Short answer: AI visibility tools run a fixed list of buyer prompts through ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Google’s AI answers on a schedule and report how often each answer names you, your competitors and the pages it cites. On the vendors’ own pricing pages on October 25, 2026, entry plans ran from $25.65 a month (ZipTie) and $29 (Otterly.AI) to $300 (Scrunch), with Profound and most enterprise tiers priced on request. Pick by the engines your buyers use and the number of prompts you need, then compare the cost per answer, not the sticker price.
A note on the sources. When we checked Google for “ai visibility tools” in October 2026, four of the top five results were published by companies that sell one of the tools, and each ranked its own product first. Most gave prices without a date. Every price and engine list below was read on the vendor’s own site on October 25, 2026. We have not run a head-to-head accuracy test, so this page gives no ratings.
What does an AI visibility tool measure?
Four things, in roughly this order of usefulness:
- Mention rate. The share of answers to your prompt list that name your brand, per engine.
- Competitor share. Which brands the same answers name instead of you, prompt by prompt.
- Citations. Which URLs the answer links to or draws on. This tells you which review sites, lists and forums to get onto.
- Sentiment and position. How the answer describes you, and where in the answer you appear.
The first two are the scoreboard described in our GEO vs SEO comparison. The third is the to-do list. Treat the fourth with care, for a reason covered below.
Which AI visibility tools are there, and what do they cost?
Ten tools, with the entry price and the engines each vendor lists. Read on October 25, 2026; vendors change prices often, so check the linked page before you buy.
| Tool | Entry price (vendor’s page) | What the entry plan includes | Engines the vendor lists |
|---|---|---|---|
| Otterly.AI | $29 a month (Lite) | 15 prompts, daily tracking, unlimited users | ChatGPT, AI Overviews, Perplexity, Copilot; Claude, AI Mode and Gemini as paid add-ons |
| SE Visible (SE Ranking) | $99 a month (Basic); the page says annual billing saves 20% | 200 prompts, about 30,000 AI answers a month, daily refresh | ChatGPT, Gemini, AI Mode, AI Overviews |
| Peec AI | $95 a month (Starter) | 50 prompts, 3 models of your choice, daily, unlimited users | Up to 13 models on Enterprise |
| Semrush AI Visibility Toolkit | $99 a month, no free trial | 25 tracked prompts, 1 domain for brand performance | The help page names ChatGPT and Google AI Mode |
| Ahrefs Brand Radar | From $199 a month (AI Visibility Index); Ahrefs lists $699 a month for all models | Brand mentions across a database of 496M+ monthly prompts; custom prompt packages from $50 a month | AI Overviews, AI Mode, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Copilot |
| AthenaHQ | $295 a month (Starter) | 3,600 credits a month, where 1 credit is 1 AI response | 11 models, including Claude, Grok, DeepSeek, Meta AI and Mistral |
| Scrunch | $300 a month, or $250 billed annually (Starter) | 350 custom prompts and 1,000 industry prompts | ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, AI Mode, AI Overviews, Meta |
| ZipTie | From $25.65 a month (Starter) | Priced by prompts and engines; “every engine costs the same” | Up to 7, including Bing’s AI answers |
| Profound | Free 7-day trial; Enterprise custom | Trial: 50 preset prompts, run daily | Trial: ChatGPT, Gemini, AI Overviews; Enterprise: up to 9, including Claude, DeepSeek and Exa |
| Ahrefs AI visibility checker | Free, no signup | One-time snapshot: total mentions, top 5 topics, cited domains and cited pages | ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Copilot, AI Overviews, AI Mode |
Engine coverage on entry plans is narrower than the marketing suggests: Claude is missing from most entry plans or costs extra. The unit of pricing differs from one vendor to the next (prompts, credits, checks or engines), so the sticker price does not compare like for like. Profound, which several of the top Google results feature, publishes no self-serve price for brands on its pricing page.
What does each tool cost per AI answer?
The fair comparison is price divided by the number of answers the plan collects each month. Where a vendor states the prompts, engines and frequency, the arithmetic is below. These are our calculations from the vendors’ published plan limits on October 25, 2026, assuming 30 days of daily runs.
| Plan | Monthly price | Answers collected a month | Cost per answer |
|---|---|---|---|
| SE Visible, 200 prompts | $99 | About 30,000 (vendor’s figure) | About $0.003 |
| Otterly.AI Lite, 15 prompts x 4 included engines, daily | $29 | 1,800 | About $0.016 |
| Ahrefs custom prompts, Basic | $50 | 2,500 checks (1 prompt, 1 platform, 1 location) | $0.020 |
| Peec AI Starter, 50 prompts x 3 models, daily | $95 | 4,500 | About $0.021 |
| AthenaHQ Starter | $295 | 3,600 responses | About $0.082 |
The higher-priced tools sell more than tracking: AthenaHQ covers 11 models, Ahrefs adds a large prompt database you did not have to write, and several tools add content suggestions. But if what you need is a monthly read on 50 buyer prompts across four engines, the gap between the cheapest and the most expensive way to get it is more than ten times.
How reliable are AI visibility numbers?
Less reliable than a rank tracker, because AI answers change between runs of the same prompt. In January 2026, SparkToro and Gumshoe.ai published a study in which volunteers ran 12 brand-recommendation prompts 2,961 times across ChatGPT, Claude and Google’s AI. Search Engine Journal’s summary gives the main results:
- ChatGPT and Google’s AI returned the same list of brands less than 1 time in 100, and the same list in the same order less than 0.1% of the time.
- How often a brand appeared across many runs was far more stable than its position. In headphones, four brands appeared in 55% to 77% of 994 answers despite very different prompts.
- Gumshoe sells AI tracking, which the authors disclosed, and the study is not peer reviewed.
What this means for buying a tool:
- Ignore “AI rank” or “position” metrics. Mention rate over many runs is the number that holds still.
- Prefer daily runs over weekly. More runs per prompt make the monthly share more trustworthy.
- Treat a move of a few points as noise. Act on changes that hold for two or three months.
Why track AI answers at all?
Because more of your buyers’ research happens inside them, and ranking on Google does not guarantee a mention:
- In 6sense’s 2025 buyer survey of nearly 4,000 B2B buyers, 94% said they used large language models during their purchase.
- Ahrefs’ March 2026 study of 4 million URLs cited in AI Overviews found that 37.9% of cited URLs also ranked in the top 10 for the same query. The rest did not.
- In a Pew Research Center study of 900 US adults’ Google searches, people clicked a traditional result in 8% of visits when an AI summary appeared and in 15% when none did.
Search Console shows clicks and impressions, but not whether an AI answer named you. That gap is what these tools fill. For the work of getting named in the first place, see our entries on answer engine optimization and generative engine optimization.
How do you choose an AI visibility tool?
Answer these before you open a trial:
| Question | Why it matters |
|---|---|
| Which assistants do your buyers use? | Pay for those engines only. A B2B software buyer may use ChatGPT and AI Overviews far more than Meta AI |
| How many prompts do you need? | 20 to 50 well-written buyer prompts cover most B2B categories. Hundreds of keyword-style prompts mostly add cost |
| How often does it run each prompt? | Daily runs give more answers to average, which matters given how much answers vary |
| Does it show the cited URLs? | Citations are the actionable part: they tell you which lists and review sites to get onto |
| Can you export the raw answers? | You want to check the tool’s parsing and keep your history if you switch |
| What is the pricing unit? | Prompts, credits, checks or engines. Price your real list at month three, not the trial |
| Is it inside a tool you already pay for? | Semrush and Ahrefs users can add tracking to an existing account instead of adding a vendor |
What does tracking cost a B2B company in practice?
Illustrative, not a benchmark. The company is fictional.
Fernhill Expense sells expense software to finance teams at companies with 100 to 1,000 employees. Its marketing lead writes 40 buyer prompts, such as “best expense management software for a 300-person company” and “expense tools that integrate with NetSuite.” Sales calls suggest buyers use ChatGPT and Google, so those are the engines that matter.
| Option | What Fernhill gets | Monthly cost, from the vendors’ pages |
|---|---|---|
| Manual check | 40 prompts x 2 engines x 2 runs, once a month: 160 answers logged in a spreadsheet | About 4 hours of a marketer’s time |
| Otterly.AI Standard | 100 prompts, ChatGPT and AI Overviews included, daily | $189 |
| Peec AI Starter | 50 prompts, 3 models, daily | $95 |
| SE Visible Basic | 200 prompts, ChatGPT, Gemini, AI Mode, AI Overviews, daily | $99 |
In month one, Fernhill is named in 6 of its 40 prompts on ChatGPT. The answers cite two software review sites and one “best expense tools” list that do not mention it. The tool did its job by turning that into a list: ask customers for reviews on the two sites, and pitch the list’s author. The tracking cost less than $100 a month. The work it pointed to is where the budget goes.
Do you need a tool or a service?
A tool measures. It does not write the pages, earn the mentions or fix the gaps it finds. Buy a tool when someone on your team will act on the report every month. If no one will, the report becomes a chart nobody opens.
Our AI search and SEO service does both halves. Each month we ask the assistants your buyers use the questions they ask, and show you which answers name you and which name a competitor. Then we write the pages those answers draw on, such as comparisons, integrations, use cases and plain definitions, built to rank on Google as well. You approve every page before it goes live.
Frequently asked
What is an AI visibility tool?
Software that sends a fixed list of prompts to AI assistants such as ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Google's AI Overviews on a schedule, then records whether each answer names your brand, which competitors it names, and which pages it cites. It turns a manual check into a repeatable report.
How do AI visibility tools work?
You enter the prompts your buyers ask and the brands to watch. The tool runs each prompt on each engine you pay for, usually daily, and parses the answers for brand mentions, position in the answer, sentiment and cited sources. Most price by the number of prompts, engines and runs, so the monthly answer count drives the bill.
What are the best AI visibility tools in 2026?
It depends on how many prompts you need and which engines your buyers use. On the vendors' own pricing pages in October 2026, ZipTie started from $25.65 a month, Otterly.AI at $29, Peec AI at $95, SE Visible at $99, Semrush's AI Visibility Toolkit at $99 and Ahrefs Brand Radar at $199. Profound and the enterprise tiers of most tools are custom priced. Ahrefs also offers a free one-off check.
Are there free AI visibility tools?
Yes, with limits. Ahrefs' free AI visibility checker gives a one-time snapshot across ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Copilot, AI Overviews and AI Mode, showing the top 5 topics, cited domains and cited pages, with no signup. Profound and ZipTie offer 7-day trials, and AthenaHQ has a free plan with 300 credits. A free check tells you where you stand once; it does not track change.
How do you monitor AI visibility without a tool?
Write 20 to 50 prompts the way your buyers ask them, run each one in the assistants they use, and record which brands each answer names. Run each prompt more than once, because answers vary between runs. Repeat the same list every month. A tool automates this once the list is too long to check by hand.
Is AI visibility tracking accurate?
It is accurate about what the tool saw, but AI answers change between runs. In a SparkToro and Gumshoe study of 2,961 runs of 12 prompts, ChatGPT and Google's AI returned the same list of brands less than 1 time in 100. Read share of answers over many runs, not a single 'rank', and treat small month-to-month moves as noise.
