AI Visibility Tools: The Definitive Comparison (2026)

There's a growing category of tools trying to answer a question most companies can't: what do AI assistants tell people about your brand? If you've read our primer on what AI visibility is, you know the problem. ChatGPT alone reaches over 700 million weekly active users. Add Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, Grok, and DeepSeek, and you've got hundreds of millions of buying decisions influenced by AI answers you've never seen.

Gartner projected a 25% drop in traditional search volume by 2026 as users shift to AI assistants. The question isn't whether this matters. It's whether you have any data on the channel that's actually growing.

You can check manually. Run a few prompts, screenshot the results, paste them into a spreadsheet. That works for about a week. Then you've got 50 prompts across 6 models, answers that changed between Tuesday and Thursday, and no historical data. That's the hole these tools fill.

This post compares eight AI visibility tools on the market right now. We cover what each does, what it costs, and where it falls short. Prompt Metrics (the company publishing this post) is in the comparison. We gave ourselves the same treatment as everyone else.

What these tools actually do

An AI visibility tool queries AI models with prompts relevant to your brand and records what comes back. Think rank tracking, but for AI recommendations instead of search results.

The core job is AI brand monitoring: tracking whether your brand gets mentioned when someone asks an AI assistant a buying question in your space. The better tools also track where you land in the recommendation list, what sentiment the AI attaches to your name, which sources it cites, and how competitors compare on the same prompts.

This matters more as traditional search erodes. SparkToro's clickstream research found that roughly 58% of Google searches now end without a click to any website. When users skip search entirely and ask an AI assistant instead, the only visibility that counts is whether you're in the answer.

Manual checking breaks for three reasons. Too many models: ChatGPT and Claude can give completely different recommendations for the same prompt because they draw on different training data and retrieval systems. Responses aren't static: the same prompt can produce a different answer tomorrow. And you need history. A single snapshot is an anecdote. Weekly data over months is something you can act on.

What to look for

These tools don't all solve the same problem. Some bolt AI tracking onto existing SEO platforms. Others are purpose-built for generative engine optimization. Here's what actually separates them.

Start with model coverage. Some tools only track ChatGPT and Google AI Overviews. Others cover Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, Grok, and DeepSeek. Your buyers use multiple AI assistants, so a tool covering one or two gives you a fraction of the picture. This is where most of the comparison happens.

Then there's the question of prompt sourcing. Some tools ship with massive pre-built databases (Profound claims 500M+, Semrush 239M). Others let you write your own. Pre-built libraries show broad category trends. Custom prompts show you exactly what your buyers are asking. Which matters more depends on how well you already know your audience.

Tracking frequency matters less than you'd think until it doesn't. Daily catches shifts faster than weekly, obviously. But the real question is whether the tool scans on-demand or on a schedule, because that determines how quickly you can react when something changes.

Sentiment analysis separates the useful tools from the basic ones. Being mentioned isn't enough. You need to know if the AI recommends you enthusiastically or mentions you as an afterthought. The Princeton GEO study found that content with cited statistics saw up to 40% higher visibility in AI-generated answers, but visibility without positive sentiment is a hollow metric.

Citation tracking tells you why a competitor got recommended. Which review sites, publications, and pages is the AI drawing from? That's where you invest your content efforts. Competitive benchmarking shows the same thing from the other direction: your brand vs. a named competitor on a specific prompt, this week. Not "the market" in aggregate. Actual names.

And you need historical data. AI visibility scores that don't move over time are just trivia. Trend lines are what tell you if your work is paying off.

Last: watch the pricing structure. Some tools charge per prompt, some per model, some per platform. A $99/month tool that charges extra per model and per prompt can hit $800+ before you've noticed.

The tools

Prompt Metrics

Disclosure: Prompt Metrics publishes this blog. We gave ourselves the same honest assessment as every other tool here.

We scan 7 AI models on every plan: GPT-5, Claude Opus, Claude Sonnet, Gemini, Grok, DeepSeek, and Perplexity. No per-model pricing tiers. You write your own prompts, run scans across all models, and get mention tracking, sentiment analysis, citation extraction, and competitive benchmarking. Competitors are tracked by name, not by category blob.

Pricing starts at $29/month (Starter, 25 prompts), Pro at $49/month (50 prompts), Business at $149/month (150 prompts). Every plan includes a 7-day free trial and access to all 7 models.

The honest weaknesses: no pre-built prompt database, so you bring your own prompts. No Google AI Overviews or AI Mode tracking (this is LLM-native, not a search overlay). And we're a newer entrant, so the platform is still shipping features fast. Whether that's a risk or a feature depends on your tolerance. See what we track →

Otterly.ai

Otterly tracks 6 platforms: ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Copilot, Google AI Mode, and AI Overviews. Named a Gartner Cool Vendor in AI for Marketing in 2025. Over 20,000 users.

$29/month gets you about 10 prompts. $189/month for 100. $989/month for 1,000. They offer a Brand Visibility Index, sentiment tracking, and citation analysis. Setup is quick, interface is clean.

The gap: no Claude, no DeepSeek. If your audience uses those models, two of the seven major AI assistants are invisible to you. Higher tiers also get expensive fast for large prompt volumes.

Good starting point if you're budget-conscious and your focus is Google AI Overviews alongside ChatGPT.

Profound

Profound's headline number is their prompt database: 500M+ prompts, processing 5M+ citations daily. But the base plan ($99/month) covers ChatGPT only. Gemini and Google AI Mode require an enterprise plan ($2,000+/month). They're SOC 2 Type II and HIPAA compliant.

Their Agent Analytics feature is worth noting: it tracks how AI bots and crawlers access your website, surfacing data that GA4 and Cloudflare miss. They also have Shopping Insights for products appearing in ChatGPT's shopping features.

The catch: full model coverage is locked behind the enterprise tier. At $99/month, you're watching one model. For a tool with the deepest data layer in the category, that's a frustrating gate.

Enterprise teams with budget will get the most out of this. The Agent Analytics feature is the one nobody else offers.

Peec AI

Peec tracks 6 platforms at base with add-ons for Claude, DeepSeek, and Grok at €80-120/month extra. Starts at €89/month (Starter) and €199/month (Pro). Unlimited users on every plan. GDPR compliant.

The standout: 115 languages. Nobody else in this comparison comes close. Their Actions feature also turns monitoring data into a prioritized GEO roadmap with a Relative Opportunity Score, and they integrate with Looker Studio for reporting.

The tradeoff is that add-on pricing for extra models adds up. If you want full 9-model coverage, the real price is well past the sticker.

This is the pick for international brands. If your market isn't English-only, the language support alone may make the decision for you.

Scrunch AI

Scrunch (now at scrunch.com) exited beta in March 2025 with $19M in funding. Core plan is $250/month for 4 platforms: ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI, and Copilot. Enterprise adds Claude, Gemini, Meta AI, Google AI Mode, and Grok.

What's different here is Google Analytics integration. Scrunch tracks which AI-driven visits actually convert, not just whether you're mentioned. SOC 2 compliant.

The downsides are well-documented in reviews: confusing prompt credit system, weak data visualization, underdeveloped reporting. "Insights" and "Site Audits" are still in beta. No free trial.

Worth a look if attribution is the thing keeping you up at night. The GA integration is the feature nobody else has nailed. Everything else feels like it's still catching up.

Evertune

Evertune is the enterprise play. $3,000/month. 10 platforms tracked including ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, DeepSeek, Meta AI, and Google AI Mode. Founded by Trade Desk veterans, $19M funded.

What makes Evertune different from everything else here: their EverPanel is a demographically weighted panel of 25 million real users measuring actual consumer AI experiences. They don't just query the API. They measure what real people see. In March 2026, they launched AI Retargeting through partnerships with The Trade Desk and Index Exchange, connecting AI visibility data to programmatic ad buying.

You can probably guess the catch. Enterprise-only, no self-serve, no trial. $36K+ annually. But nobody else has the real-user panel, and nobody else connects AI visibility to programmatic ad buying.

Semrush AI Visibility Toolkit

Semrush added AI visibility as a $99/month add-on to their existing SEO platform in October 2025. Three platforms: ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, and Google AI Mode. Gemini is "coming soon."

You get prompt research (like keyword research but for AI), brand performance tracking with weekly updates, and an AI Search Site Audit that checks up to 100 pages for crawlability issues. The prompt database has 239M+ prompts with 6 months of historical data.

The limitations are real: 3 platforms, no Claude, no Perplexity, no Grok, no DeepSeek. English only across 6 regions (US, UK, Canada, Australia, India, Spain). Costs stack: +$99/month per additional domain, +$60/month per 50 extra prompts. Independent reviews note the strategic recommendations tend toward generic advice.

Convenient if you're already paying for Semrush and don't want another vendor. But "convenient" and "sufficient" aren't the same thing.

Ahrefs Brand Radar

Ahrefs launched Brand Radar as an add-on to their SEO platform. It tracks 6 AI platforms plus YouTube, TikTok, and Reddit. Their prompt database comes from 243M+ monthly "People Also Ask" queries, which gives it a different angle than tools relying on custom prompts.

Pricing: €179/month per AI platform index, or €654/month for all 6. Custom query tracking is a separate add-on starting at €46.70/month for 2,500 queries. All of this sits on top of an Ahrefs subscription (minimum ~$129/month), putting full coverage around €800+/month.

The prompt library is static with timed snapshots, not live or on-demand. Custom query tracking is an extra paid layer on top of the already-paid add-on. The cost structure is complex.

If you live in Ahrefs and want AI data in the same dashboard, it works. The PAA-derived prompt database is a different lens than what other tools offer, but you can't shape it to your needs without paying more.

Side-by-side comparison

Feature	Prompt Metrics	Otterly	Profound	Peec	Scrunch	Evertune	Semrush	Ahrefs
AI models	7	6	1-3+	6-9	4-9	10	3	6
All models included	Yes	Yes	No	No	No	Yes	Yes	No
Custom prompts	Yes	Yes	Limited	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Add-on
Sentiment	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Limited
Citations	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Competitor tracking	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
GA integration	No	No	No	Looker	Yes	No	No	No
Free trial	7 days	Limited	7 days	No	No	No	No	No
Starting price	$29/mo	$29/mo	$99/mo	€89/mo	$250/mo	$3,000/mo	$99/mo*	~€179/mo*
Self-serve	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Partial	No	Yes	Yes

* Semrush and Ahrefs prices are add-ons requiring base subscriptions.

What none of these tools solve yet

Every tool here shares the same constraints, including ours.

Ask the same prompt five minutes apart and you might get a different answer. Every tool takes periodic snapshots, not continuous streams. You're always seeing a sample, never the full picture.

No tool can tell you why a model recommends one brand over another, either. The Princeton GEO study showed that certain strategies (adding citations, statistics, quotations) improve visibility by up to 40%, but what happens inside the model is still a black box.

Attribution is the hard one. You changed your content strategy and your AI visibility score went up. Was it your changes? A competitor's site going down? A model retraining? Correlation is easy. Causation is hard. Nobody in this category has cracked it.

Then there's crawlability. Most tools monitor AI responses but don't tell you whether AI crawlers can even access your site. Fabrice Canel, Principal Program Manager at Microsoft, has said that content creators who make their content well-structured and accessible for AI systems benefit from increased visibility. You can use an AI crawlability checker to audit your robots.txt and meta tags, or generate an llms.txt file to give AI systems a structured summary of your content. These are prerequisites for monitoring, not features of it.

AI assistants also increasingly surface images, product cards, and video alongside text. Most tools only parse text responses. The visual layer is largely unmonitored. And autonomous AI agents that research, compare, and purchase on behalf of users are emerging fast. None of these tools monitor what happens when an AI agent, not a human, asks the questions.

How to pick one

Startup or SMB on a budget. Otterly or Prompt Metrics at $29/month. Both give you multi-model coverage at the lowest price point. Run 10-25 prompts weekly, build a baseline, then decide if you need more.

Mid-market marketing team. Prompt Metrics, Peec, or Profound, depending on what you need. Multilingual? Peec. Massive prompt database? Profound. Custom prompts across every model without add-on math? That's us.

Enterprise with compliance requirements. Scrunch (SOC 2) or Evertune if budget allows. Evertune's real-user panel is the one thing in this comparison nobody else can replicate. Scrunch ties visibility to conversions through GA.

Already paying for Semrush or Ahrefs. Their add-ons are convenient but cover fewer models. Consider running a dedicated AI visibility tool alongside your SEO platform rather than relying on an add-on alone.

Agency managing multiple brands. Look for multi-workspace support and per-client reporting. Check how each tool handles workspace isolation and team access.

Run one for a month. Look at the data before committing annually.

Frequently asked questions

What are AI visibility tools?

Software that queries AI models on your behalf and records what they say about your brand. Instead of you manually running prompts in ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity and screenshotting responses, the tool does it on a schedule and tracks changes over time. Our guide on what AI visibility is goes deeper into the concept.

How much do they cost?

Anywhere from $29/month to $3,000/month. Otterly and Prompt Metrics sit at the low end. Profound, Peec, and Scrunch land in the $89-$250 range. Evertune is enterprise-only at $3K+. The SEO platform add-ons from Semrush and Ahrefs start at $99-€179/month but require base subscriptions you're probably already paying for, so the real cost is higher than the sticker.

Which AI models matter?

ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini at minimum. Those three cover the largest share of AI-assisted buying research. Perplexity is strong for search-style queries, Grok is growing through X/Twitter, and DeepSeek has traction in technical and international markets. Each model has different training data and recommendations, so watching just one is like monitoring only one search engine.

Will these tools improve my AI rankings?

No. They're monitoring tools. They show you where you stand. What you do with that data is what moves the needle. The practice of actually optimizing for AI recommendations is called generative engine optimization, and it starts with the data these tools give you: which prompts matter, what sources get cited, where competitors outperform you. Our GEO vs SEO breakdown covers how optimization for AI differs from traditional search.

How often should I check?

Weekly at minimum, daily in competitive categories. AI responses change more often than search rankings. One check is an anecdote. Twelve weeks of data is a trend you can act on. Start weekly on your most important prompts, then increase frequency where you're seeing competitive movement.