The best AI search visibility tools in 2026, compared

There is no single best AI search visibility tool; there is a best one for the engines your buyers use, the budget you have and what you will do with the numbers. Otterly.AI and HubSpot AEO are the cheapest ways to start, SE Visible gives the most prompts per dollar, Rankscale and AthenaHQ cover the most engines, Semrush, Ahrefs and SE Ranking fit teams already on their suites, Profound fits enterprise procurement, and Recomma fits teams that need each figure to carry its error range and each fix to be measured.

Quick picks

• Cheapest daily tracking: Otterly.AI — $29 a month for 15 prompts, daily, with ChatGPT, AI Overviews, Perplexity and Copilot included.
• Cheapest daily tracking from a big brand: HubSpot AEO — $50 a month for 25 prompts on ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity, no HubSpot subscription needed.
• Most prompts per dollar: SE Visible — 200 prompts tracked daily on five engines for $99 a month.
• Pay only for what you check: ZipTie — a cent per prompt per engine, with weekly and monthly prompts billed at a fraction of daily.
• Most engines for the money: Rankscale — seventeen-plus engines paid from one credit pool, from $99 a month on Pro.
• Broadest model list with content actions: AthenaHQ — eleven models on its $295 Starter plan, with GA4 and Search Console connections.
• Clean daily tracking for content teams: Peec AI — three engines of your choice from $95 a month, daily on every plan.
• Numbers that survive a follow-up question: Recomma — every figure with its sample size and a 95% interval, and every fix re-measured fourteen days after it ships.
• AI agent traffic and an AI-ready site: Scrunch — agent monitoring and a served AI version of the site, from $300 a month.
• Already on Semrush, Ahrefs or SE Ranking: their own modules, added to the suite you pay for.
• Enterprise procurement, SOC 2 and the widest contract: Profound.

What an AI visibility tool does

An AI search visibility tool asks AI assistants the questions your buyers ask — ChatGPT, Gemini, Google's AI Overviews and AI Mode, Perplexity, Copilot and others — on a schedule, and records which brands each answer names, in what order, in what tone, and which pages it cites. The core figure is visibility: the share of answers that name you. Around it sit share of voice, position and sentiment, defined in what AI search visibility is. The category is also called generative engine optimisation (GEO) or answer engine optimisation (AEO) tooling.

It is not rank tracking. An answer has no position ten: a brand is named or it is not, and the same question asked twice can name different brands. That is why the differences below — how answers are collected, and how many each number rests on — matter more here than they would in an SEO tool.

Five things that separate them

• Engines, and which are extra. Several tools include three or four engines and sell the rest as add-ons. Price the plan with the engines you need, not the headline.
• How answers are collected. An answer from a model's API and the page a reader sees cite different sources; in our own test, most of the sources a reader was shown never appeared in the API's answer. Ask whether the tool captures the interface.
• How many answers each number rests on. A visibility figure without a sample size cannot tell a real change from a re-roll.
• Cadence. Daily tracking smooths noise faster; weekly is cheaper. Some tools let you choose per prompt.
• What happens after the report. Recommendations, tickets with measured outcomes, content agents and AI-served site versions are different products — pick the one your team will actually use.

The reasoning behind the second and third points is in what sampling a model can and cannot see and why every number needs its error range.

All fifteen, side by side

Otterly.AI

Best for starting cheaply. Lite is $29 a month for 15 prompts, Standard $189 for 100 with unlimited workspaces, Premium $489 for 400, all tracked daily, with ChatGPT, AI Overviews, Perplexity and Copilot in the price. Gemini and Google AI Mode are $59 each on Standard and Claude $109; the REST API and MCP server come with Standard (pricing). Answers are collected from the assistants' own websites, Claude excepted (method). It also runs a GEO audit of AI crawler access and page structure. Compared in detail in Recomma vs Otterly.AI and Otterly.AI alternatives.

Peec AI

Best for content and SEO teams that want tidy daily numbers across three engines. Starter is $95 a month for 50 prompts and one project, Pro $245 for 150 and two, Advanced $495 for 350, five projects, several countries and a Looker Studio integration. You choose three models from a list including ChatGPT, AI Mode, AI Overviews, Copilot, Gemini and Naver; more cost $35 to $165 each. The API is on Enterprise, and the MCP server reads and writes (pricing, MCP docs). See Recomma vs Peec AI.

Recomma

Our product, listed here on the same terms as the rest. Best for teams that report AI visibility to someone who will ask whether a change is real, and for agencies running several brands from one pool of prompts. Recomma captures ChatGPT, Gemini, AI Overviews and Google AI Mode from the pages readers see and asks Perplexity through its own API, with none of them sold as an add-on; prints the sample size and a 95% interval beside every figure; prices each question by the keywords behind it; and re-measures each fix on fresh answers fourteen days after it closes. Plans: Starter $30/mo · 50 prompts · daily · 1 project · up to 3 engines; Growth $299/mo · 300 prompts · daily · 3 projects · up to 3 engines; Scale $999/mo · 500 prompts · daily · unlimited projects · every engine.

Where it is weaker: no Copilot or Claude, Perplexity read by API rather than from its interface, a Data Studio connector only on Scale and still in beta, and no third-party reviews yet. Details on the pricing page.

Rankscale

Best for budget-minded SEOs who want many engines and flexible cadence. It sells credits rather than prompts: Essentials from $17 a month billed yearly, Pro $99 for 1,200 credits, Pro+ $229 for 3,000, Growth $385 for 5,500. The main engines cost a quarter of a credit per answer and the newest Claude models three or four. It offers seventeen-plus engines on every plan, labels each as captured from the interface (GUI) or from an API, and runs each question at any cadence from hourly to monthly. The API starts at Pro+; an MCP server that reads and, with permission, writes is on every plan (pricing, MCP). See Recomma vs Rankscale.

AthenaHQ

Best for mid-market growth teams who want the broadest model list and content actions tied to their analytics. There is a free tier with five engines; Starter is $295 a month for 3,600 answers across eleven models, including Claude, Grok, DeepSeek, Meta AI and Mistral, with Shopify, Webflow, GA4 and Search Console connections and a content-optimisation agent. You choose which weekdays each prompt runs, repeating every one to four weeks (docs). API access is a paid add-on at an unpublished price (pricing). See Recomma vs AthenaHQ.

Scrunch

Best for teams that care how AI agents read the site, not only what the answers say. Starter is $300 a month ($250 annually) for 350 custom prompts and three users; Growth $500 ($417) for 700. It tracks ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, AI Mode, AI Overviews and Meta, monitors agent traffic, and its AXP product serves an AI-friendly version of the site. A new prompt is asked daily for fourteen days, then every 72 hours, through a mix of browser automation and official APIs (method). The data API is Enterprise only; an MCP server that reads and writes comes with every plan (pricing, MCP). See Recomma vs Scrunch.

Profound

Best for enterprise brands buying through procurement. The public offer today is a free seven-day trial on 50 fixed prompts and an Enterprise contract with up to nine engines, API, SSO and SOC 2; there is no self-serve brand plan on the pricing page (pricing). Agencies can buy client workspaces, priced at $399 a month each at launch (Profound blog). For self-serve options, see Profound alternatives and Recomma vs Profound.

Semrush AI Visibility Toolkit

Best for teams already paying for Semrush. The toolkit is $99 a month for one project and 25 prompts, tracked daily, with weekly brand performance (knowledge base). Semrush's data page lists ChatGPT, AI Mode, AI Overviews and Gemini for tracked prompts, adds Perplexity for brand performance, and says answers are captured from real requests rather than model APIs (data). The Semrush One bundles add 50 to 200 daily AI prompts to the SEO suite, from $199 a month (pricing). See Recomma vs Semrush.

Ahrefs Brand Radar

Best for market-wide benchmarking. Rather than tracking your prompts, the $199-a-month AI index measures brands across more than 475 million prompts from Ahrefs' keyword data, on AI Overviews, AI Mode, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Copilot. The Google surfaces update with the keyword database; the chat assistants are re-tested monthly on a 90-day window, through their public web interfaces (method). Paid Ahrefs plans include 5 to 20 daily custom prompts, and more come in packages from $50; API and MCP access, with Brand Radar tools, start at Lite (Brand Radar, pricing, MCP). Strong for share of voice across a market, less suited to watching a fixed set of questions closely. See Recomma vs Ahrefs Brand Radar.

SE Ranking and SE Visible

Best for the most prompts per dollar. SE Ranking tracks AI answers inside its SEO plans — 100 prompts daily on Core at $129 a month, 250 on Growth at $279 — and sells the AI side alone as SE Visible: 200 prompts for $99, 450 for $189, 1,000 for $355, all daily on ChatGPT, Gemini, AI Mode, AI Overviews and Perplexity, with a ten-day trial and no card (SE Ranking pricing, SE Visible). Answers are captured from the interface. See Recomma vs SE Ranking.

Promptwatch

Best for teams that want Peec's plan shape with an API and MCP from the first tier. Essential is $95 a month for 50 prompts and one project, Professional $245 for 150 and two, Business $579 for 350 and five; each tracks four models daily, from a list that includes ChatGPT, Perplexity, AI Overviews, AI Mode, Claude, Gemini, Llama, DeepSeek and Grok. A seven-day trial covers the two smaller plans (pricing).

HubSpot AEO

Best for small businesses and HubSpot users who want a daily score without a new vendor. It is $50 a month ($45 billed yearly) for one brand and 25 prompts on ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity, with more prompts for sale, and needs no other HubSpot subscription. A free trial tracks 25 prompts without a card (HubSpot AEO).

LLM Pulse

Best for small teams in Europe on a budget. Starter is €49 a month before VAT for 50 prompts, Growth €99 for 150, Scale €299 for 450, asked weekly on ChatGPT, Perplexity, AI Mode, AI Overviews and Gemini; daily tracking is a separate option and other models cost from €8 a month each. MCP comes with every plan and the API from Scale; the fourteen-day trial needs a payment method (pricing).

ZipTie

Best for agencies and long-tail tracking that want to pay per check. A prompt checked once on one engine costs a cent, a little less when all seven engines run, and a weekly prompt costs a seventh of a daily one. Seats, projects and competitors are not billed; API and MCP access is $10 a month. The engines are ChatGPT, AI Overviews, Perplexity, AI Mode, Copilot, Bing's AI overview and Gemini (pricing).

Writesonic

Best for content teams that want tracking and writing in one tool. Starter is $79 a month billed yearly for 50 prompts, Basic $199 for 100, Growth $399 for 200, all daily — but only on ChatGPT, Gemini and AI Overviews; the other five engines are on Enterprise. API and MCP access are not mentioned on the pricing page (pricing).

How this guide was made

Every price, allowance and engine list was read from the vendor's own pricing page, documentation or changelog and is linked where it is stated: the first nine tools on 10 October 2026, re-checked with the six added on 14 October. Where a vendor does not publish something, the guide says so rather than guessing. Review-site ratings are left out because they could not be checked at the source. The tools are grouped by what each is best at rather than ranked, because the right choice depends on engines and budget more than on any single score. Recomma is our product and appears third, after the two tools most often compared with it.