How to Choose an AI Visibility Tool in 2026

Every week another AI visibility tool launches, and almost every one shows a version of the same dashboard. Mentions in ChatGPT, a trend line, a list of competitors. How do you choose between them from feature screenshots? Honestly, you cannot, and the entry prices in this category hide more than they show.

This guide gives you a buyer framework built for small and mid-size businesses and for agencies, then applies it to nine tools with real entry pricing. By the end you should know which tool fits your situation, including the cases where the honest answer is one of our competitors.

Do you even need an AI visibility tool

Checking manually sounds free. Open ChatGPT, type what your customers would ask, see who gets named. The catch is that AI answers are probabilistic. SparkToro recently showed significant variability in recommendations even for identical prompts, so five manual checks tell you almost nothing about your real position. You need volume, repetition, and a consistent method before the data means anything.

And there is a second catch. A manual check ends at the symptom. You learn that a competitor got recommended, and you still have no idea which sources drove that answer or what to change. A real tool has to close that gap. Otherwise you are paying for a mirror.

Eight questions that separate the tools

1. Does it help you change your AI visibility or only chart it? Most products in this category measure your brand’s visibility and show it in dashboards. Citations, sentiment, share of voice, trend lines. Useful to know. But how does any of that move you to the top of your category? What you really need from an AI customer acquisition platform like Reachd is data-driven, focused, actionable guidance on what to improve in your online presence, so AI engines read, cite, and recommend you more often than your competitors. Ask every vendor what happens after the chart.

2. Can the metric be trusted week over week? Here is a trick many tools play without meaning to. They report absolute mention counts, and those counts grow whenever the tool simply runs more queries. The chart climbs while your market has not moved an inch. A share metric on a fixed query set against named competitors behaves differently. Same queries every week, so when the number moves, something real happened.

3. How many queries does the entry plan actually run? Vendors keep this spec in the fine print, and for a reason. Otterly Lite tracks 15 prompts, Peec Starter and the Semrush AI Toolkit track 25. Can two dozen prompts describe how AI sees a business with several services and locations? For comparison, Reachd runs fresh queries every working day, 5 on Starter and up to 20 on Pro, which adds up to over a hundred analyzed queries a month on the entry plan. Treat query depth as your first filter.

4. Does it show what AI actually knows about you? AI recommends businesses based on facts. Pricing, specialties, service area, reviews, differentiators. So which of those facts does each assistant actually believe about you? A useful tool audits this layer directly, shows which models confirm each fact, and flags the gaps that quietly cost you recommendations. Most tools in this category never look here at all.

5. Does it explain why a competitor wins? A mention count without a cause is trivia. The question that earns the subscription sounds different. Which sources did AI rely on when it picked the other business, and which facts about you is each platform missing? Without answers at the source level, every improvement is a guess.

6. Does it say where to publish, and what? Recommendations like improve your content are homework. Naming the page to change, the claim it is missing and the wording assistants already quote is a deliverable. The difference decides how much of your week the tool consumes. A content team can live with the first. A business owner or a lean agency needs the second, and that is usually the whole point of buying a tool.

7. What will it really cost in six months? Entry prices in this category are teasers, so price the plan you will actually need. Profound starts at $99 for ChatGPT-only tracking and realistically lands between $399 and $499. Ahrefs Brand Radar looks like a $129 add-on until you include the required base plan and pass $800 all-in. Semrush charges $60 for every extra 50 prompts. Count platforms, prompts, and seats before you compare price tags.

8. Does it fit how agencies bill? Managing clients changes the checklist. You need per-client workspaces, white-label reports, and a metric you can defend in a renewal meeting. A tool built for a single in-house team turns into spreadsheet glue somewhere around client number three.

Nine AI visibility tools compared in 2026

Tool	Best for	Entry price	Choose if	Skip if
Reachd	Businesses that want to be the #1 recommendation in ChatGPT, Google AI, and other assistants, and agencies helping their clients get there	$99 ($79 yearly)	You want to know exactly what to change and publish to become the recommendation AI gives first	You need enterprise SSO and SOC2 procurement
Profound	Enterprise brands with security and integration needs	$99 (ChatGPT only)	You are enterprise and need SOC2, integrations, prompt volumes	You are an SMB or testing the waters
Peec AI	Mid-market teams that want clean analytics	€89 (25 prompts)	You need solid monitoring data and have your own strategist	You want the tool to name what to change and where
Otterly	Cheapest credible monitoring start	$29 (15 prompts)	You want a low-risk first look at AI mentions	You need to know why competitors win and what to publish about it
Writesonic GEO	Content teams producing at scale	$199	You run a content team and want GEO inside a writing suite	You want a lean tool or hands-on guidance
Scrunch	Small sites needing technical AI improvements	$300 ($250 yearly)	Your site has technical crawl issues for AI bots	You need market diagnosis rather than site plumbing
Semrush AI Toolkit	Existing Semrush users	$99 per domain (25 prompts)	You already pay for Semrush and want one stack	You are wary of post-Adobe pricing, or need depth
Athena HQ	Agencies wanting GEO certification and referrals	$295	You want their agency program and lead gen	You need prompt volumes or a concrete plan of what to publish
Ahrefs Brand Radar	Ahrefs subscribers adding AI tracking	$129 add-on	You already live in Ahrefs daily	You would be buying the $800+ full stack just for this

Reachd

Best for. Small and mid-size businesses that want to be the #1 recommendation in their niche across ChatGPT, Google AI, and other assistants, and agencies that sell GEO retainers under their own brand.

Coverage. ChatGPT, Google AI, Perplexity, Claude, and Grok, with the same fixed query set across all five so the numbers stay comparable.

Price. Starter $99, Pro $299, Expert $499 per month, or $79, $239, and $399 on yearly billing. Agency plans run $199 per client business. The first analysis is free and shows where you stand before you pay for anything.

Reachd is built around a simple idea. A chart of your invisibility is homework, and most owners and agencies have plenty of that already. So the product ships the whole loop, from the answer an AI engine gave to the page that has to change. It runs fresh customer queries every working day, 5 on Starter and up to 20 on Pro and Expert, more than a hundred analyzed queries a month even on the entry plan. Results come back as your share of recommendations against named competitors on a fixed query set. The set stays fixed, so the number only moves when something real moves in your market.

Two layers set it apart. The first is the AI facts audit, which we have not seen anywhere else in the category. It collects the decision-driving facts each assistant holds about your business, shows which models confirm each one, and flags the knowledge gaps that quietly cost you recommendations, refreshed every two weeks. The second is what happens after diagnosis. For every query you lose, Reachd traces the answer back to the page that produced it, then names what that page has to carry and the wording assistants already quote from the competitor holding the answer, so the distance from insight to action is minutes rather than meetings. A read-only MCP server also pulls your standing, winning prompts, and action items straight into Claude or ChatGPT.

On Starter everything is automatic. You enter a URL, and the queries, competitors, and locations are determined for you. That makes it the rare tool in this list a non-marketer can run alone. Pro adds custom keywords that drive the analysis, custom prompts, and multiple languages and locations per business. In documented cases ChatGPT picked up changes within 48 hours, and category leadership arrived in about three weeks.

Choose Reachd if you want to know exactly what to change and what to publish to become the recommendation AI gives first, you want to see what AI actually knows about your business, or you are an agency packaging GEO at $500 to $2,000 per client.

Skip Reachd if you are an enterprise with SSO, SOC2, and procurement requirements, or monitoring alone covers your needs.

Profound

Best for. Enterprise brands with security reviews, data teams, and integration requirements.

Coverage. The broadest platform list in the category, around ten AI surfaces including ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews and AI Mode, Perplexity, Claude, Copilot, and Grok.

Price. The $99 Lite plan covers ChatGPT only, serious use lands between $399 and $499 per month, and enterprise contracts are custom.

Profound is the category leader by funding and logo wall, valued at a billion dollars as of early 2026, and it earns the position. Prompt volumes run deeper than anywhere else. The conversation datasets are unmatched. The platform ships the enterprise essentials most of this list lacks, meaning SOC2, SSO, and real integrations into analytics and BI stacks. If your brand employs an AI visibility analyst, this is the instrument that person wants on their desk.

The fit starts to break below enterprise scale. Lite is a single-platform teaser, and the real product assumes enterprise budgets. The output is insight rather than execution. Profound tells your team what is happening with remarkable depth, and then expects that team to exist.

Choose Profound if you are an enterprise with procurement, a security checklist, and analysts ready to act on deep data.

Skip Profound if you are an SMB, an agency serving local businesses, or anyone who needs the work produced rather than described.

Peec AI

Best for. Mid-market marketing teams that want clean monitoring analytics.

Coverage. ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Gemini, Perplexity, and Claude among others.

Price. Starter at €89 tracks 25 prompts, Pro at €199 tracks 100, and an enterprise tier runs €499.

Peec grew faster than almost anyone in this category, reportedly passing $10 million ARR within its first year, and the product explains the momentum. The dashboards are the tidiest in this list. The citation and source breakdowns are genuinely useful, and the competitor share views make weekly reporting painless. A marketing team that knows what to do with data will enjoy working here.

The boundary is that Peec measures and then stops. Recommendations end at the chart. Nothing points at the page that produced an answer, and there is no audit of the facts AI holds about your business. And the 25 prompt cap on Starter describes a fairly narrow slice of a real company, which in practice means budgeting for Pro. Plan to bring your own strategist and your own writer.

Choose Peec if you need reliable monitoring data in a clean interface and have people ready to act on it.

Skip Peec if you want the tool itself to diagnose causes, name the pages to change, or run without a strategist.

Otterly

Best for. The cheapest credible first look at your AI mentions.

Coverage. ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity, and Copilot on every plan, with Claude, Gemini, and Google AI Mode as paid add-ons.

Price. Lite at $29 tracks 15 prompts, Standard at $189 tracks 100, and Premium at $489 tracks 400. Extra capacity runs $99 per 100 prompts.

Otterly does one thing and does it honestly. For the price of a lunch it shows whether AI mentions your brand on a small prompt set, with link and sentiment tracking included. As a low-risk probe before committing real budget, it is the easiest recommendation on this page.

The limits are structural rather than cosmetic. Fifteen prompts cannot describe a business with several services or locations. The product is monitoring-only, with no view into why competitors win and nothing to publish afterwards. And by the time you upgrade for scale, you are paying dedicated-tool money for what remains a probe. Treat Otterly as a thermometer, not a treatment.

Choose Otterly if you want the lowest-cost signal that AI visibility matters for your business.

Skip Otterly if you already know it matters and need causes, a plan of what to publish, or client reporting.

Writesonic GEO

Best for. Content teams producing at scale that want GEO inside their writing suite.

Coverage. ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity, and Gemini within the broader Writesonic platform.

Price. GEO features start at $199 per month as part of the suite.

Writesonic came to GEO from the content side, and that shows in the best sense. If your team ships dozens of articles a month, having visibility tracking, SEO tooling, and AI-assisted production under one roof is a real workflow win. Their own GEO content machine demonstrates daily that they practice what they sell.

The trade-off is that you are buying a suite. Lean teams end up paying for production breadth they will never touch. The GEO analytics layer runs lighter than the dedicated tools in this list, and there is no done-for-you option, because the suite assumes your writers. Think of it as a factory upgrade rather than a visibility department.

Choose Writesonic if you run a content team with real volume and want one integrated stack.

Skip Writesonic if you need depth of diagnosis over breadth of production, or have no writers to feed.

Scrunch

Best for. Sites with technical barriers that keep AI systems from reading them properly.

Coverage. ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, Google AI Mode and Overviews, and Meta on every plan.

Price. Starter at $300 a month tracks 350 custom prompts, Growth at $500 tracks 700, and yearly billing drops them to $250 and $417. Enterprise is quoted on request.

Scrunch approaches AI visibility from the pipes. Its strength is agent experience, meaning how AI crawlers access, parse, and interpret your site. For businesses whose sites actively confuse or block AI systems, this plumbing work is the highest-leverage move available, and few tools in the category address it seriously.

Outside that scenario the case weakens. Market-level diagnosis runs thinner than the leaders. What to publish, and where, is not the focus, and prices climb quickly through the tiers. The honest summary is that Scrunch improves how machines read you, not what the market hears about you.

Choose Scrunch if an audit shows AI systems struggle to crawl or parse your site.

Skip Scrunch if your site is technically clean and your real problem is losing recommendations to competitors.

Semrush AI Toolkit

Best for. Teams already paying for Semrush that want AI tracking in the same stack.

Coverage. ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Gemini, and Perplexity.

Price. $99 per domain per month for 25 prompts, with extra prompts at $60 per 50.

The pitch here is convenience. Your team already knows the interface, the billing is consolidated, and the AI data sits next to your SEO work. For a single-domain business that lives in Semrush anyway, trying the toolkit before adding a new vendor is a rational move. That is exactly why it makes this list.

Two caveats have grown louder since Adobe closed its acquisition of Semrush in April 2026. Pricing direction under Adobe is an open question, and the market is already reacting to it. The per-domain model punishes agencies, where every client means another $99 plus prompt add-ons. Add the thinnest serious prompt base in this list, and a toolkit that measures without diagnosing or producing, and the fit narrows to one specific buyer.

Choose the AI Toolkit if you are one domain, one team, already in Semrush, and want a first look without a new vendor.

Skip the AI Toolkit if you manage multiple clients, need depth, or prefer not to bet on post-acquisition pricing.

Athena HQ

Best for. Agencies that value certification, community, and referral flow over tooling depth.

Coverage. Major platforms including ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, and Perplexity.

Price. From $295 per month.

Athena’s real product is its ecosystem. The agency certification program, the partner directory, and the referral flow generate actual leads for member agencies. For some shops that pipeline alone covers the subscription. The platform underneath handles core monitoring competently.

Judged purely as a tool, though, the price runs ahead of the depth. Prompt volumes are modest for $295 and the platform stops at monitoring, so agencies focused on delivery economics will find more actionable output elsewhere in this list. The honest question is whether their leads are worth your margin.

Choose Athena if the certification and referral ecosystem fits your agency’s growth model.

Skip Athena if you are optimizing for per-client delivery margin rather than lead generation.

Ahrefs Brand Radar

Best for. Teams that already live in Ahrefs every day.

Coverage. Strong on Google AI Overviews through the Ahrefs index, plus ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity.

Price. A $129 add-on that requires an active Ahrefs base plan, which puts the realistic all-in cost above $800 per month.

Brand Radar’s advantage is the index behind it. Ahrefs sits on one of the largest crawl datasets in the industry, and its AI Overviews coverage benefits directly from that. If your team already works in Ahrefs daily, the add-on drops AI mention data into familiar workflows with no learning curve at all.

The structural issue is that it is an add-on rather than a product. There is no action layer, no facts audit, and nothing to publish. Buying the full Ahrefs stack just to get Brand Radar is the most expensive route to AI tracking on this entire page. It extends a toolset you already have, it does not build a capability you lack.

Choose Brand Radar if Ahrefs is already open in your browser every morning.

Skip Brand Radar if you would be buying the base plan just for this, or you need anything beyond tracking.

Which AI visibility tool should you choose

• Enterprise brand with a security checklist and a data team, choose Profound.
• Already deep in Semrush or Ahrefs and comfortable with add-on economics, try their toolkits before adding a vendor.
• Want the cheapest possible look at your mentions, start with Otterly Lite.
• Running a content team with heavy production, Writesonic GEO fits your workflow.
• Need clean monitoring data and nothing else, Peec AI is the tidiest dashboard.

And if you are a small or mid-size business that wants to be the #1 recommendation in your niche, or an agency that wants that for its clients, choose Reachd. It runs fresh customer queries every working day instead of tracking a couple dozen prompts, audits the facts AI knows about your business and flags the gaps, reports a share metric that cannot be inflated, and names the page to change, the claim it is missing and the wording assistants already quote from the competitor holding the answer. The free analysis shows your starting point before you spend anything.

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