Best AI Visibility Tools in 2026: 12 Tools Compared

Pricing verified August 2026; check vendor pages for current rates. Several vendors on this list changed prices or tier structures within the past year, and 2 of them do not publish numbers on their own sites at all.

We compared every tool on 5 criteria that decide whether the report you get is worth acting on: engine coverage, Claude access, evidence transparency, one-shot versus subscription, and price to first insight.

• Engine coverage. The engines disagree with each other 54.5% of the time (SparkToro/Gumshoe 2,961-run study, 2025), so a tool that checks 1 or 2 surfaces is measuring a fraction of your visibility.
• Claude access. The clearest pricing split in the category. Some tools include Claude, some sell it as a monthly add-on, some gate it to enterprise plans, and some do not track it at all.
• Evidence transparency. Whether you can read the actual answers behind the visibility score, and whether mentions and citations are reported separately. They should be: 61.7% of AI citations are ghost citations, where the domain is cited but the brand is never named.
• One-shot vs subscription. Almost the entire category is subscription-only. If you have never measured your AI visibility, a 12-month commitment is a strange first step.
• Price to first insight. What you pay before you know whether you even have a problem.

The improvement side of this discipline is called generative engine optimization, and it borrows from search without being search. Our GEO vs SEO comparison covers where the 2 practices overlap and where they split.

The Cruelx AI Visibility Scan is the only AI visibility tool under $299 you can buy once, with no subscription. One AI Visibility Scancosts $19.99 and asks 15 buyer-style questions × 3 samples × 6 AI surfaces: ChatGPT, Gemini, Google AI Overviews, Google AI Mode, Perplexity, and Claude. That is 270 collected answers, every one stored in the report as evidence. Before buying anything, the free AI visibility checker covers the readiness basics and samples 2 engines live.

The report grades your visibility per engine, never as one blended number, and never from a single run. Each answer is scored into one of 5 statuses: Recommended, Mentioned, Known only when asked directly, Invisible, or Misdescribed. The Misdescribed status is the hallucination-detection metric: it catches engines that talk about your business and get the facts wrong. The scan closes with a prioritized fix list ranked by published evidence, plus a designed PDF of the full report. A 3-pack costs $49 and a 10-pack $129, and none of it renews.

The sampling is the point. In repeated runs, 92% of engine-question pairs return the same verdict across 3 samples, while Google AI Overviews is the most volatile surface, splitting 20% of the time (Cruelx scan data, 2026). A tool that asks each question once cannot tell you which of those readings it caught.

Where it falls short

It is a point-in-time scan, not continuous monitoring. You see exactly where you stand on scan day, and you re-scan when you want a new reading. If your program needs daily tracking dashboards and alerting, a subscription tool below fits better.

Profound is the deepest enterprise AI visibility platform on this list, and it is priced like one. As of August 2026, Starter costs $99 per month billed yearly and covers ChatGPT only, with 50 prompts and 1 seat. Growth costs $399 per month billed yearly and covers 3 engines (ChatGPT, Perplexity, and AI Overviews) with 100 prompts and 3 seats. The custom-priced Enterprise plan is where the full set of up to 9 engines lives, including Claude, alongside agent analytics and sentiment tracking.

Where it falls short

Reviewers on G2 and SourceForge widely read the Starter tier as a funnel to the $399 plan, and the 1-workspace limit on self-serve accounts blocks agency use. Independent reviews from 2026 also report slow dashboard loads and billing issues. It is a serious product for enterprise brands with budget; it is not built for a first, cheap answer. We break down every tier in our guide to Profound pricing and alternatives.

Peec AI is a clean, capable tracker for SMB and agency teams, with pricing you have to hunt for. Peec AI does not publish pricing; independent reviews from August 2026 report plans from about $95 per month, with higher tiers near $245 and $495. The default engine set spans ChatGPT, AI Overviews, AI Mode, Perplexity, Gemini, and Copilot, but self-serve plans track 3 models at a time. Its dashboard, prompt suggestions with search volumes, and CSV, Looker, and API exports are genuinely good.

Where it falls short

The 3-model cap turns broad coverage into an add-on bill: each extra model costs $35–$165 per month depending on tier, and Claude is one of the extras. The pricing opacity makes budgeting a guess until you are in the sales flow.

Otterly.AI is the cheapest credible subscription entry into AI visibility tracking. As of August 2026, the Lite plan costs $29 per month ($25 billed annually) for 15 prompts, Standard $189, and Premium $489. Every tier covers ChatGPT, AI Overviews, Perplexity, and Copilot, with daily tracking across 50+ countries.

Where it falls short

The $29 headline is misleading once add-ons stack. AI Mode and Gemini each cost $9–$149 per month extra, and Claude costs $29–$439 per month extra depending on tier, which means Claude coverage alone can cost more than the plan it sits on. Users also report refresh lag.

The Semrush AI SEO Toolkit is the obvious pick if you already pay for Semrush, and a thin one on its own. Semrush gates the toolkit’s numbers behind its site; third-party reporting from August 2026 puts the add-on at $99 per month per domain, covering 25 prompts (50 more cost $60 per month), or inside the Semrush One bundle from $199 per month. It tracks ChatGPT, Google AI Mode, AI Overviews, and Gemini, integrated with the search data you already use.

Where it falls short

25 prompts at $99 is thin, there is no toolkit trial, and neither Claude nor Perplexity is tracked. It extends a Semrush subscription; it does not compete as a standalone tool.

Ahrefs Brand Radar brings the strongest prompt database in the category, at add-on prices few small teams will pay. It is a separate add-on on top of an Ahrefs subscription: Select Platforms at $398 per month and All Platforms at $699 per month, with 2,500 checks monthly. Coverage spans AI Overviews and AI Mode, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Copilot, Gemini, and Grok, and its prompt volumes are backed by observed search data rather than modeled estimates.

Where it falls short

Claude is not tracked on any tier, and the total cost of Ahrefs plus the add-on puts it firmly in mid-market and enterprise territory. There is a free AI visibility checker as a preview, but it is a teaser, not the product.

Scrunch AI is the tool to shortlist when you want your site served to AI agents, not just tracked in their answers. Its Agent Experience Platform publishes machine-readable versions of your pages for AI crawlers, on top of standard visibility tracking across ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, AI Mode and AI Overviews, and Meta. Claude is included on every tier, and the platform is SOC 2 certified. As of August 2026, Starter costs $250 per month billed annually ($300 monthly) and Growth $417 billed annually.

Where it falls short

There is no cheap entry point. At $3,000 per year minimum, it asks you to commit to fixing an AI visibility problem before you have confirmed you have one.

Rankscale covers more engines per dollar than anything else on this list. As of August 2026, plans start at $20 per month for Essentials, with Pro at $99 for 1,200 credits, Growth at $385, and Enterprise at $780, and unused credits roll over. It claims 17+ trackable engines including ChatGPT, Perplexity, AI Mode, AI Overviews, Gemini, Claude, DeepSeek, Mistral, Grok, and Copilot, plus 94-checkpoint readiness audits of your site.

Where it falls short

The credit system obscures what you actually get: how many prompts, engines, and refreshes a plan buys takes effort to work out, and top-ups require an active subscription.

AthenaHQ has the only genuine free tier in the category. The free Essential plan includes 300 credits and tracks ChatGPT, Perplexity, AI Overviews, Gemini, and Claude, which makes it the cheapest way to watch Claude continuously. Starter costs $295 per month for 3,600 credits and adds AI Mode, Copilot, and Grok, along with GA4, Search Console, and Shopify integrations and an “Ask Athena” agent.

Where it falls short

There is nothing between free and $295. The moment 300 credits stop being enough, the next step is a $295-per-month jump that most small teams will not make.

Knowatoa is the cheapest monitor that covers 7 named engines, Claude included. As of August 2026, Starter costs $59 per month and Growth $199, covering ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, AI Overviews, AI Mode, Gemini, and Meta AI. It pairs monitoring with AI content agents at a price small SaaS teams can justify.

Where it falls short

Tracking runs weekly, not daily. For most small businesses that cadence is honest and sufficient, but if you need day-level movement, it is the wrong tool.

ZipTie is the simplest tracker here, with the narrowest engine set. Plans run $69 for Basic, $99 for Standard, and $159 for Pro per month, with a 14-day trial, and cover exactly 3 surfaces: AI Overviews, ChatGPT, and Perplexity.

Where it falls short

No Gemini, no AI Mode, no Claude. Given that engines disagree with each other more than half the time, 3 surfaces is a partial reading at a price where competitors offer more.

Prompt Visible is the only other automated one-shot report in the category. A single audit costs $299 for Standard or $499 for Pro, one-time, delivered as a PDF in about 5 minutes with a top-5 fix list. It checks 4 engines: ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and Gemini, and offers a free top-level snapshot score as a preview.

Where it falls short

It costs $299 against the Cruelx scan’s $19.99, and it covers 4 engines instead of 6: neither Google AI Overviews nor AI Mode is checked, which leaves out the 2 AI surfaces attached to the world’s largest search engine.

Free checkers answer a narrower question than the tools above, and they are worth knowing about as long as you know which question. Am I Visible on AI is a free technical checker that tests whether ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Perplexity can access and extract your site, checking robots rules and schema rather than prompt-level visibility. Ahrefs offers a free AI visibility checker as a limited preview of Brand Radar. Profound offers a free AEO report as a lead magnet, and Prompt Visible offers a free top-level snapshot score. All 4 are useful for a 2-minute pulse check; none of them tells you what the engines actually say when a buyer asks.

The honest answer depends on where you are, not on any tool’s feature grid.

If you have never measured your AI visibility

Start with a one-shot. The Cruelx AI Visibility Scan gives you 270 collected answers across 6 engines for $19.99 with no commitment, and the result tells you whether a monthly monitoring bill is worth discussing at all.

If you run an ongoing enterprise program

Profound and Scrunch AI are the credible picks. Profound has the deepest dataset and agent analytics, with the full engine set on Enterprise; Scrunch adds machine-readable page delivery for AI crawlers. Budget accordingly: both start in 4 figures per year.

If you are on a budget and want a subscription

Otterly.AI at $29 and Rankscale at $20 per month are the cheapest credible entries. Read the add-on and credit fine print first: Otterly charges separately for Claude, Gemini, and AI Mode, and Rankscale meters everything in credits. On Claude specifically, Rankscale at $20 is the cheapest subscription that includes it, and Knowatoa at $59 is the cheapest that pairs it with 7 named engines.

If you already pay for Semrush or Ahrefs

Their add-ons keep your data in one place, and both are serious products. Just know the caveat before you buy: neither tracks Claude at any price, so a whole engine stays dark.

Whichever tool you choose, remember that measurement is half the job. The engines re-decide constantly (Google AI Mode replaces 56% of its cited sources week over week), which means the visibility you measure today is earned or lost by what you publish next. Our guide on how to get recommended by ChatGPT covers the improvement side: the content formats, citations, and third-party proof that measurably raise how often AI answers name you.