The competitive set
Eight AI visibility
tools, compared
honestly.
We make one of these, so read this knowing that. What we can promise is the method: every price and every capability below was read off that company’s own page, on the date shown, and linked so you can open it yourself. Nothing came from a review site, a roundup, or memory.
We have also written down, in plain words, the situations where each of them is a better answer than us — and a whole section on where we are behind. If a comparison page from a vendor never loses a row, it is worth nothing to you.
Checked 31 August 2026 from each company’s own pricing page · a few capability rows carry forward from 30 August where the vendor page had not changed · prices change, so check before you buy
When to buy someone else
When one of them is
the better answer.
Eight real situations. Each one links to the page it came from.
Otterly
You only want a number, and you want it cheap. $29 a month is a fair price for “does AI mention my business, yes or no”, and we are not trying to win that customer.
Knowatoa
You want articles researched, written and published for you on a schedule, without being in the loop — and you want that at $59 a month. That is the thing we plan to be best at, and they are already selling it today.
Ahrefs Brand Radar
You already pay for Ahrefs. A feature inside a tool you own beats another monthly bill, and their prompts start free inside a plan you have. They are also the only one here that spells out, on a public page, the difference between AI naming your business and AI linking to your page. We had planned to claim that as ours. It isn’t.
Profound
You are a large company with a purchasing process — seats, security review, a vendor questionnaire. That is their end of the market and it is not ours. They also read answers from the ordinary consumer screen rather than the developer connection, which is harder to do and closer to what your customer actually sees.
Peec
You want the data out of the tool and into everything else you use. They ship a live connection to Claude, Cursor and n8n, plus an API and a Looker Studio connector — though all three sit on their Enterprise plan, not on the $80 one.
Semrush
You already run your SEO out of Semrush and want the AI numbers in the same place. Their AI Visibility Toolkit is $99 a month for one domain and bundles a site audit for AI readiness alongside the tracking.
AthenaHQ
You want the widest coverage on this page — 10 different AI assistants on their entry plan — or you sell on Shopify and want visibility tied back to sales. They also run agency workspaces, so several brands sit in one account.
Scrunch
You need to check the answers your different types of customer get, separately — they treat customer personas as a first-class thing. And they hand you 1,000 ready-made questions for your industry, so you are not staring at a blank box.
When to stay
When we are
the better answer.
- todayYou want the fix handed to you as a file, not as advice. Seven of our tools are live now: four give you the block of text or the small file to paste in, and three fetch your site and report what an assistant actually gets.
- todayYou want to see the problem before you pay anybody. Ours are open — the result appears on screen, no account, no email. That is worth less than we thought it was: Ahrefs states “no signup required” on its checker, and Knowatoa’s crawler console returned a real result for an arbitrary domain with no email at all. Scrunch requires a sign-up and Semrush is a seven-day trial; the other four do not say where their sign-up wall falls, which is why there is no column for it below.
- todayYou are a small business, not a marketing department. Nothing to set up, no seats to buy, and no year paid up front before you find out whether any of this matters to you.
FAQ schema block Organization schema block robots.txt file llms.txt file
Those four generators are not the whole shelf: Crawler Checker, Readiness Score and Render Check each fetch your own site from our server and return a real result about your own pages.
Side by side
The comparison.
Every figure links to the page it was read from.
| Tool | Cheapest paid plan | AI assistants checked | Separates “named you” from “linked to you” | Hands you the fix as a file |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Otterlyotterly.ai | $29 / month$25 a month if you pay for a year. | 4 — ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity, Microsoft Copilot.Claude, Gemini and Google AI Mode cost extra on top. | Partly. It shows you the links AI used, but nowhere says that being named without a link is a different problem. | No. You get suggestions and content briefs to work from. |
| Ahrefs Brand Radarahrefs.com | $50 / monthFor custom questions. Their full AI Visibility Index is $199 a month. If you already pay for Ahrefs, some questions are included. | 6 — Google AI Overviews, AI Mode, Perplexity, Gemini, ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot.Claude as well, on the $199 plan. | Yes, and they define both in plain words on their own page — the only tool here that does. | No. It tells you where you stand and stops there. |
| Knowatoaknowatoa.com | $59 / monthTheir next plan up is $199 a month. | 3 on the $59 plan.All 7 on the $199 plan. | Partly. They lead on the pages AI is citing, but never say that a plain name-drop is counted differently. | Yes, and further than that — an AI writer drafts whole articles and can publish them on a schedule, from the $59 plan up. |
| Peecpeec.ai | $80 / monthBilled annually. The page injects its prices after loading, so this was read in a browser rather than fetched. The month-to-month rate is not verified: their monthly toggle left every figure unchanged. | 3 of a possible 6, and you choose which.ChatGPT, Google AI Mode, AI Overviews, Microsoft Copilot, Perplexity, Gemini are the six. A fourth costs $30 a month more. | No. Brand mentions and the sources AI used are two features side by side, not two different measurements. | No. Reporting and recommendations. |
| Profoundtryprofound.com | $99 / monthPaid for a year up front. Their next plan is $399 a month. | 1 on the $99 plan — ChatGPT only.3 on the $399 plan. The wider list they describe is what the platform can do, not what those two plans watch. | No. One blended “citations” figure. | Yes. Their Agents write content for you, paid for in credits, from the $99 plan up.What one credit buys is not verified — their page says a credit is consumed each time an Agent runs, and does not say what a run produces. |
| Semrushsemrush.com | $99 / monthPer domain, billed annually. Seven-day free trial. | 4 — ChatGPT, Google AI, Gemini, Perplexity.25 tracked questions, one domain. | Not verified. Their page names mentions but does not say whether a name-drop and a link are counted apart — so this is blank, not a no. | No. You get an AI-readiness site audit, not a file. |
| Scrunchscrunch.com | $250 / monthPaid for a year. $300 a month if you pay monthly. | 7 — ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, Google AI Mode and AI Overviews, Meta. | No. One blended citations figure. | Their own page does not say. They advertise “actionable fixes” on page audits, but never say whether that is a file you can use or a list on a screen — so we are not answering for them. |
| AthenaHQathenahq.ai | $295 / month17% off if you pay for a year. Includes $300 of usage credit a month, and they say one credit is one AI response. | 10 — ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, AI Mode, Gemini, Claude, Copilot, Grok, DeepSeek, Meta AI.The widest coverage on this page. | No. | In between. You get recommendations and a content optimisation agent, not finished files. |
| Answermendthat’s us | Nothing to buy yet.There is no paid plan and no sign-up. The tools that are live are free. | 2 — ChatGPT and Gemini.Perplexity on the paid plans. Google’s AI Overviews is on no plan here: it has no public API, and we would rather name it unmeasurable than scrape it. | Yes, and it is the reason this business exists. Named-from-memory and fetched-and-linked are two different failures with two different fixes, so they are never summed into one figure. | Yes, today. Seven are live and free: four write the block of text or the small file in your own browser, and three fetch your site from our server and report what they found. No account either way. |
What we could not check, and left out of the table
These are the comparisons we wanted to make and could not. A blank is more use to you than a guess, so here is every one of them, with the reason.
- 01Whether you can see a result before handing over your email. This was going to be a column. Four of the eight are settled: Ahrefs says “no signup required” in writing, Knowatoa’s crawler console returned a real result for an arbitrary domain with no email, Scrunch requires a sign-up, and Semrush is a seven-day trial. The other four all advertise a free trial or a free plan, and not one of them says where the sign-up wall actually falls. Finding out means running each sign-up on someone else’s site, not reading each page — so the column came out rather than being filled with guesses.
- 02Whether Semrush separates being named from being linked to. Their page names mentions and does not answer the question either way, so their cell reads “not verified” rather than “no”. Ahrefs is credited above for being the only one that answers it plainly; that credit is about the tools whose answer we know.
- 03Peec’s month-to-month price. The $80 is the annual rate. Their page has a monthly toggle, and clicking it left every figure unchanged, so we have one rate and not the other. Their FAQ mentions a 15% annual discount; working the monthly price back out of that would be arithmetic, not a reading, and it is not going on this page.
- 04How many times each tool asks a question before it reports a number. This matters more than it sounds: ask an AI the same thing five times and you can get five different answers, so a number from a single ask is close to meaningless. Not one of the eight says what it does here — Peec comes closest, saying it runs daily and that answers vary day to day, without saying what it averages. Neither do we. There is nothing to compare, so there is no row. Read “not stated” as not stated; it does not mean they only ask once.
- 05Whether any of them explains how it measures. We used to say nobody publishes this. That was wrong, and we are correcting it here rather than quietly dropping it: Peec’s docs describe daily runs and admit answers vary, Otterly publishes what its own free crawler tool does not check, and Ahrefs says its questions come from real search behaviour rather than invented ones. We have not read every help centre, so we are still not claiming to know what the rest do.
Where we lose
Where we are
behind, plainly.
Six of these. We would rather you read them here than find them out after paying us — which, for now, you cannot do anyway.
There is nothing to buy from us.
Every tool on this page can be bought today. Ours cannot. If you have a decision to make this month, we are not on the shortlist.
They watch more assistants than we do.
AthenaHQ watches 10 for $295 a month. Even the cheapest here, Otterly at $29, watches four. We ask two, and we are not going to win a breadth race we did not enter.
Knowatoa already does the thing we intend to be best at.
Drafted articles, researched and published on a schedule, for $59 a month. That is the thing we intend to be best at, and they are already selling it. We do not get to call it our idea.
Ahrefs got to the honest metric first.
Being named in an answer and being linked to as a source are two different problems needing two different fixes. We think that is the most important thing in this whole category. Ahrefs already explains it on a public page, so we cannot claim it as ours, and we are not going to.
Free, with no email, is the category standard.
We had counted “see it before you pay” as something of ours. It is not. Ahrefs states “no signup required” on its checker, and Knowatoa’s console returned a real result for an arbitrary domain with no email. Whatever our free tools win on, it is not the absence of a gate.
No customers, no results, nothing to show you.
No logos, no case studies, no reviews, no “trusted by” line — because there is nothing true to put in one. That gap closes with time or not at all, and inventing our way out of it is the one thing that would end this business.
Or skip the comparison
and just look.
All seven free tools: no account, no email, result on screen.