The best AI visibility tools, ranked by one of them

The five criteria, and why there is no total score

A roundup is only as honest as the criteria it states before it starts. These are the five, in the order a buyer should ask them:

1. What it measures, and what it can only infer. ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and Perplexity can be asked through a programmatic interface, so a result from them is a measurement. Google publishes no such route for AI Overviews or AI Mode, so any tool covering those is reading a rendered results page, usually through a third party. That can be a perfectly good product choice — but it is a different kind of number, and a vendor should say which kind you are looking at.
2. Engines covered on the plan you would actually buy. Not the platform ceiling. A pricing page that lists eleven models and sells you one at the entry price is telling you two different things.
3. Whether it separates being named from being linked. A model can name your business from memory without ever opening your site. Only a link back proves a page was read. A tool that reports the two as one number cannot tell you which problem you have — the metrics guide works through why.
4. Price, with the billing period attached, and what it buys. “$99 a month” billed yearly is a $1,188 commitment. Prompt counts and cadence belong beside the price, because they are what the price is for.
5. Fix or diagnose. Does it hand you something to publish, or a chart? And after you publish it, does it go back and re-ask the questions the fix was aimed at?

We do not add these up into one score. The columns do not share a scale, and a tool that wins on price and loses on measurement is not “a seven”. Each criterion has its own winner in the tables below, and the picks are given by situation rather than as one ordered list of nine — which is also why no tool on this page gets a mark out of ten.

The short answer, by situation

Seven situations, seven picks. Ours is last, and the paragraph under it is the honest one.

1. You want the cheapest daily tracker across the most assistants

   Otterly Lite — $29 a month

   Fifteen search prompts, tracked daily, across four assistants: ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity and Microsoft Copilot. Claude, Gemini and Google AI Mode are paid add-ons on that plan — $29, $9 and $9 a month respectively. It ships three recommendations a week, a thousand GEO audits a month, and team members at no extra charge. Answermend loses this one on price, engine count and prompt count, and it is not close.

   otterly.ai/pricing · read in a browser 19 October 2026

2. You already pay for Ahrefs or Semrush

   Use the AI product inside the tool you own

   Ahrefs Brand Radar defines mentions and citations separately, in writing, on two live pages — the clearest statement of that distinction from any vendor here. Read the price carefully, though: its Custom Prompts packages start at $50 a month, and that $50 is a package of 2,500 prompt checks bought on top of an Ahrefs subscription, which itself starts at $129 a month for the Lite plan that unlocks it. Checks over the allowance bill at 2 cents each. The AI Visibility Index is a separate $199 a month, and the Lite plan carries its own small Brand Radar allowance of five prompts, refreshed daily. Semrush’s AI Toolkit is $99 a month per domain for 25 prompts tracked daily across ChatGPT, Google AI, Gemini and Perplexity, plus a site audit for AI readiness.

   ahrefs.com/pricing · ahrefs.com/brand-radar · semrush.com/pricing/ai · all read in a browser 19 October 2026

3. You want drafted content for the least money

   Knowatoa Starter — $59 a month

   Three of its seven AI services on the entry plan — ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews and AI Mode — with a weekly digest of what changed, and “AI agents” ticked on the $59 plan, which is the cheapest drafting on this page. That tick is the load-bearing fact here and it is confirmed rather than inherited: it does not survive text extraction, so it was read off a screenshot of the rendered pricing table on 19 October 2026. The pricing page states no prompt or question count on any tier, and it states no refresh cadence per tier either. It cancels any time.

   knowatoa.com/pricing · read in a browser, and screenshotted, 19 October 2026

4. You want the most prompts and your choice of engines under $100

   Peec Starter — $95 a month

   Fifty prompts, daily, on your choice of three from six models — ChatGPT, Google AI Mode, Google AI Overviews, Microsoft Copilot, Gemini and Naver AI — with a fourth model at $30 a month on annual billing. Perplexity and Claude are on its Enterprise tier only. Users are not metered on any plan, and the page publishes its own arithmetic: prompts × models × frequency, which works out at 4,500 AI answers a month on Starter. Diagnosis and analytics only: no drafting, no files. It advertises a 15% annual discount in its FAQ and prints no annual figure on any card. Peec also sells a separate agency ladder metered in credits and priced by how many clients you manage; that ladder was read on 7 September 2026 and was not re-read on 19 October, so no figure from it appears here.

   peec.ai/pricing · read in a browser 19 October 2026 · agency ladder read 7 September 2026, price not restated

5. You want generated content from a vendor that claims to close the loop, and you can sit through a demo

   Profound — no plan price is published

   Profound publishes no brand plan price at all. Its pricing page carries two cards: a free Trial — 50 prompts run daily for 7 days across ChatGPT, Gemini and Google AI Overviews, with no history, no exports and no API — and Enterprise, “Custom”, which lists up to nine answer engines, SSO/SAML and SOC 2 and whose only button is “Get a Demo”. There is no self-serve path between those two. If you need a number before a sales call, this is the wrong vendor; if content generation at scale is the point, it is still the most ambitious product here. It also sells two things nobody else on this page does: prompt-volume data from an opted-in consumer panel, and analytics of AI crawler traffic to your site. Its Aim page said it “closes the loop with impact measurement” when that page was read on 3 September 2026 — closed-loop language Scrunch’s site also uses — and the mechanism inside either product cannot be read from outside it.

   tryprofound.com/pricing · read in a browser 19 October 2026 · tryprofound.com/features/aim · read 3 September 2026

6. You are a larger team buying a platform

   Scrunch Core — $250 · AthenaHQ Starter — $295 a month

   Scrunch prints one price, $250, with no billing period beside it: 125 prompts, 5,000 responses a month, four LLMs (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, Copilot), five user licences, five site audits a month, content generation at that tier, and a seven-day trial behind a signup. Whether that $250 is the monthly or the annual-equivalent rate still is not on the page — the same gap we recorded seven weeks earlier. AthenaHQ is $295 a month for visibility across eleven models and 3,600 credits, where one credit is one AI response — the only credit unit defined on any pricing page read here — plus content recommendations, an AI agent, seats it does not meter and role-based access. A free Essential plan carries 300 credits across five engines. Two things a buyer pays for are deliberately unpriced: API access and extra credits.

   scrunch.com/pricing · athenahq.ai/plans · both read in a browser 19 October 2026

7. You want a mention rate and a citation rate with the run count on every figure, and the fix as files

   Answermend — Free $0 · Starter $49 a month · Pro $99 a month

   Free is three scans in any rolling 30 days, up to five questions, on ChatGPT and Gemini — one pass each, labelled as one run, with only Gemini asked to open your site. Starter is up to ten questions on the same two assistants, Gemini asked every day and ChatGPT every seventh, both asked to go and look every seventh day, four fix files written from your own scan, and one re-check a week. Pro is up to 40 questions and adds Claude every 30th day and Perplexity every third, with drafted pages for the gaps. A failed or unasked check is reported as not measured, never as a zero. It loses on engine count, prompt count, agency features and track record — the section on that is below, and it is longer than this paragraph.

   answermend.com/pricing · current on 20 October 2026 · billed monthly, or 25% off paid yearly

Table 1: what the entry price buys

The plan you would actually buy, not the platform ceiling. Every row names the day its vendor page was read; the caption says what to do with a row older than you like.

Table 2: what it measures, and what it does about it

The four questions a chart cannot answer for you. “Not found” means the pages we read describe no such thing — it is not a claim that the product lacks it.

Not one of the eight pricing pages read on 19 October 2026 states how many times it asked before printing a figure. Three publish a volume — Peec’s prompts × models × frequency, AthenaHQ’s credit-per-response, Ahrefs’ checks — which tells you what you bought, not what sits under a number on screen. Ask every vendor which it is, including us.

Nine tools, one paragraph each

What each one is, what its entry plan buys, what it does about a gap, and the place it beats us. Same order as the tables.

Where Answermend loses

The section a vendor-written roundup usually leaves out. Every item is measured against the tables above.

• Assistants watched. Two on Free and Starter, four on Pro. Otterly watches four for $29; Peec lets you pick three of six for $95; AthenaHQ lists eleven for $295. And we cover neither Google AI Overviews, Google AI Mode nor Microsoft Copilot on any plan — every other tool here covers at least one of them. Google publishes no programmatic route to those surfaces, and we would rather call them unmeasurable than read a results page through a third party and present it as a measurement. If those surfaces are where your buyers are, that is a reason to buy elsewhere, and this page says so.
• Prompt count. Up to 10 on Starter and 40 on Pro. Peec sells 50 at $95, Semrush 25 at $99 per domain, Scrunch 125 at $250, and Ahrefs’ own example of its $50 package is 80 prompts a day on one platform. Ours are written from your own site rather than typed in, which is why they are few; it is still fewer.
• Agencies. One brand per plan. No client seats, no white-label report, no pitch workspace, no consolidated invoice, no API, no MCP server. Otterly, Peec and AthenaHQ each sell an agency route today; Insites sells AI-visibility audits to agencies and resellers, at a price it does not publish. If you manage several clients, we are not yet the answer.
• Track record. Our paid plans went on sale in September 2026, and every scheduled run we can show you has happened on one account: ours. It has fired daily for forty-five days, which is real but is one subscriber’s worth of evidence. Claude’s monthly run has fired once and is tagged not yet proven, no Starter schedule has ever run, and the alert email has never been sent. Every other tool on this page was already selling when we first read its pricing page on 31 August 2026. And like every vendor on this page except Ahrefs, we do not publish how far back your data goes — ours is kept on the paid plans and on Free there is no history at all, only the latest scan. Ahrefs is the one tool here that gives you a number for that, and it is a fair reason to pick it. A trend line needs history, and ours starts the day you do.
• Things we do not measure at all. No prompt-volume data — Profound produces some from an opted-in panel, and we cannot honestly produce any at our scale. No AI referral-traffic analytics; Profound and Otterly sell those. No keyword database behind the prompts, which Semrush and Ahrefs have by default.
• Cadence at the entry tier is a tie, not a win. Every priced competitor in the sub-$100 band refreshes daily. So does Starter now, on Gemini; ChatGPT is asked every seventh day. Otterly refreshes all four of its assistants daily for $20 less.

What is left, honestly stated: a mention rate and a citation rate kept apart and each shown over its own run count; a check that did not run reported as not measured rather than as a competitor win; and the fix delivered as files rather than as advice — four of them from $49, with drafted pages from $99. That is not the cheapest drafting on this page. Knowatoa ticks AI agents at $59, $40 under our drafting tier, and its drafts are whole articles where our $49 ships technical files. If honest denominators and a file you can paste are what you are buying, we are a fair choice. If breadth or cheap drafting is, we are not.

What we could not check, and left blank

Each of these would have been easy to guess. None was. A guessed competitor fact is the failure this whole page exists to avoid, so they are listed here as open rather than filled in. Two came off the list on 19 October 2026 and one came onto it.

• Knowatoa’s prompt count on any tier, and its refresh cadence — its pricing page states neither, and its own FAQ implies a prompt count exists once you sign up.
• What Ahrefs’ all-models price buys. Its Brand Radar page carries an all-models figure with no unit, no tier and no explanation, several times larger than anything on its own pricing page, where the prompt packages stop at $250. The vendor’s two pages disagree, so we do not reprint the number — if you have seen it quoted somewhere, that is why it does not appear in our table.
• Otterly’s annual prices. It advertises 15% off and prints no annual figure. A second price set sits in the page’s own HTML, never renders when you click the annual toggle, and one of its three numbers is not 15% off anything. Treat Otterly’s annual pricing as unpublished.
• What one Profound AI Marketer credit produces — a page, a pass, a call. The page says credits are “limited” on the Trial and stops there. Its month-to-month price is no longer an open question because there is no published price to have one.
• Whether Scrunch’s $250 is monthly or annual, its refresh cadence, and whether its site audit emits a file or a list. The billing-period question has now been open across two readings seven weeks apart. A plain fetch of that page will happily invent an answer; we are not using it.
• AthenaHQ’s refresh cadence, what its API and extra credits cost, and whether its free Essential plan shows a result before an email.
• Whether Semrush’s AI Toolkit separates mentions from citations, and whether its $99 is a monthly or an annual-equivalent rate — its own toggle shows the same figure either way.
• Whether Peec’s app shows a result before signup — every button on its marketing site hands off to the app — and what its agency ladder costs today.
• How each vendor collects Google AI Overviews and AI Mode, since Google publishes no programmatic route to either. Profound stated that it captures responses “directly from the consumer experience, not API outputs”; the others’ pricing pages do not say.
• The loop mechanism inside Profound, Scrunch and AthenaHQ. All three claim or frame it on public pages; all three products sit behind an account or a demo.

Closed since the last reading, and said out loud because an audit that only ever adds unknowns is not auditing: Knowatoa’s AI-agents tick on its $59 plan is confirmed, read off a screenshot of the rendered pricing table rather than inherited from an older file; and Profound’s pricing is settled by being absent — there is nothing left to verify, which is itself the answer.

Four questions to ask any vendor, including us

The tables answer what the pricing pages say. These get at what they don’t.

1. “Which of these figures came from asking the model directly, and which from a results page you rendered?” Both can be legitimate. They are not the same measurement, and a report should mark which is which.
2. “How many times did you ask before you printed that percentage?” The same question asked twice can return two different answers with nothing changed on your site. A number with no count under it is a single observation wearing a percentage sign. The tracking guide shows the arithmetic by hand.
3. “What does a failed check look like in my report?” If the answer is a zero, or a blank that looks like a zero, the report will make your competitors look stronger every time a rate limit is hit.
4. “What do I get to publish?” A recommendation is a to-do. A file is a fix. Ask to see one before you pay, and ask what happens to the questions it targeted after you publish it.

A tool that answers all four plainly is worth more than one with two extra assistants in the header.

FAQs