What are the best AI visibility tools, and what do their numbers actually tell you?

By Andrej Ruckij · November 1, 2026

TL;DR: For a small business, start free: Bing Webmaster Tools’ AI Performance report and a manual check of 10-20 buyer questions, then Otterly Lite ($29/month) or Peec AI Starter ($95/month) if you want it tracked daily. If you already pay for Semrush or Ahrefs, their add-ons (Semrush AI Visibility Toolkit at $99/month, Ahrefs Brand Radar from $50/month for custom prompts) are the cheapest way to add it. Agencies with many clients look at Peec AI, Scrunch ($300/month month-to-month) or Profound (custom pricing). Whatever you buy, read the output as “how often we show up across many runs”, never as a rank. AI answers barely repeat: in a SparkToro study of 2,961 runs, ChatGPT and Google’s AI returned the same brand list less than 1% of the time. And the tool’s collection method matters: Surfer found that answers pulled through the API shared only about 16-32% of brands with what users see in the app.

Primores runs AI visibility audits for brands: see how we work with brands.

I read the pricing pages of every tool below on November 1, 2026. Prices change often in this category, and Ahrefs shows different currencies and different package structures depending on where you open it, so treat the figures as “as listed that day”.

What is an AI visibility tool?

It’s software that asks ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Google’s AI Overviews and AI Mode (sometimes Copilot or Claude too) a set of questions on a schedule, saves the answers, and counts how often your brand is named, which pages get cited, and how you compare with competitors. Most add sentiment; some add content audits.

The question a marketer is really asking is: when a buyer asks an assistant “what’s the best X for Y”, do we come up? Being known isn’t the same as being suggested. One study I covered earlier found ChatGPT recognised 99.4% of startups by name but recommended only 3.3% of them when asked for the best tool in their category (How can ChatGPT recommend my business?). A visibility tool measures the second thing.

How do AI visibility tools work?

Three different things hide under the same label, and it helps to know which one you’re paying for.

1. Prompt sampling. You (or the tool) write a list of prompts. The tool runs them daily against each engine and logs the answers. Peec AI, Otterly, Scrunch, Profound, Semrush’s Prompt Tracking and Ahrefs’ Custom Prompts all work this way. Your numbers are only as good as the prompt list: if it doesn’t match how real buyers ask, you’re measuring your own guesses.

2. A big pre-built prompt database. Ahrefs Brand Radar says it has “519 million+” prompts (the pricing page says 525 million+), which it builds by taking real search queries from its keyword database and expanding them into natural questions using People Also Ask and “semantic fanout”. Semrush’s toolkit runs “a large set of common queries” through ChatGPT and AI Mode for its Brand Performance reports. You can look up any brand without setting anything up, but the prompts start from Google searches, not from what people type into ChatGPT.

3. Volume estimates. This is the part everyone wants and nobody has cleanly. No assistant publishes how often people ask a given question. Profound sells a feature it calls Prompt Volumes. In December 2024, while Profound’s volume estimates were still in beta, Digiday reported that they come from a predictive model; CEO James Cadwallader declined to name the external data sources, saying only that they are opt-in and privacy compliant. Ahrefs’ “Estimated Impressions” weights prompts by “the search volume behind each prompt”, which is Google volume used as a stand-in. Semrush shows “topic-level volume, difficulty, and user intent” for AI search; its help page I read doesn’t say where the volume comes from. My read: treat any AI prompt volume as a rough ranking of topics, not a count of people.

API or app: the detail that changes the numbers

There are two ways to collect an answer. A tool can call the model’s API, which is cheap and stable, or it can load the consumer app (chatgpt.com, Google) the way a user would and scrape what appears.

Surfer tested this in August 2026: 1,000 prompts across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, AI Mode and AI Overviews, collected both ways, 13,779 answers. Brand overlap between the API answers and the app answers was 15.5% to 23.8% as returned, and 21.3% to 31.6% after cleaning up brand-name spellings. ChatGPT’s API named 13.8 brands per answer against 7.9 in the app, and cited 3.1 sources against 12.1. Surfer’s conclusion: “You cannot reliably track your AI visibility based on APIs.” Surfer sells a tracker that scrapes the app, so it has an interest in that conclusion, and it took one sample per prompt. Still, a gap that size isn’t noise.

So the first question to ask any vendor is: do you collect from the app or the API, per engine? Of the pages I read, Otterly lists Claude as “(API)” and Peec AI describes its extra Enterprise models (Claude, GPT 5 Search, Grok and others) as API-based; the rest didn’t say either way for their main engines. I found no vendor page that states it plainly for every engine.

The best AI visibility tools in 2026, side by side

Tool	What it measures	Engines (as listed)	Price as listed	Trial	Suits
Semrush AI Visibility Toolkit	AI Visibility Score vs competitors, prompt gaps, topic volume, sentiment, daily tracking, crawl blockers	ChatGPT, Google AI Mode, Gemini	$99/month; 25 tracked prompts; +50 prompts $60/month	No	Teams already on Semrush
Ahrefs Brand Radar	Mentions, citations, AI share of voice, estimated impressions	AI Overviews, AI Mode, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Copilot, Claude	Custom Prompts from $50/month (5 prompts, 150 checks); AI Visibility Index from $199/month; “$699/mo for all models”	Not stated	Competitor research across a huge prompt set
Profound	Visibility, citations, Prompt Volumes, ChatGPT Shopping (Enterprise)	Trial: ChatGPT, Gemini, AI Overviews; Enterprise: up to 9 incl. Perplexity, AI Mode, Copilot, Claude, DeepSeek	Free trial; Enterprise custom; Agency Growth price not listed	Yes: 50 prompts, daily for 7 days	Enterprise brands and larger agencies
Peec AI	Visibility, position, sentiment, sources	ChatGPT, AI Mode, AI Overviews, Copilot, Gemini, Naver AI (pick 3 active)	Starter $95/month (50 prompts), Pro $245 (150), Advanced $495 (350)	Not stated	Small teams and agencies wanting a clean daily tracker
Otterly	Mentions, position, citations, share of voice, sentiment, GEO content audit	ChatGPT, AI Overviews, Perplexity, Copilot; AI Mode, Gemini, Claude as add-ons	Lite $29/month (15 prompts), Standard $189 (100), Premium $489 (400)	Yes, length not stated	Small businesses and solo marketers
Scrunch	Prompts, citations, personas, page audits, agent traffic, AI-friendly site version (AXP)	ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, AI Mode, AI Overviews, Meta	Starter $300/month (or $250 billed annually), Growth $500 ($417)	7 days, no card	Brands wanting monitoring plus site changes
HubSpot AI Search Grader	One-time score out of 100: sentiment, presence, recognition, share of voice	GPT-5.4 mini, Perplexity, Gemini	Free; HubSpot AEO tracking $50/month	n/a	A first look
Bing Webmaster Tools AI Performance	Citations of your pages, cited pages, grounding queries	Copilot, Bing AI summaries, some partners	Free	n/a	Every site owner

Notes on the table: Ahrefs’ pricing page opened from Europe showed different packages, not just a different currency: the Brand Radar AI add-on “from €179/mo”, custom prompts sold as Basic, Growth and Scale check bundles, and base plans from €119/month. Check what your own region shows. Otterly’s lower annual prices ($25, $160, $422) sit behind a “15% off” toggle. Peec AI’s Enterprise tier adds Perplexity and several API-only models.

Semrush AI Visibility Toolkit: what you get for $99

The Semrush AI Visibility Toolkit costs $99 a month with no free trial, according to its help page. It covers ChatGPT and Google AI Mode for tracking, with Gemini mentioned in a pricing banner. You get an AI Visibility Score, which shows your brand’s mentions “compared to the median number of mentions for your top industry competitors”, a competitor gap view, Prompt Research with topic volumes, brand perception (share of voice, sentiment, attributes), daily tracking of 25 prompts, and a check for technical issues that stop AI bots reaching your pages. Extra domains or locations for Brand Performance cost $99 each; 50 more tracked prompts cost $60 a month.

It suits a team already living in Semrush. Twenty-five tracked prompts is thin for anything beyond your core category.

Ahrefs Brand Radar

Brand Radar’s strength is the database: you can look up how often any brand shows up across hundreds of millions of search-derived prompts on seven engines, without writing a single prompt. Its four metrics are mentions, citations, AI share of voice and estimated impressions. Custom prompt tracking is sold by “checks”: one prompt on one platform in one location is one check, and Claude “consumes 8 checks per update”. The entry plan (5 prompts, 150 checks a month) is enough to try it, not to track a business.

I’d pick it for competitor research; for tracking your own buyer questions, the dedicated trackers give more prompts per dollar.

Profound, Peec AI, Otterly and Scrunch

Profound has gone enterprise: the pricing page shows a free trial (50 prompts, daily for 7 days, three engines, one language and region) and then custom pricing, with up to nine engines, plus ChatGPT Shopping as a separate Enterprise feature. Its distinct product is Prompt Volumes, with the sourcing caveat above.

Peec AI is the straightforward tracker: $95 a month for 50 prompts, run daily, on three engines of your choice from six, which comes to 4,500 AI answers a month. The tiers scale by prompts, not features.

Otterly is the cheapest way in at $29 a month for 15 prompts on four engines. The jump to Standard ($189 for 100 prompts) is steep, and AI Mode, Gemini and Claude cost extra on every tier ($9, $9 and $29 a month on Lite). It also includes a content audit for crawlability and “citation potential”. Its homepage says 40,000+ users in one place and 30,000+ in another.

Scrunch starts at $300 a month month-to-month and gives you the most prompts at that level (350 custom plus 1,000 industry prompts), three seats, personas and page audits. It also sells AXP, which builds an AI-friendly version of your site. That’s a site change, not a measurement, so judge it separately.

Is there a free AI visibility tool?

Yes, four useful ones, each with a narrow view.

Bing Webmaster Tools, AI Performance (free, public preview since February 10, 2026). It shows how often your pages are cited in “Microsoft Copilot, AI-generated summaries in Bing, and select partner integrations”, which pages, and the “grounding queries” the AI used to find them. Microsoft says the grounding queries are “a sample of overall citation activity”, and there’s no click data. It’s real first-party data, which none of the paid tools have. Search Influence logged 19,717 citations across 86 pages over 91 days on its own site, with one page taking 69% of them, and saw daily citations fall 97% from December to February.
Google Search Console’s generative AI reports, announced June 3, 2026 and rolling out to “a subset of websites”. Per PPC Land’s write-up, they show impressions in AI features by page, country, device and date, with AI Overviews and AI Mode combined and no query breakdown.
HubSpot AI Search Grader: enter company name, location, product and industry, get a score out of 100 in a couple of minutes. HubSpot calls it a one-time check based on what the models say “based on their training data”. Fine as a first look, not a tracker.
Free trials: Profound (7 days of 50 prompts), Scrunch (7 days, no card) and Otterly (length not stated). A week of daily runs is enough to see how much your numbers wobble before you pay.

Why the numbers move: answers vary run to run

SparkToro and Gumshoe (January 2026). In November and December 2025, 600 volunteers ran 12 brand-recommendation prompts 60 to 100 times each on ChatGPT, Claude and Google’s AI Overviews (AI Mode when no Overview appeared), 2,961 runs in total. ChatGPT and Google returned the same brand list less than 1% of the time, and the same list in the same order less than 0.1% of the time. Rand Fishkin’s verdict, in SparkToro’s own write-up: “But, any tool that gives a ‘ranking position in AI’ is full of baloney.” But the same study found something steadier. When 142 people wrote their own headphone prompts, the prompts were almost all different (semantic similarity 0.081), yet Bose, Sony, Sennheiser and Apple appeared in 55% to 77% of the 994 answers. Presence across many runs held up; position didn’t. Tight categories (cloud providers) were more stable than broad ones (science fiction novels). Two caveats: Gumshoe sells AI tracking, which Fishkin disclosed, and the study isn’t peer-reviewed.

Ahrefs on AI Overviews (November 2025). Across 43,000+ keywords tracked for a month, an AI Overview had a 70% chance of changing between consecutive observations and lasted 2.15 days on average. Consecutive versions shared only 54.5% of their cited URLs. Yet the meaning barely moved: average similarity between versions was 0.95 out of 1. Ahrefs’ line: “Your brand can be cited today, and gone tomorrow.”

Put together: the answers reshuffle constantly, while the pool of brands an engine considers for a topic is fairly stable. A useful tool measures your share of that pool over many runs; a daily “position 3” is mostly chance.

What a number from these tools can and can’t tell you

It can tell you:

Whether you’re in the consideration set at all for the questions you care about. Zero mentions across hundreds of runs is a real finding.
Which competitors show up where you don’t, and which pages the engines cite for those answers. That’s the most actionable output, because cited pages are things you can study, earn mentions on, or improve.
What the engines say about you (wrong prices, old positioning, a competitor’s feature attributed to you).

It can’t tell you:

How many real people asked those questions. Volume figures are modelled from undisclosed data or borrowed from Google.
What a specific buyer saw. Real users are logged in, have memory and location, and phrase things their own way; the tool’s runs are none of those.
A rank. On SparkToro’s numbers, position is mostly noise.
Whether a week-to-week change is real. With a handful of runs per prompt, small moves are within the wobble. My rule of thumb: ignore anything under ten percentage points unless it persists for a month.
Revenue. Even Bing’s first-party report has no clicks, and Google’s shows impressions only.

How to run a free manual check

This takes about two hours and tells you most of what a first month of a paid tool would.

Write 10-20 prompts the way a buyer would ask them, in your market’s language: “best [category] for [situation]”, “[competitor] alternatives”, “is [your brand] good for [use]”. Include at least five where you don’t name yourself.
Run each prompt three to five times on ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google (AI Mode or an AI Overview), starting a new chat each time. Don’t stop at one run: the SparkToro study ran 60 to 100 per prompt to see stable patterns.
Log each run in a sheet: engine, prompt, run number, mentioned yes/no, position if listed, competitors named, URLs cited, anything factually wrong about you.
Compute presence rate per prompt and engine (runs with a mention divided by total runs). That’s your baseline. Ignore positions.
Sort the cited URLs by how often they appear. Those are the pages the engines trust for your category: review sites, “best X” lists, Reddit threads, competitor pages. For what tends to get a business named, see How can ChatGPT recommend my business? and new-seo-playbook-ai-search.
Open Bing Webmaster Tools at bing.com/webmasters, verify your site, open the AI Performance section and note which of your pages Copilot cites.
Repeat in 30 days with the same prompts. If you find yourself doing this every week, that’s when a tracker earns its fee.

If the check shows AI crawlers can’t reach your pages at all, fix that first: should-i-allow-ai-crawlers.

Which to pick

Best AI visibility tools for small businesses: start with the free stack (Bing AI Performance, Search Console if you have the report, the manual check). If you want it automated, Otterly Lite at $29 for 15 prompts is the cheapest daily tracker I found; Peec AI Starter at $95 if you need 50 prompts and a choice of engines.

If you already pay for Semrush or Ahrefs: use their add-on before buying a separate tool. Semrush’s toolkit ($99) if you want topic volumes and sentiment next to your SEO data; Ahrefs Brand Radar if competitor research across a big prompt set matters more than tracking your own list.

Best AI visibility tools for agencies: Peec AI scales cleanly by prompts ($245 for 150, $495 for 350). Scrunch gives the most prompts per dollar at its entry tier and adds personas and seats. Profound has an Agency Growth plan with “400 credits per month per client workspace”, but no listed price, so expect a sales call.

Enterprise brands that want prompt volumes and many engines: Profound, accepting that the volume data’s sources aren’t disclosed.

Best AI visibility tracking tools, whatever your size: pick the one that answers four questions in writing before you pay:

Does it collect from the app or the API, per engine?
How many runs per prompt per day, and does it show presence rate rather than position?
Where do its volume numbers come from?
Can you export the raw answers and cited URLs?

My read, from the priors I work from: being cited and mentioned matters more than traffic in AI search, so a tool is worth paying for when it shows you which sources the engines trust for your category. A tool that only gives you a score is a dashboard you’ll stop opening.

Who this is for

For: marketers and founders of brands, online stores, SaaS and B2B companies whose buyers research categories by asking assistants, and agencies reporting AI visibility to clients. Not for: local businesses whose customers find them through Google Maps and reviews; check your Business Profile and reviews first. And if you sell through distributors or relationships with few online comparisons, a tracker will mostly show you zeros.

Sources

More of this every day on the channel: https://t.me/aidaily_business