Best AI Visibility Tools: 5 Compared for 2026

How AI visibility tools differ under the hood

Two architectures exist in this market, and the difference decides what you can see.

Prompt-tracking tools ask a list of questions to AI engines on a schedule. You write the prompts, or accept a vendor's suggestions, and the tool records every answer. The strength is precision: your exact buyer questions, tracked daily. The weakness is coverage. A question nobody added to the list stays invisible.

Index tools run millions of questions through the engines up front and store every answer; you then search the archive by brand, product, or whole category with no setup. Ahrefs' index holds 476 million monthly prompts modeled from real search data. Freshness is the tradeoff. Indexes re-test monthly, while prompt trackers run daily.

A few tools also grade sentiment, audit your site for crawler access, or draft the content that closes the gaps. Those extras matter more than most buyers think at purchase time, because the measurement is the easy half of the job.

The five tools

Profound

The enterprise incumbent of the category. Profound sells prompt tracking, analytics, and workflow tooling to large marketing orgs, and it lands in many "best AI visibility tool" roundups.

According to Ahrefs' comparison page, self-serve plans track 25 to 50 prompts across three answer engines. Enterprise lifts that to nine engines, keeps the daily refresh, and opens the API. Prompt volume data sits behind the enterprise quote too.

• Daily refresh on tracked prompts

• Up to 9 engines on Enterprise tiers

• Agency growth tier for client work − No searchable index; you see only the prompts on your list − Prompt volumes and API are enterprise-only − Self-serve tiers cap at 25 prompts and 3 engines

Best for: large organizations buying stakeholder dashboards through procurement.

Ahrefs Brand Radar

Ahrefs split the product into two halves. Custom Prompts tracks your questions, checked daily, weekly, or monthly. The AI Visibility Index lets you look up any brand, product, or competitor across 476 million stored answers with no setup. The six indexes cover AI Overviews (267M prompts), AI Mode (92M), Copilot, Perplexity, Gemini, and ChatGPT (about 29M each).

Every paid Ahrefs plan includes a prompt quota (Lite 5, Standard 10, Advanced 20), with larger check packages from $50/mo. The index starts at $199/mo. Prompts derive from Google's People Also Ask data and Ahrefs' 110B-keyword database, so each carries real search demand.

• Two ways in: index for breadth, custom prompts for depth

• Look up any brand or category with zero setup

• Search demand attached to every prompt − The index re-tests monthly on a 90-day window − Claude coverage requires paid prompt tracking − The useful half of the pricing assumes an Ahrefs subscription

Best for: teams already paying for Ahrefs, and anyone benchmarking a whole category instead of a fixed prompt list.

Semrush AI Visibility Toolkit

A $99/mo add-on to the Semrush suite. Six reports come in the toolkit. Visibility Overview scores your AI Visibility Score against the median of your auto-detected industry competitors. Competitor Research and Prompt Research (with volume and difficulty per topic) round out the analysis side. Brand Performance adds share of voice and sentiment, Prompt Tracking covers 25 prompts daily, and an AI Search Health check inside Site Audit covers up to 100 pages.

Semrush One bundles raise the limits: 50 prompts on Starter, 100 on Pro+, 200 on Advanced. Additional domains cost $99 each, and another 50 prompts cost $60/mo. There is no free trial.

• Sentiment and brand-narrative analysis included

• Site-audit integration flags crawler blockers

• 40+ regions plus worldwide coverage − No free trial − 25 prompts at the base tier − Corporate accounts need a license per user

Best for: Semrush shops that want AI visibility inside the stack they already run reports from.

Otterly.AI

The budget entry with a real product behind it. Otterly.AI Lite costs $29/mo for 15 prompts, Standard $189/mo for 100, Premium $489/mo for 400, and Enterprise starts at 1,000 prompts. Annual billing cuts roughly 15%. A free trial exists, seats are unlimited on every plan, and tracking runs daily across 50+ countries.

The four included engines are ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity, and Microsoft Copilot. Claude, Google AI Mode, and Gemini cost extra as add-ons, priced per engine per plan. Claude on the Standard tier, for example, adds $109/mo.

• Cheapest credible entry point, with a free trial

• Unlimited team members on every plan

• API and MCP access from Standard up − Three major engines sit behind add-on pricing − Add-ons scale with plan tier, so costs compound − No searchable answer index

Best for: small teams and agencies with a known prompt list and a watched invoice.

Selise GEO

Our product, listed in the same format as the rest. Selise GEO measures visibility the prompt-tracking way, then keeps pushing toward the fix. The free scan on selisegeo.com takes one URL and no account. It drafts buyer questions, asks ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and Claude, and returns a trimmed report. The report includes a technical read of your site with per-bot robots.txt access and an llms.txt check.

The paid product ($59 Starter / $99 Growth / custom Scale) turns that into brand tracking. The same question baseline gets re-run against the same engines, so scores compare run over run. A gaps view names every question where no engine cited you, and who was named instead. The sources view shows which websites the answers drew on, grouped by site type, plus the searches engines ran. The crawler view checks each AI bot's access to your pages and compares your robots.txt against competitors'. An actions worklist turns findings into fixes, and some fixes ship with copy-ready prompts for a coding or writing agent.

• Free scan requires no account or credit card

• Crawler and robots.txt depth, including competitor comparison

• Actions and content briefs close the loop from measurement to fix − Young product with a thinner track record than the incumbents − No public prompt-volume index; prompt counts come from your plan − Fewer integrations; API and agency tooling are minimal

Best for: teams that want the audit to end in a worklist, with the technical crawler layer checked along the way.

Side-by-side comparison

Pricing reality check

Advertised entry prices mislead in this category, because engine coverage and prompt counts move the invoice more than the headline number.

Otterly's $29 tier tracks 15 prompts across four engines. Add Claude and Gemini to a Standard plan and you pay $189 plus $109 plus $59, before prompt overages. Ahrefs' index at $199 covers six engines with unlimited lookups, but the daily prompt tracking that covers Claude assumes a paid Ahrefs plan or the $50 package. Semrush starts at $99 with 25 prompts and one domain; a second domain costs another $99. Profound's real numbers sit behind a sales call. Selise GEO's $59 Starter is the cheapest paid tier here, and the free scan costs nothing but the time to paste a URL.

Budget for the prompt count you will reach, since the entry tier always ships smaller. A brand with three products in four markets burns through 25 prompts in a week.

When an AI visibility tool is the wrong buy

Three situations deserve a pass on all of the above.

You have fewer than twenty questions that matter and no budget. Run them by hand in fresh chats, three to five times each, and log the results in a sheet. Our manual method guide walks through it, and it produces the same raw data a tool would show you for month one.

You sell through channels where AI answers barely figure. If your buyers find you through partners, tenders, or referrals, and analytics shows no AI-referred traffic after a quarter of watching, the money belongs in those channels first.

You want a tool to do the optimization for you. Every product here measures; some recommend. The publishing, the review-site presence, the robots.txt fixes: those stay with your team regardless of which invoice you pick.

FAQ

What is an AI visibility tool?

Software that asks questions to AI engines like ChatGPT and Gemini on a schedule, then reports whether your brand appears in the answers. Most also track competitors, and some audit your site for crawler access.

How many prompts do I need to track?

Count your products times your markets, plus the head-to-head questions buyers ask. A single-product company in one market can start near 15; three products across four markets pushes past 60 fast.

Is there a free way to check AI visibility?

Yes. Ahrefs and Semrush both ship free checkers with limited scope, and Selise GEO's free scan returns a full trimmed report for one URL with no account. The manual method costs only an evening.

Do these tools optimize my content too?

Partly. Selise GEO generates content briefs and action prompts, Profound and Ahrefs offer agent or helper tooling, and Semrush adds recommendations inside Brand Performance. Execution stays with your team.

Pick the tool that matches how you buy: a trial if you are small, your existing SEO vendor if you are mid-size, a sales call if you are an enterprise. Run the free options first, though. A scan costs you an evening and tells you whether the category deserves your budget at all.