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, read rendered rather than fetched · a few capability rows carry forward from 30 August and are marked where they appear · corrected 3 September 2026 against those same readings, with the corrections written down rather than quietly made · prices change, so open the links 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 the $295 plan — or you sell on Shopify and want visibility tied back to sales. Their entry plan is not that one: Essential is free, watches 5, and comes with 300 AI responses a month and an agent. 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 their $250 plan covers 3 of them. It also ships content generation and one page optimisation a month, which most trackers at any price do not.
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. 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, Semrush is a seven-day trial, and Peec is the hardest gate of the eight — signed out, their app is a sign-up wall that asks for a work email and shows nothing. The remaining three do not say where their wall falls, which is why there is no column for it below.
- todayYou run the brand, 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 six 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: $9 a month each for Gemini and AI Mode, $29 for Claude — the cheapest extra-assistant pricing in this table by a wide margin. | 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 | from $50 / monthTheir page says custom questions start there. The full AI Visibility Index is $199 a month, and it is the only tool here that publishes what one more check costs: two cents. If you already pay for Ahrefs, a handful of questions come with the plan — 5 on the $129 tier, 20 on the $449 one. | 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 / monthThat is the annual rate. Month to month it is $95. The page injects its prices after loading and the billing toggle sits on each card rather than at the top, so both figures were read rendered in a browser. | 3 of a possible 6, and you choose which.ChatGPT, Google AI Mode, AI Overviews, Microsoft Copilot, Perplexity, Gemini are the six. A fourth is $30 a month more on the annual rate, $35 month to month. | 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. Their page carries a “billed annually” line, but switching it to monthly leaves the figure at $99 — there is no annual discount, so this is also the month-to-month price. 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 / monthTheir page prints that one figure with no billing period next to it, so whether it is the annual rate or the month-to-month rate is not verified — and we are not working it back out of a discount. Seven-day free trial, no card, sign-up required. | 4 on the $250 plan — ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, Microsoft Copilot.Claude, Gemini, Meta AI, Google AI Mode and Grok sit on the custom-priced tier above, which lists 9. The $250 plan carries 125 tracked questions, one brand workspace and three customer personas. | No. One blended citations figure.Carried forward from 30 August. They restructured their plans since, and this line was not re-read. | Yes, in part. Their plan table lists “Content Generation — Basic” and one page optimisation a month on the $250 plan.Whether that arrives as a file you can use or a list on a screen is not verified — the table names the capability, not the thing it hands you. |
| AthenaHQathenahq.ai | $295 / month$245 a month billed for a year, 17% off. Includes $300 of usage credit a month — 3,600 responses — and they are the only one here that both names the unit and meters the plan in it: one credit is one AI response. There is also a free Essential plan, 300 responses a month, and it is a plan rather than a trial. | 10 on the $295 plan — ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, AI Mode, Gemini, Claude, Copilot, Grok, DeepSeek, Meta AI.The widest coverage on this page. The free plan watches 5. The full list of ten was read on 30 August; the count was re-read on the 31st. | No. | In between. You get recommendations and a content optimisation agent, not finished files. |
| Answermendthat’s us | On sale since 5 September 2026.Prices are on our pricing page. You buy by creating a free account and upgrading from the account page. The free tools stay free and need no card. | 4 — ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and Perplexity on Pro; ChatGPT and Gemini on Free and Starter. On Pro every assistant answers once per ask, and the repeats come from how often it is asked — Gemini daily, ChatGPT weekly, Perplexity every third day, Claude monthly; Starter asks each question once a day, on the two assistants it covers.Google’s AI Overviews is on Pro: it still has no public API, and the route is a paid search-data vendor rather than a scrape. It has not yet run against that vendor for real, so no figure from it appears here until it has. | 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. |
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. Five 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, Semrush is a seven-day trial, and Peec’s app signed out is a sign-up wall that shows nothing and asks for a work email. The remaining three — Profound, Otterly and AthenaHQ — each put a URL box or a free plan in front of you without saying what happens after you use it. Settling those means running a sign-up on someone else’s site, not reading a 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.
- 03Two month-to-month prices, and a correction to the one we thought was missing. Profound labels both of its self-serve plans “billed yearly” and publishes no monthly rate at all. Scrunch prints a single figure, $250 a month, with no billing period beside it, so we cannot tell you which of the two it is. Peec used to be on this list — we said their monthly toggle left every figure unchanged. That was wrong. The toggle sits on each plan card rather than at the top of the page, and the monthly rates are $95, $245 and $495. Peec’s is now in the table, and the correction is here rather than quietly made.
- 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. We do say, on the pricing page, per plan — which is why there is no row: a column of eight blanks beside one filled cell is a comparison of our own making. 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. Ahrefs goes further than we would have credited them for: on the pricing page, before you buy, they say their index “may have limited coverage for brands with little or no search volume” — a vendor naming the brands its own product measures badly. We have not read every help centre, so we are still not claiming to know what the rest do.
Two of these pairings get a page of their own. Profound against Ahrefs Brand Radar is the product gap: a platform with a writing layer next to a checker that costs nothing and asks six assistants. Profound against Otterly is the price gap: $99 against $29, where the cheaper one watches more. Both put the reading date next to each figure rather than at the top, and both end where this one does — with where they beat us.
Shown, not argued
That row, on
a real screen.
The table says we keep “named you” and “linked to you” apart. This is what that looks like — and what the report does with a check that did not run at all.
Northlight is an invented brand and both scans are simulated — example data, never a customer. The layout and the rules are the product’s; the numbers belong to nobody.
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, since 5 September 2026, you can actually do.
Every other tool here was on sale before ours was.
Our paid plans went on sale 5 September 2026 — a free account first, then an upgrade from the account page — but every other tool on this page was already on sale when we read its pricing page. We are the newest paid product on our own comparison: no renewals yet, no long-running paid accounts, and nothing but this page’s method to judge us on.
They watch more assistants than we do.
AthenaHQ watches 10 for $295 a month. Even the cheapest here, Otterly at $29, watches four. Worse for us: AthenaHQ’s free plan watches 5 for nothing, which is more than we ask at any price. We ask two, three on Pro, 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 twenty free tools: the result on screen.