The 10 Best AI Visibility Tools in 2026 (Grouped by Who They're Actually For)

The best AI visibility tool depends entirely on who you are: enterprises standardize on Profound, mid-market teams and agencies get the most from Peec AI, solo operators start with Otterly at $29/mo, teams already paying for Semrush or Ahrefs should switch on their built-in AI tracking first — and local businesses, the segment most of these tools ignore, are better served by purpose-built local tracking like our own Radar. Full disclosure up front: Radar is our product. It appears in this list in one section, clearly labeled, and we'll tell you plainly when something else fits you better.

We run AI visibility measurement for a living, so we evaluate these platforms the way a practitioner does: what engines does it observe, how does it sample (once or repeatedly?), what evidence does it show, and what does full coverage actually cost once the add-ons land. Pricing below was verified July 2026 — this market changes monthly, so confirm on vendor sites before buying.

What is an AI visibility tool?

An AI visibility tool is a monitoring tool that measures how often AI platforms — ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude, Copilot, and Google AI Overviews / AI Mode — mention, cite, or recommend your brand when users ask questions in your category. The good ones run defined prompt sets against each AI engine on a schedule, then track AI mentions and share of voice against competitors, sentiment, and which sources the AI responses cite. In short: they tell you whether you show up in AI search, across many AI engines at once.

The category exploded for a simple reason: buying decisions moved into AI answers, and there's no Search Console for them. ChatGPT serves ~900 million weekly users, AI Overviews appear on roughly 30% of Google searches, and 68% of US Google searches end without a click (SparkToro, June 2026). Traditional SEO tools and rank trackers can't see any of it — brand visibility inside AI search engines is a different measurement problem than rankings. Between mid-2025 and spring 2026, investors put over $300M into AI visibility tracking tools — which is also why every platform now claims to do everything. They don't, and the differences are material.

How we grouped these tools

Feature tables treat a Fortune 500 brand team and a two-location roofing company as the same buyer. They aren't. So this list is organized by buyer, because the best AI visibility tracking tool for you is a budget-and-need question:

1. Enterprise brands — Profound, Scrunch AI, Evertune
2. Mid-market and agencies — Peec AI, Rankscale
3. Solo operators and small teams — Otterly.ai
4. Teams already in an SEO suite — Semrush AI Toolkit, Ahrefs Brand Radar
5. Local businesses — Routeless Radar (ours), plus honest alternatives

Quick comparison table

Enterprise: Profound, Scrunch AI, Evertune

1. Profound — the category leader, priced like it

Profound is what most people mean by "enterprise AI visibility platform." It monitors brand visibility across the widest engine set in the category, tracks how every AI crawler and agent reads your site (agent analytics), surfaces the questions people actually ask AI in your category (conversation explorer), and its query fan-out analysis — decomposing a user question into the sub-queries an engine actually runs — is genuinely ahead of the field. SOC 2 Type II, a 10k-call/day API, and a content-generation layer round it out.

The catch is the ladder: the $99/mo Starter tracks ChatGPT only; $399/mo Growth gets you three engines; full 10+ engine coverage is custom enterprise pricing that reviewers consistently report in the low thousands per month ($30k–$100k+/yr). No free trial, sales-led.

Verdict: if you're a national brand with an AEO budget, this is the safe pick. If you're anyone else, you're paying for depth you won't use.

2. Scrunch AI — the customer-journey angle

Scrunch frames AI visibility around journey stages — awareness, consideration, purchase — and shows where in the funnel AI answers drop or misrepresent you. Well-funded, solid engine coverage, typically lands around $300/mo and up. A sensible Profound alternative when journey framing matches how your marketing team already thinks.

3. Evertune — brand perception in AI, quantified

Evertune is less about "did we get mentioned" and more about how AI models characterize your brand versus competitors — attribute by attribute, model by model. Custom pricing. Brand and comms teams at large companies get the most from it; performance marketers will find it abstract.

Mid-market and agencies: Peec AI, Rankscale

4. Peec AI — the agency default in 2026

Berlin-based Peec earned its momentum ($29M raised, $4M+ ARR within ten months) by doing the core job cleanly at a price agencies can stomach: prompt-level tracking across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Copilot, AI Mode, and AI Overviews in the base plan (~€89/mo), unlimited seats, multi-country tracking, sentiment, source analysis, and a Looker Studio connector on higher tiers. Claude, Grok, and DeepSeek ship as add-ons (~€20–30 each).

Verdict: the best price-to-breadth ratio for a marketing team or agency managing multiple B2B/national brands. Its lens is prompts-per-brand, though — for local service businesses, question sets and sampling need a local shape it isn't built around (more below).

5. Rankscale — value pick for small agencies

Rankscale undercuts Peec meaningfully (from ~$49/mo) with tracking across the big four engines, citation analysis, and competitive benchmarks. Fewer integrations and a smaller team behind it, but for a small agency's first paid AI tracking, the economics work.

Solo operators: Otterly.ai

6. Otterly.ai — the $29 on-ramp

Otterly AI's Lite plan is the cheapest real AI search monitoring in the category: $29/mo for 15 prompts across ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Copilot with multi-country support. Standard ($189/mo, 100 prompts) adds API, MCP, and Looker; Premium ($489/mo, 400 prompts) adds agency workspaces. Watch the add-on math: Gemini, Google AI Mode, and Claude cost extra ($9–$149 depending on plan), so the headline price isn't the full-coverage price.

Verdict: for a solo founder or small SaaS validating whether AI visibility matters in their niche, this is the right first subscription. It's monitoring done simply — no content workflow, light analysis — which is exactly the point at this price.

Already paying for an SEO suite: Semrush and Ahrefs

7. Semrush AI Toolkit / AI SEO tracking

Semrush bolted AI visibility into its ecosystem of traditional SEO tools: AI Overview tracking inside position tracking, the Semrush AI Toolkit for brand mentions across ChatGPT and other engines, and its enterprise AI Visibility Index. The integration with existing keyword and competitive workflows is the sell — one dashboard, one invoice, AI search visibility next to your rankings. Depth per engine trails the specialists, and costs stack on top of an already substantial Semrush subscription.

8. Ahrefs Brand Radar

Ahrefs took its crawling DNA into AI monitoring: Brand Radar tracks brand mentions across AI Overviews, ChatGPT, and Perplexity against one of the largest AI citation indexes anywhere, included with standard Ahrefs plans. If you live in Ahrefs, turn it on today — it's the fastest zero-new-vendor path to directional AI visibility data. It answers "do we show up in AI answers?" well; it's thinner on "why, and what do we do about it."

Verdict for both: right answer for teams with these subscriptions already. Wrong answer as a reason to buy the whole suite.

Local businesses: the segment everything above ignores

Here's the structural problem we kept hitting before building our own: every tool above is designed around brands. Their unit of analysis is "how often is [brand] mentioned for [industry prompts]." A local service business — a roofer, a personal-injury firm, a med spa — has a different question: "when someone in my city asks AI who to hire, does it say my name or my competitor's?"

That question needs different mechanics: locally-phrased buyer questions ("best roofer near me for tile"), per-market competitor extraction, accuracy checking (does AI have your hours, services, and address right?), and — critically — enough repeated sampling to make a recommendation rate statistically meaningful, because AI answers vary run to run and one screenshot proves nothing. Enterprise prompt trackers can be bent toward this; none are built for it, and their pricing assumes marketing-department budgets.

9. Routeless Radar — ours, built for exactly this

Radar is our product, so weigh this section accordingly — but its design choices are easy to verify because the free tier shows everything. A free scan observes real ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity answers to real customer questions about your business and returns the full evidence: recommendation receipts (every question, the complete answer text, the sources cited, model, timestamp), competitors ranked by how often AI names them, verbatim quotes of what AI says about you, technical can-AI-read-your-site checks, and a starter llms.txt. No signup to see results.

Paid tracking is priced for a local business, not a brand team: Local, $49/mo — weekly tracking of 10 customer questions from a 150-observation baseline, recommendation rate with a 95% confidence range, competitor watch, Facts Watch for what AI gets wrong, GA4 connection. Growth, $149/mo — adds Claude coverage, two locations, source graphs showing which websites feed the answers, displacement analysis, intervention tracking (did the fix work?), branded shareable PDF reports, and uptime monitoring. Agencies run it white-label under their own brand — relevant if you sell SEO or AEO reporting to clients.

Where Radar is the wrong pick, honestly: national/e-commerce brands (use Profound or Peec), multi-country tracking (Peec), massive custom prompt volumes (Profound), or pure AIO citation research at index scale (Ahrefs). Radar's depth is local recommendation intelligence; that focus is the product.

10. The DIY spot-check — free, and better than nothing

You can approximate a baseline manually: write ten questions your customers actually ask, run each several times across ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity, and log who gets named. It's tedious and unscientific — small samples, your own account's personalization, no source tracing — but it beats deciding in the dark. (It's also exactly the drudgery the free report automates, which is why we give that away.)

How to choose: a 60-second decision path

• Enterprise budget, national brand → Profound (or Scrunch for journey framing, Evertune for brand perception).
• Agency or mid-market team, multiple non-local brands → Peec AI first; Rankscale if budget-constrained.
• Solo founder validating the channel → Otterly at $29, upgrade when prompt limits pinch.
• Already on Semrush/Ahrefs → switch on their AI tracking before buying anything new.
• Local business, or agency serving local clients → run our free scan for the baseline; pay for tracking only if the baseline shows a fight worth having.

Two buying rules that apply to every tracking tool on this list. First, demand receipts — if a platform gives you a visibility score without the underlying AI responses, you can't audit it, and unfalsifiable metrics attract bad decisions. Second, mind sampling: AI answers are probabilistic, so any tool reporting from single runs is reporting noise. Ask vendors how many observations sit behind each number, and whether visibility across engines is measured with the same question set.

Measurement is half the job

One caution from daily practice: a visibility dashboard doesn't improve visibility, any more than a scale loses weight. The tools tell you where you stand; the movement comes from answer-first content, consistent entity data, reviews, and presence on the sources AI actually cites. Budget accordingly — if the tool subscription crowds out the fixing, you've bought a very precise report of a problem you can't afford to solve. The full playbook is in our answer engine optimization guide.

Frequently asked questions

What do AI visibility tools actually track?

They run defined prompts against AI engines on a schedule and record whether your brand is mentioned or cited, in what position, with what sentiment, and which sources the answer drew from. Aggregated over time, that yields mention rate, share of voice versus competitors, and source-level diagnostics.

What's the best free AI visibility tool?

For local businesses, our Radar scan is the most complete free option we know: multi-engine observation with full answer receipts, competitor extraction, and technical checks, no signup. For brands, Ahrefs' free AI visibility checker and Semrush's free checker give lighter one-shot snapshots. Free tiers are baselines, not monitoring.

Are AI visibility tools worth it in 2026?

If AI answers plausibly influence your buyers — and with ~900M weekly ChatGPT users and AI Overviews on ~30% of searches, they do for most categories — then measuring is worth something. Whether it's worth $29 or $3,000 a month depends on deal size and how contested your category's answers are. Run a free baseline before subscribing to anything.

Can't I just ask ChatGPT if it recommends me?

A single ask tells you one sample from a distribution. The same question re-asked returns different names — we watch this daily. Meaningful measurement requires repeated observations across engines and question phrasings, which is precisely the tedium these tools exist to automate.

Do these tools improve my AI visibility, or just measure it?

Most measure only. Profound and a few others added content-generation layers; their depth is still measurement. Improvement comes from the work: restructuring pages to answer questions directly, fixing entity data, building reviews and citations on sources AI trusts. Radar's tracking closes the loop by verifying whether each intervention changed your recommendation rate.