The 10 Best AI Visibility Tools in 2026 (Compared, With Prices)

AI visibility tools tell you whether ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews and the other answer engines mention your product when a buyer asks a question you would want to be named in. In 2026 there are more than thirty of them. Most are built for enterprise marketing teams with hundreds of prompts, multi-market dashboards and agency reporting. A solo founder or a two-person SaaS team needs a much shorter answer: are we named for the ten questions our buyers ask, and if not, why.

This guide compares ten tools on the numbers that decide the choice: starting price, which engines are tracked, how many prompts you get, and whether there is a free tier or trial. Every price was read from the vendor's own pricing page on 7 September 2026 and will drift, so treat the table as a starting point and the vendor page as the source of truth. For the wider GEO category, see Best GEO Tools 2026.

No tool can make an AI engine recommend you. These products measure the answers and show where the evidence is missing.

What is an AI visibility tool?

An AI visibility tool sends a fixed set of buyer questions to AI answer engines on a schedule, records the answers, and reports whether your brand was mentioned, in what position, and which sources the engine cited. It is the AI-answer equivalent of a rank tracker, with the raw answer kept as evidence.

The 10 tools compared

Prices are the lowest published paid plan, per month, checked 7 September 2026. Annual billing is usually 10 to 17 percent cheaper.

Ahrefs, if you already pay for it, or a $20 to $29 plan gets you a first answer. The $300 plans buy more prompts, seats and workflow, not more accuracy.

The 10 best AI visibility tools

1. Ahrefs Brand Radar: free if you already pay for Ahrefs

Brand Radar tracks mentions across AI Overviews, AI Mode, Gemini, Perplexity, ChatGPT, Copilot and Claude. Every paid Ahrefs plan includes custom prompts at no extra cost: 5 a day on Lite, 10 on Standard, 20 on Advanced. Standalone, custom prompts start at EUR 47 a month and the AI Visibility Index costs EUR 179 a month for 83 prompts a day.

Best for: any team already on Ahrefs. Run your prompts there first and decide later whether you need a dedicated tool.

Limitation: the daily prompt allowance on the small tiers is thin, and the raw answers are less inspectable than in the dedicated tools below.

2. Rankscale: the widest engine list at the lowest entry price

Rankscale covers ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude, DeepSeek, Mistral, Grok and Copilot on every plan. Essentials starts at $20 a month. Pro is $99 for 1,200 credits, which the vendor describes as up to 4,800 tracked answers, 10 brand dashboards and 50 page audits, with a 7-day trial.

Best for: marketers who want to test many engines before settling on the two or three that matter for their buyers.

Limitation: credit-based pricing takes a spreadsheet to compare with per-prompt plans, and the product set changes often enough that last quarter's review may be out of date.

3. Otterly.AI: the cheapest daily monitor

Lite is $29 a month ($25 on annual) for 15 search prompts, tracked daily across ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity and Copilot, with unlimited team members. Standard is $189 for 100 prompts and API access. Extra prompts cost $99 per 100.

Best for: a founder who wants daily tracking of a short prompt list and nothing else.

Limitation: 15 prompts is enough to validate the problem, not to cover a product with several buyer segments. Budget for the jump to $189 if the tool sticks.

4. directree GEO Monitor: weekly evidence, built for founders and local businesses

GEO Monitor Starter is $29 a month for 15 brand-free buyer questions, scanned weekly across ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews, with the cited source domains, three named competitors and 12 months of history. Pro is $79 for 50 questions across five engines (adding Gemini and Claude), full citation URLs and a gap list of the pages you are missing from. Managed is $149 and includes a written monthly summary with three actions. The free check runs three questions with no signup.

Best for: a founder or a local business that wants a defensible baseline and the raw answers behind every number.

Limitation: weekly scans, not daily, on Starter. It measures; it does not write content or promise placement, and it has no effect on your directree listing.

5. Peec AI: clean reporting for marketing teams

Peec's Starter plan is listed at $95 a month ($80 on annual) for 50 prompts, a choice of three models, daily tracking and unlimited users. Peec's own pricing page renders the tiers without numbers in some browsers, so confirm the figure there before you buy. If you are weighing it against a cheaper option, the Peec AI alternative page lays out the differences.

Best for: an in-house marketing team that will share the dashboard and needs reporting that looks finished.

Limitation: the model choice is capped on Starter, and the price is three times the entry tools for a prompt count you can get for less.

6. Promptwatch: visibility plus crawler logs

Promptwatch tracks AI search visibility and citations across ChatGPT, Gemini, AI Overviews, Claude and Grok, and adds crawler-log and visitor analytics so you can see AI bots hitting your site. Explore is free, Essential is $95, Professional $245, Business $579. Prompt counts per plan are not published on the pricing page.

Best for: teams who want to connect what the engines say with what the crawlers actually fetch.

Limitation: you have to ask what the plan limits are. A pricing page without prompt counts is a pricing page you cannot compare.

7. Profound: the enterprise platform with a small door

Profound's Starter is $99 a month billed yearly for 50 prompts on ChatGPT only, one seat and 100 agent credits. Growth is $399 for 100 prompts across ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews with three seats. Enterprise covers up to nine engines on custom pricing. See the Profound alternative page for a side-by-side.

Best for: organisations that will run a full AI-search programme with content and workflow tooling around it.

Limitation: the $99 tier tracks one engine. A founder who needs Perplexity and AI Overviews pays $399 before the tool answers the real question.

8. Semrush AI Visibility Toolkit: an add-on for Semrush customers

The toolkit is $99 a month per domain, billed annually, for one user, 25 custom prompts with daily rankings, 300 daily AI reports and a 100-page AI search site audit. Fifty more prompts cost $60 a month; another domain or another user is $99. There is no trial for the toolkit itself. Semrush also bundles it into Semrush One from $199 a month.

Best for: teams that already run Semrush and want AI visibility in the same login.

Limitation: 25 prompts for $99 is the weakest prompt-per-dollar ratio in this table, and annual billing is required.

9. AthenaHQ: a real free tier, then a jump

The Essential plan is free with a $25 credit and tracks five models (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, Gemini, Copilot) with unlimited members. Starter is $295 a month for 3,600 credits, ten models, integrations and CSV export. Enterprise adds a knowledge base, SSO and audit logs.

Best for: trying a full-featured platform for free before deciding whether the category is worth a budget line.

Limitation: the step from free to $295 is steep, and credits run out faster than a prompt count suggests once you add competitors.

10. Scrunch: monitoring plus site audits, priced for teams

Scrunch Starter is $300 a month ($250 on annual) for three user licences, 350 custom prompts, 1,000 industry prompts, three personas and five page audits, with a 7-day trial. Growth is $500 for five licences, 700 custom prompts and ten audits.

Best for: a marketing team that wants monitoring and a connected view of site readiness in one product, with room for many prompts from day one.

Limitation: the prompt allowance is generous, but a two-person company will not use 350 prompts, and pays for them anyway.

How to choose

Choose a light tool when you are validating the problem. If you have never tracked AI answers, start with 10 to 15 buyer questions in two engines. Learn which prompts matter and whether the answers are stable before you pay for volume.

Choose a team platform when the work is shared. Agencies, brand teams and content operations need more users, markets and client reports. The premium is worth it when those features are used every week.

Choose evidence over a proprietary score. Ask every vendor whether you can open a result and see the prompt, the raw answer, the date, the engine, the detected mentions and the citations. If you cannot inspect the source, you cannot tell whether a score moved because you improved or because the engine changed.

Check the engine list against your buyers. A B2B SaaS buyer is more likely to ask ChatGPT or Perplexity; a local service buyer is more likely to see an AI Overview. A tool that tracks eight engines you do not need is not better than one that tracks the three you do.

Keep traditional SEO in the loop. AI visibility is not a replacement for crawlable pages, clear pricing, accurate structured data and useful third-party coverage. Those are what the engines cite. The LLM SEO tool page explains how the two fit together.

A sensible first month

1. Write 10 buyer questions that do not mention your company.
2. Run them through a tool, or by hand, across the engines your audience uses.
3. Save the raw answers and note the recurring competitors and sources.
4. Fix factual gaps on your website and in the third-party listings the engines cite.
5. Recheck with the same prompt set. Do not change the prompts and then claim the score improved.

Budget for it: GEO monitoring pricing in 2026 breaks down what a month of this costs across the category.

Where directree fits

A structured, accurate product listing is one of the sources answer engines cite, not a shortcut to a recommendation. If your SaaS needs a clean public footprint on an honest SaaS directory, you can submit it for free. The GEO Monitor is a separate product and has no effect on listing or ranking.

FAQ

How do I get AI visibility? Publish pages that answer the questions buyers ask, keep your pricing and feature facts consistent everywhere they appear, and get listed in the third-party sources the engines already cite for your category. Then measure with a fixed prompt set so you can tell what changed.

Are AI visibility tools worth it? Yes if you sell something people ask AI engines about, and if you will act on the gaps the tool finds. They are not worth it as a vanity dashboard. Start with a free or $29 plan and upgrade only when you run out of prompts.

What is the best AI visibility tool for a small SaaS? The one that tracks your actual buyer questions, lets you read the raw answers and costs less than $100 a month. On the numbers above that means Otterly, directree GEO Monitor, Rankscale, or Ahrefs Brand Radar if you already pay for Ahrefs.

Can an AI visibility tool improve my ranking in ChatGPT? No. It measures answers and reveals evidence gaps. It does not control what an AI engine recommends.

How often should I scan? Weekly is a reasonable starting cadence for a small SaaS. Daily makes sense when you have enough prompt volume and active changes to read the noise.