The Best AI Visibility Tools in 2026, Honestly Compared

Let's get the conflict of interest out of the way first. We sell a product in this space. It is not an AI visibility tool, and by the end of this you will understand why that distinction matters more than any feature comparison in it.

If you want the short version: Profound if you are running a serious, funded programme. Otterly if you are a small team who wants the number without the enterprise price. Ahrefs Brand Radar if you already pay Ahrefs, because you may already own most of what you were about to buy. Citation Rocket if you want the audit to hand you files rather than a dashboard.

And before any of them: Google now gives you part of this data for free, which almost every comparison of these tools forgets to mention.

Here is what each one actually does, what they all charge for, and the thing none of them can tell you.

First, What Are You Actually Buying?

Almost every tool in this category works the same way underneath, and understanding the mechanism tells you more than any feature list.

You give the tool a set of questions your customers might ask. It runs those questions against ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google's AI features and others, on a schedule. It records whether you were mentioned, how you were described, and who got mentioned instead. Out of that comes a number, usually called visibility or share of voice.

That is sampling, not measurement. The tool is not reading inside the AI. It is asking questions and writing down answers, which is exactly what you would do by hand, at a scale and frequency you could not sustain by hand.

This matters for a practical reason: two tools will give you different numbers for the same brand, and neither is broken. Different prompt sets produce different results. A tool tracking 15 prompts and a tool tracking 400 are measuring different things and calling them the same word.

The Pattern Nobody States Out Loud

Look across this whole market and one commercial fact stands out: almost nobody charges for the audit. They charge for the watching.

Every priced product here bills on tracked prompts, monitored brands, audits per month, or refresh frequency. The one-off audit is the free sample. The subscription is "tell me every week whether ChatGPT still mentions me."

That is worth knowing before you buy, because it tells you what you are actually signing up for. If your real question is "how am I doing right now," a free audit answers it and you can close the tab. The subscription answers "has it changed since last week," which is a different question, and only worth paying for monthly if you are actively doing work whose effect you need to watch.

The Tools

Profound: the enterprise option

The most complete product in the category, and priced accordingly. It tracks the widest set of answer engines, and its higher tiers add things smaller tools do not attempt, including analytics on AI agent traffic to your site.

Its pricing starts at $99 a month billed yearly for Starter, which tracks ChatGPT only and 50 prompts. Growth is $399 a month billed yearly, covering three answer engines and 100 prompts. Enterprise is a custom quote and adds up to nine engines, multiple brands, SSO and SOC 2.

Buy it if you have a funded programme, more than one brand, or a procurement process that will ask about SOC 2. Skip it if you are one site trying to find out whether ChatGPT knows you exist, because the Starter tier's ChatGPT-only tracking is a lot of money for one engine.

Otterly: the sensible small-team choice

The best price-to-usefulness ratio in the category, and notably transparent about its own methodology, which is rarer here than it should be.

Otterly's pricing puts Lite at $29 a month for 15 prompts across four engines: ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity and Copilot. Standard is $189 for 100 prompts and adds API and MCP access. Premium is $489 for 400 prompts. Enterprise starts around $1,000. Annual billing takes about 15% off. Unlimited team members on every tier, which is unusual and quietly generous.

Buy it if you are a small team, an agency starting out, or you want to find out whether this category is worth anything to you before spending real money. Skip it if 15 prompts will not cover your product range, in which case the jump to $189 is the real decision.

Ahrefs Brand Radar: check this before you buy anything

The one most people should check first, because you may already be paying for it.

Brand Radar tracks brand mentions and citations across AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Copilot and Claude. Custom Prompts are included free in every paid Ahrefs plan, with the allowance scaling by tier: 5 prompts on Lite, 10 on Standard, 20 on Advanced, 83 and up on Enterprise. Beyond that, the add-on starts at $50 a month, and a separate AI Visibility Index product is $199 a month.

Buy it if you already pay for Ahrefs. Genuinely: go and look at what your plan already includes before you buy a second subscription. Skip it if you do not use Ahrefs, because subscribing to the whole suite for this feature alone is the expensive way round.

Citation Rocket: the one that hands you files

Different shape from the others. It audits, and then its AEO Pack hands over ready-to-install files rather than leaving you with a dashboard and a to-do list.

Pricing runs Free for 1 audit a month on 1 domain, Starter at $49 for 15 audits across 5 domains with monthly monitoring, Pro at $149 for 30 audits, unlimited domains and weekly monitoring, and Enterprise at $299 for 50 audits with daily monitoring.

Buy it if you want output, not just observation, and you do not have a developer to hand. Look closely first if you care what is in those files, because generated files are only as good as what goes in them, and one of them in particular is worth checking against the evidence before you deploy it.

Peec AI: worth knowing about

Regularly named alongside Profound and Otterly, and positioned between them on depth. Its pricing page lists Starter, Pro, Advanced and Enterprise tiers on annual billing but does not publish figures in a form we could verify, so we are not going to quote a number for it. Worth a look if the two above do not fit.

AI Schema Gen: not a visibility tool, and that is the point

Ours, so treat the rest of this section with appropriate suspicion, and here is the disclosure that matters: we do not sell what the tools above sell. We do not track prompts, we do not report share of voice, and we cannot tell you whether ChatGPT mentioned you last Tuesday.

We measure the other half: whether your site can be reached, read and correctly understood by AI systems, and whether the facts they would state about you are actually backed by your own data. That is readiness, not visibility, and the two are genuinely different purchases.

The honest sales pitch is a division of labour, not a replacement: a visibility tool tells you that you were not mentioned. It cannot tell you why. If the reason is that a crawler cannot reach your pages, or that your site never plainly states what you do, no amount of monitoring surfaces that, because monitoring is pointed at the answer rather than at your site.

Consider us if you have already learned you are invisible and want to know what is fixable. Do not buy us instead of a visibility tool if what you actually need is the weekly number.

Quick Comparison

Start With the Free One

Google added a generative AI report to Search Console in June 2026. It shows how often your links appeared inside AI Overviews and AI Mode, broken down by page, country, device and date.

It is narrower than the paid tools: impressions only, no clicks, no queries, and it covers Google's AI surfaces rather than ChatGPT or Perplexity. But it is free, it is first-party data from the platform itself rather than a sample of prompts, and it is sitting in an account you already have.

Check it before you spend anything. It may not answer your whole question, and it will tell you whether you have a question worth paying to answer.

Do It By Hand First, Once

Before any subscription, spend twenty minutes doing manually what these tools automate. It costs nothing and it tells you whether you have a problem worth paying to track.

Write down the ten questions a customer would actually type. Not your brand name. The questions someone asks when they do not yet know you exist: "best plumber in Leeds," "software for tracking X," "who makes Y for small teams." Brand-name searches flatter you and tell you nothing.

Ask each one in ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google's AI mode. Three engines, ten questions, thirty answers. Perplexity is the easiest to read because it shows its sources on every answer.

Record three things per answer: were you mentioned, who was mentioned instead, and was anything said about you wrong.

That third column is the one people skip and the one that matters most. Being absent is a visibility problem, and it is slow to fix. Being described incorrectly is a readiness problem, it is usually your own site's fault, and it is often fixable this week.

Do this once and you will know which kind of problem you have, which is exactly the knowledge that stops you buying the wrong tool. Do it again in a month and you have the beginnings of the tracking you were about to pay for. At some point the manual version stops scaling, and that is the honest moment to buy one of the tools above, not before.

What None of These Can Do

Worth being blunt, because the category's marketing rarely is.

None of them can tell you why. Every one reports whether you were mentioned. Not one can tell you what would have made the difference, because none of them can see inside the model's selection.

None of them can promise you citations, and neither can we. Anyone attaching a specific percentage to what their product will do for your AI mentions is quoting a number nobody has substantiated. We checked those claims against the sources for structured data specifically, and the pattern holds across this whole category.

None of them measure the whole population. They sample prompts. A brand can look strong on one prompt set and weak on another, and the tool has no way to tell you which is representative.

The number moves for reasons you do not control. Models get updated. Retrieval changes. A competitor publishes something. Treat week-to-week movement as noise and look at direction over months.

Common Mistakes When Buying

Buying monitoring before you have anything to monitor. If you have not done any of the work, the weekly number will be flat, and you will have paid for a flat line. Do the fixable work first, then measure it.

Paying twice for the same data. Check your existing Ahrefs or Semrush subscription before buying a dedicated tool. This is the most common wasted spend in the category.

Comparing scores between tools. They are not comparable. Different prompt sets, different engines, different counting. Pick one and watch it move.

Choosing the tool with the most engines. More engines is more surface area, not more insight, and the engines your customers actually use is a much shorter list than the one on the pricing page.

Mistaking a low score for a content problem. It is often a technical problem instead: a blocked crawler, a page that only exists after JavaScript runs, a site that never plainly says what the business does. Those are invisible to a monitoring tool and are exactly what an AEO checklist works through.

Believing a tool that will not show its method. If a product reports a visibility score and will not tell you which prompts produced it, you cannot check its work and neither can they.

Once a visibility tool has told you that you are not being mentioned, the next question is why. Run a free AI readiness check to see whether AI systems can reach, read and correctly describe your site in the first place.