start from the same idea: ask the AI engines the questions your customers ask, over and over, and record who gets named. Where they differ is everything that decides whether a tool is worth paying for — which engines are on the plan you can afford, how many questions you get, whether they count citations or only mentions, and whether anything happens after the report lands.

This comparison covers eleven paid tools and four free ones. Every price and engine list below comes from the tool's own pricing or product page, checked on 3 October 2026. Prices in this category change often, so treat them as a snapshot and confirm on the vendor's site before buying.

Disclosure: CiteCycle, which publishes this guide, is one of the tools listed. It is described with the same fields as the rest, including what it does not do.

How we compared them

Six things separate these tools in practice:

• Engines on the entry plan. Homepages list every engine a vendor supports; the plan you can afford often covers three or four. Claude, Gemini and Google AI Mode are common add-ons.
• Entry price, in the currency and billing period shown. "From $79" billed annually is not a $79 monthly plan.
• Prompt allowance. The number of questions tracked decides how much of your market you actually see. Fifteen prompts is a sample; 150 is a picture.
• Mentions versus citations. A brand mention is your name in the answer; an AI citation is a source the engine links. They diverge constantly — engines often use a page without naming its brand, a pattern called a ghost citation.
• Monitoring or action. Some tools stop at dashboards; others add recommendations, content drafts or page optimizations.
• A free way to try it. A free plan, a trial, or at least a one-off check.

At a glance

The tools, one by one

Profound — best for enterprise brands

Profound is the enterprise end of the category. It began as AI-search analytics and now sells an "AI Marketer" agent that researches, writes content and reports for the brand, alongside reusable agents and flagged opportunities.

• Engines: the free trial covers ChatGPT, Gemini and Google AI Overviews; the enterprise plan covers "up to 9 answer engines" (the pricing page does not name all nine).
• Pricing: a free trial running 50 prompts daily for 7 days, then Enterprise at a custom price. There is no public self-serve paid plan.
• Notable: Agent Analytics (traffic from AI crawlers and agents via CDN integrations), prompt volume data, ChatGPT Shopping on Enterprise, SSO and SOC 2.
• Watch for: if you need a published price or a monthly plan you can start without a sales call, Profound is not built for that. See Profound alternatives.

Peec AI — best for prompt-level analytics and agencies

Peec AI focuses on prompt-level analytics for brands and agencies, with separate agency pricing.

• Engines: self-serve plans let you pick three models from ChatGPT, Google AI Mode, AI Overviews, Microsoft Copilot, Gemini and Naver AI; Perplexity appears as an extra model. Enterprise lists up to 13, including Claude, Grok, DeepSeek, Qwen, Mistral and Meta.
• Pricing (shown in euros only): Starter €85/month with 50 prompts, Pro €205/month with 150, Advanced €425/month with 350, Enterprise custom. Annual billing is 15% off; extra models start at €25/month. A free trial is offered.
• Notable: prompt volume and suggestions, product-level visibility from a catalog upload, tracking of sponsored placements, and fact-checking of claims AI engines make about you.
• Watch for: three engines on self-serve plans; adding more raises the price.

Otterly.AI — best for the lowest-cost monitoring

Otterly is the inexpensive way to start monitoring brand mentions and citations, with GEO page audits included.

• Engines: ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity and Microsoft Copilot. Claude ($29), Google AI Mode ($9) and Gemini ($9) are add-ons.
• Pricing (USD, excluding tax): Lite $29/month, or $25/month billed annually, with 15 prompts; Standard $189/month; Premium $489/month; Enterprise custom. A free trial is offered.
• Notable: 1,000 GEO URL audits a month on Lite, ChatGPT ads tracking, agent analytics and API/MCP access from Standard up, unlimited team members, and recommendations on every plan.
• Watch for: 15 prompts is a narrow sample. Adding Claude and Gemini to Lite more than doubles its price.

Semrush AI Visibility Toolkit — best if you already use Semrush

Semrush's AI Visibility Toolkit adds AI-mention tracking, prompt research and AI-readiness audits to the Semrush suite.

• Engines: ChatGPT, Google AI, Gemini and Perplexity.
• Pricing: the toolkit is "$99/mo per domain, billed annually" with 25 tracked prompts and a 7-day free trial. Semrush One bundles start at $199/month ($165.17/month billed annually) with 50 prompts.
• Notable: brand sentiment, competitor analysis, prompt research, site-audit checks for AI bot access, and white-label reporting.
• Watch for: the value is highest if you already pay for Semrush; as a standalone AI tracker, 25 prompts at an annual commitment is a modest allowance.

Ahrefs Brand Radar — best for researching any brand's AI mentions

Brand Radar is Ahrefs' answer to AI visibility: research any brand's mentions across Ahrefs' own prompt database, then track your own prompts on top.

• Engines: Google AI Overviews, Gemini, ChatGPT, Perplexity and Copilot, plus Claude and AI Mode; YouTube, TikTok and Reddit are in beta.
• Pricing: Brand Radar AI from $199/month; custom prompt packages from $50/month (2,500 checks a month). Core Ahrefs plans include 150–600 tracked-prompt checks a month. It can be bought standalone.
• Notable: mention and citation tracking, competitor benchmarking, AI traffic to your pages, and daily updates. Ahrefs also runs a free AI visibility checker.
• Watch for: the prompt database is the differentiator — useful for market research across brands, less so if you only need your own shortlist of questions.

Rankscale — best for budget multi-engine tracking

Rankscale is a credit-based AI rank tracker with page audits and citation analysis.

• Engines: ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Mode, AI Overviews, Gemini, DeepSeek, Mistral, Claude and Copilot, with Grok also listed.
• Pricing: Essentials $17/month, yearly only; Pro $99/month with 1,200 credits (up to 4,800 AI answers) and a 7-day free trial; Pro+ $229; Growth $385 with white-label; Enterprise $780. Yearly billing saves 15%.
• Notable: unlimited search terms, with credits limiting how often they run; citation analysis; page audits; a REST API.
• Watch for: credits, not prompts, are the real limit. Estimate how many answers a month you need before choosing a tier.

Writesonic — best for combining tracking with AI writing

Writesonic is an SEO and GEO platform that pairs AI-visibility tracking with AI article writing and agent workflows.

• Engines: self-serve plans cover ChatGPT, Gemini and Google AI Overviews; Enterprise covers ten, adding Perplexity, Claude, Grok, DeepSeek, Copilot, Meta AI and AI Mode.
• Pricing: Starter "$79 per month, billed annually" with 50 prompts and 15 AI articles a month; Basic $199; Growth $399; Enterprise custom. Free trial, no credit card.
• Notable: an Action Center for on-page and off-page actions, AI articles, site audits, and sentiment from the Growth plan.
• Watch for: Perplexity and Claude are enterprise-only.

Scrunch — best for serving AI agents optimized pages

Scrunch pairs visibility monitoring with an "Agent Experience Platform" that serves AI-optimized versions of your pages to AI agents.

• Engines: Core covers ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews and Copilot; Enterprise covers nine, adding Claude, Gemini, Meta AI, AI Mode and Grok.
• Pricing: Core $250/month with 125 prompts and 5,000 responses a month, 7-day free trial; Enterprise custom.
• Notable: citation and source tracking, sentiment, AI bot traffic, recommendations, one page optimization a month on Core, and basic content generation.
• Watch for: Gemini is enterprise-only.

AthenaHQ — best for trying many engines on credits

AthenaHQ is credit-based GEO tracking with content-optimization agents, and the only paid tool here with a free plan that includes credit.

• Engines: the free plan covers ChatGPT, Perplexity, AI Overviews, Gemini and Copilot; Starter covers eleven, adding AI Mode, Claude, Grok, DeepSeek, Meta AI and Mistral.
• Pricing: Essential is free with $25 of credit (300 credits); Starter is $295/month with 3,600 credits, where one credit is one AI response. Annual billing is 17% off.
• Notable: source and competitor insights, prompt volume estimates, content recommendations and an optimization agent.
• Watch for: the jump from free to $295/month is steep.

Goodie AI — best for revenue attribution

Goodie positions itself as a full research-to-revenue loop for answer engine optimization, with revenue attribution as the headline.

• Engines: Core covers ChatGPT, AI Overview, Perplexity, AI Mode and Copilot; Pro has eight, adding Gemini and Amazon Alexa.
• Pricing: Core $399/month with 120 prompts and a 7-day free trial; Pro $999/month; an agency plan at $275/month billed quarterly or annually; Enterprise by demo.
• Notable: revenue attribution, SKU-level visibility for agentic commerce on Pro, MCP access, AEO strategist support, and 50 optimizations a month on Core.
• Watch for: the highest entry price on this list.

CiteCycle — best for small teams that want a weekly action plan

CiteCycle (ours) asks the questions your customers ask every week, shows who the AI mentions and cites, and turns each gap into a ranked action: pages to refresh, lists to get on, and drafts ready to publish.

• Engines: ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and Google search; Google AI Overviews on Pro. It does not track Perplexity, Copilot or Google AI Mode.
• Pricing: a free plan with 1 brand and 2 questions; Pro at $49.90/month or $499/year with 3 brands, 20 questions and 30 content drafts a month.
• Notable: mentions and citations tracked separately, a weekly action plan with outcome tracking, AI content drafts, and outreach copy. It never posts or sends anything on your behalf.
• Watch for: weekly runs only, by design — no daily tracking — and fewer engines than the enterprise tools.

Free ways to check your AI visibility

If you only need a snapshot, start here before paying for anything:

• HubSpot AI Search Grader — a free score out of 100 for how GPT, Perplexity and Gemini describe your brand, weighted heavily toward sentiment. It reflects what the models say from training data. A form unlocks the full results; ongoing tracking is HubSpot AEO at $50/month.
• Ahrefs' free AI visibility checker — a free entry point to Brand Radar's data.
• Amplitude AI Visibility — a free, limited report covering ChatGPT and Google AI Overviews, with the full product inside Amplitude's analytics platform.
• CiteCycle's free AI visibility checker — enter a domain and it asks ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude five unbranded customer questions with web search on, then shows how many answers name you and who is recommended instead. No sign-up.

How to choose

• You just want to know where you stand: run a free check first. A single snapshot is noisy, but it tells you whether you are in the conversation at all.
• You want ongoing tracking on a small budget: Otterly, Rankscale or CiteCycle. Compare prompt allowances, not just prices.
• You already pay for Semrush or Ahrefs: start with their AI toolkits before adding another subscription.
• You need many engines, including Claude and AI Mode: compare Ahrefs Brand Radar, Rankscale and AthenaHQ, whose plans list the widest coverage below enterprise tier.
• You need recommendations or content, not just data: look at the "beyond monitoring" column — and check whether the actions are on the plan you would buy.
• You are an enterprise with procurement needs: Profound, Peec AI's enterprise tier, Scrunch and Goodie, which list SSO, attribution or agency features.

Whichever you pick, the tool only measures. What moves the numbers is work on the sources AI engines read — the generative engine optimization guide covers what that work is.