Somewhere in the past year, "what does ChatGPT say about us?" stopped being a curiosity and became a budget line. Buyers now ask AI assistants for shortlists, the assistants answer with total confidence, and your brand is either in that answer or it isn't. So you've gone shopping for an AI visibility tool — and discovered the category is barely two years old, every vendor describes itself with a different acronym, and half the pricing pages don't publish the numbers you actually need to compare them.
Why should you care which one you pick? Because if you're a marketing lead at a brand — or an agency adding AI visibility as a service line — the tools below run from $29 a month to four figures (every price sourced and dated in the table below, as of August 2026), and the expensive ones are not simply "more" of the cheap ones. They meter different things, cover different engines at different tiers, and refresh at different speeds. Pick wrong and you'll either drown in a dashboard nobody opens or hit a prompt cap in week two.
Buy the tool that matches your prompt volume and your engines — not the one with the most impressive dashboard.
That's the whole game. Everything below — the criteria, the table, the eight reviews — is that one sentence applied. A tool that tracks the five engines your buyers actually use, at the prompt volume you actually need, beats a tool with twice the charts every time. (If you're still untangling how AI visibility relates to your existing search work, we've written up the difference between GEO and SEO — short version: same goal, different scoreboard.)
What makes a good AI visibility tool
Every tool in this category does the same core job: it asks the AI engines a set of questions your buyers might ask, records the answers on a schedule, and shows you whether — and how — your brand appears. The differences that actually matter come down to six things, and none of them is dashboard design.
Engines covered — at the tier you'll actually buy
Vendors list every engine they support anywhere in the product. What matters is which engines are included at the tier you can afford. Several tools below cover only one to four engines at entry and lock the rest — usually Claude, often Perplexity or Copilot — behind add-ons or enterprise plans. If your buyers live in Copilot (common in B2B) or ask Claude for recommendations, check the tier grid, not the homepage.
Prompts metered
A prompt is one buyer-style question the tool tracks on a schedule — "best CRM for real estate teams," say. Prompts are the metered unit of the entire category: a plan is essentially a prompt allowance with software attached. Twenty-five prompts can cover one product in one market; a brand with several products, or an agency with several clients, typically needs 100–300.
Refresh cadence
Weekly refresh is fine when you're monitoring trends. Daily matters when you're actively fixing things — publishing content, correcting a wrong claim — and want to see whether the engines noticed this week, not next month. Daily is usually the top-tier feature. Decide whether you're in monitoring mode or repair mode before you pay for it.
Citations vs mentions
A mention is your brand named in an answer. A citation is your page linked as a source for the answer. They're different games: mentions track brand strength, citations track whether your content is doing the work. Good tools separate the two. If a tool reports one blended "visibility score," ask what's inside it before you put it in a board deck.
Reporting and white-label
Brands need alerts and something presentable to paste into a Monday deck. Agencies need client-facing branded reports — white-label PDFs, shareable links, scheduled sends — or a junior ends up screenshotting dashboards every Friday afternoon. If you're an agency, this criterion alone eliminates half the list.
Price per prompt
The honest normaliser. As of August 2026, entry prices below run from $29 to $250 a month, but the allowances behind them run from 15 prompts to 125 — so the real cost of tracking one question varies by an order of magnitude between tools. We built a spreadsheet to normalise all eight pricing pages into a single cost-per-prompt column. It took two evenings, and at some point during the second evening we came to understand, at a level deeper than arithmetic, why no vendor publishes this number.
The 8 tools at a glance
Prices are each vendor's published entry tier as of August 2026, linked to source. Full detail — and each tool's honest limitation — in the sections below. Two cautions as you scan: entry price and entry coverage are different axes, and the cheapest column and the widest column never belong to the same tool; and three of the eight prices require annual billing to get the advertised number.
| Tool | Entry price | Engines at entry | Free trial | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Apex | $149/mo | 5 | No — demo first | Full engine coverage at entry; agency white-label |
| Otterly.AI | $29/mo | 4 | 14 days, no card | Tightest budgets; most-reviewed product |
| Peec AI | €70/mo | Pick 3 of 6 | Yes | Analytics-minded marketing teams |
| Profound | $99/mo (billed yearly) | 1 (ChatGPT) | Appears Growth-only | Enterprise procurement |
| Scrunch AI | $250/mo | 4 | 7 days | Agent-readiness; Sitecore shops |
| Knowatoa | $59/mo | 3 | Yes | Small teams; all 7 engines in one flat plan |
| Writesonic | $79/mo (billed annually) | 3 | Yes, no card | Content-production-first teams |
| Semrush AI Toolkit | $99/mo per domain (annual) | 4 | No | Teams already on Semrush |
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The 8 best AI visibility tools in 2026
Each review covers four things: what the tool actually does, its real entry price with a link to the source, who it genuinely fits, and one honest limitation. No tool below is bad. Several are excellent at jobs we don't do.
A note on method: every price and plan detail in these reviews was loaded from the vendor's own pricing page or a primary source in August 2026, and each number links to where we found it. Pricing in this category moves quickly — if you're reading this much later, treat the links as the source of truth.
1. Apex
What it does: Apex is an AI visibility platform — it tracks what ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Gemini, Perplexity and Copilot say about your brand, meters by tracked prompts, and puts unlimited seats on every plan. It's our product (see the disclosure up top), so read this as our best honest case, then check it against the Apex vs Otterly head-to-head.
Price: as of August 2026, Core is $149/month for 100 tracked prompts, one brand workspace, five tracked competitors, weekly refresh and all five engines. Premium is $349/month for 300 prompts, daily refresh, a done-for-you prompt-set build, and a sixth engine — Claude, tracked via the official API. For agencies: Agency is $399/month for three client workspaces (then $99/month each) with 300 pooled prompts and white-label PDF reports, shareable client links and scheduled sends; Agency Premium is $799/month for ten workspaces, 1,000 pooled prompts, daily refresh and Claude. Annual billing takes two months off.
Why it's first: engine coverage at the entry tier. Every other tool on this list includes between one and four engines at its cheapest plan; Apex Core includes five. If the principle at the top of this post is right — buy for your engines and your prompt volume — that's the whole argument, and the table above lets you check it against every competitor's own pricing page. Prompt-for-prompt it holds up too: Core's 100 prompts at $149 sits under Otterly's 100-prompt Standard at $189, with one more engine included.
Best for: brands that want every major engine tracked from day one without an enterprise contract, and agencies that want white-label client reporting at a self-serve-shaped price.
The honest limitation: Apex is the newest entrant on this list, at the pre-launch, founding-customer stage. There is no third-party review history yet — no G2 page, no public case studies — and access starts with a demo rather than a self-serve signup. If your organisation only buys software with a review trail, Otterly's 54 G2 reviews are one section down.
2. Otterly.AI
What it does: Otterly, founded in 2024 out of Austria, is the most established self-serve name in AI search monitoring. Every paid plan tracks four engines — ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity and Copilot — with link-citation analysis, a Brand Visibility Index, GEO audits, ChatGPT Ads tracking, a Looker Studio connector and coverage in 50+ countries. It's also the best-reviewed tool here: 4.8/5 on G2 from 54 reviews, with zero one-to-three-star ratings.
Price: as of August 2026, Lite is $29/month for 15 prompts, Standard is $189/month for 100, Premium is $489/month for 400, and Enterprise starts from $1,000/month. There's a 14-day free trial, no card required. Claude, Gemini and Google AI Mode are paid add-ons — Claude runs $29, $109 or $439 per month depending on your tier.
Best for: the tightest budgets. At $29/month, Lite is the cheapest credible way into this category, and the mature feature set means you won't outgrow the product itself — only your prompt cap. Its Agency Partner program (150 prompts on Standard, 500 on Premium, custom Looker Studio reports with agency branding) also makes it the established agency choice. It's the tool we compare ourselves against most seriously, which is why the full comparison gets its own post.
The honest limitation: the add-ons stack up, and the gap between tiers is wide. One verified G2 reviewer put it this way in June 2026:
"The jump to €189/month for the Standard tier feels like a bit of a stretch for a small agency's software budget… the entry-level Lite tier doesn't provide enough capacity."
— Verified G2 review, 23 June 2026
3. Peec AI
What it does: Peec is AI search analytics for marketing teams — visibility, position and sentiment metrics presented with more analytical discipline than most of the category. It claims 3,000+ brands and agencies, and the traction is real: €10M ARR roughly 16 months after launch, with $21M raised.
Price: as of August 2026, Starter is €70/month for 50 prompts and your pick of three models from six (ChatGPT, Google AI Mode, AI Overviews, Copilot, Perplexity, Gemini); Pro is €180/month for 150 prompts; Advanced is €360/month for 350 prompts, five projects, multi-country tracking and Looker Studio. Extra models cost €25–€115/month by tier, and there's a free trial.
Best for: marketing teams that want clean, analytics-grade metrics — position and sentiment, not just presence — and like choosing exactly which trio of engines to watch rather than taking a fixed bundle.
The honest limitation: even the €360/month Advanced tier includes only three models; Claude, the API and SSO are Enterprise-only. If you need broad engine coverage on a self-serve plan, the model-picking flexibility becomes a ceiling.
4. Profound
What it does: Profound is the enterprise heavyweight of AI-answer visibility — the most heavily funded dedicated tool on this list, with a $96M Series C at a $1B valuation in February 2026. The Enterprise tier goes up to nine engines with SSO and SOC 2, and there's a free AEO report tool on the homepage if you just want a taste.
Price: as of August 2026, billed yearly: Starter is $99/month for ChatGPT only — 50 prompts, 1,500 responses a month; Growth is $399/month for three engines (ChatGPT, Perplexity, AI Overviews), 100 prompts and 9,000 responses a month; Enterprise is custom. The free trial appears to be Growth-only.
Best for: enterprises with a procurement process. If your security team needs SOC 2 paperwork, SSO and a vendor that will still exist in five years, Profound is built for exactly that conversation.
The honest limitation: the self-serve tiers are thin for the money — Starter tracks a single engine, and both self-serve tiers are limited to one language and one region, with the API reserved for Enterprise. The full product sits behind the Enterprise conversation.
5. Scrunch AI
What it does: Scrunch calls itself an "AI customer experience platform" — monitoring plus an agent-experience layer that works on making your site legible to AI agents, not just measuring what they say. It was acquired by Sitecore in June 2026, which tells you where it's headed: deep into the enterprise web stack.
Price: as of August 2026, Core is $250/month — 125 prompts, four LLMs (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, Copilot), five seats and five site audits a month, with a 7-day free trial and a free 30-second audit. Enterprise adds five more engines (including Claude and Gemini), the API, the agent-experience platform and SSO.
Best for: enterprise teams who care about the agentic buying journey — how AI agents read, traverse and transact with the site itself — especially organisations already on Sitecore after the acquisition.
The honest limitation: Core caps hard: one page optimisation a month, one country, five competitors, and no API, Looker Studio or SSO. At $250/month it's the priciest entry tier here, and the product it's actually selling is the Enterprise one.
6. Knowatoa
What it does: Knowatoa pitches "one place to see — and improve — how AI search talks about your brand," and pairs monitoring with AI agents that draft content to fill the gaps it finds. The free no-signup audit is a genuinely good on-ramp — their counter shows 110,793 audits completed.
Price: as of August 2026, Starter is $59/month for three engines (ChatGPT, AI Overviews, AI Mode); Growth is $199/month for all seven — adding Claude, Gemini, Meta AI and Perplexity — plus the API, an MCP server, Looker Studio and NinjaCat. There's a free trial, and annual billing is available.
Best for: small teams and boutique agencies on tight budgets. At $199/month, Growth includes all seven of its engines — Claude among them — in one flat plan, with the reporting integrations thrown in rather than gated.
The honest limitation: the pricing page publishes no prompt or question volume limits at all — you cannot size a plan without talking to sales, which undercuts the self-serve appeal. And Starter is missing four of the seven engines plus every reporting integration.
7. Writesonic
What it does: Writesonic is a combined SEO and GEO platform — it tracks your AI visibility, then points AI agents at the problems: article drafting, audits, and an "Action Center" that turns findings into tasks. It claims 10,000+ marketing teams. Of all eight tools, it's the one built around producing content, not just measuring it.
Price: as of August 2026, billed annually: Starter is $79/month for 50 prompts and three engines (ChatGPT, Gemini, AI Overviews); Basic is $199/month for 100 prompts; Growth is $399/month for 200 prompts plus sentiment tracking. There's a free trial, no card required.
Best for: content-production-first teams. If your bottleneck isn't knowing where you're invisible but manufacturing the content to fix it, one subscription that measures and produces is a real efficiency — none of the pure monitoring tools will write the articles for you.
The honest limitation: every self-serve tier tracks only three engines and one market — Perplexity, Claude, Copilot and the rest sit in Enterprise — and sentiment is gated to the $399 Growth tier. You're buying the content engine; the visibility tracking is the thinner half.
8. Semrush AI Visibility Toolkit
What it does: the Semrush AI Visibility Toolkit bolts AI tracking onto the SEO platform your team may already pay for: a visibility score, share of voice, prompt research, sentiment and an AI-readiness audit across ChatGPT, Google AI, Gemini and Perplexity. Semrush itself was acquired by Adobe for $1.9B in 2026.
Price: as of August 2026, $99/month per domain, billed annually — 25 custom tracked prompts refreshed daily, one domain's brand performance. Extra users start at $45/month and the white-label Pro Report is a $20/month add-on. There is no free trial, though a separate free AI Visibility Checker exists.
Best for: teams already on Semrush. Same login, familiar interface, one invoice — and daily refresh on all 25 prompts at $99 is genuinely good value if 25 prompts covers your world.
The honest limitation: 25 prompts and one domain per $99 means multi-brand or multi-domain tracking gets expensive fast, and neither Claude nor Copilot appears in the engine list. It's an add-on for Semrush customers, not a destination product.
How to choose
Ignore the rankings for a moment and map yourself to a segment. All prices as of August 2026, sourced above.
- Tightest budget: Knowatoa Starter at $59/month or Otterly Lite at $29/month. Otterly is cheaper and more mature; Knowatoa's $199 Growth tier is the cheaper upgrade path if you'll eventually want all seven engines.
- Enterprise with a procurement process: Profound for the classic enterprise motion (SOC 2, SSO, up to nine engines), or Scrunch if the agentic site experience — not just answer monitoring — is the strategic bet, especially in a Sitecore stack.
- Already paying for Semrush: take the AI Visibility Toolkit at $99/month per domain before adding a new vendor. If 25 prompts and four engines stops being enough, you'll know exactly why, and you can shop with that number.
- Content production is the bottleneck: Writesonic. It's the only tool here where the fix-it half of the product is the main event.
- Agency needing white-label: Apex Agency at $399/month (white-label PDFs, shareable client links, scheduled sends, pitch workspaces) or Otterly's Agency Partner program with agency-branded Looker Studio reports.
- Claude coverage included in the plan: Apex Premium at $349/month tracks Claude via the official API as part of the tier. Otterly offers Claude too, as a paid add-on ($29–$439/month by tier), and Knowatoa's $199 Growth includes it — so this is about whether you want it bundled or bolted on.
- Analytics-first marketing team, especially in Europe: Peec. Position and sentiment metrics with real discipline, priced in euros, model choice yours.
One more practical filter: trials. Otterly gives you 14 days with no card, Writesonic a card-free trial, Scrunch seven days, and Peec and Knowatoa offer trials too — so for the self-serve tools you can run two side by side for a fortnight on the same brand. That matters more here than in most software categories: the engines are non-deterministic, two tools asking similar prompts will not return identical results, and watching how each one handles that variance tells you more than any feature grid.
And whichever way you lean: before you buy anything, spend ten minutes checking what the engines say about you right now. Here's how to run a manual AI visibility audit with no tool at all — it will tell you which engines matter for your brand, which is the one input no pricing page can give you.
FAQ
What is an AI visibility tool?
An AI visibility tool is software that asks AI engines — ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, Copilot — a set of buyer-style questions on a schedule, records the answers, and reports whether your brand appears, what the engines say about it, and which pages get cited as sources. Most tools meter by the number of tracked prompts and charge more for extra engines, daily refresh and reporting.
Which AI visibility tool is cheapest?
As of August 2026, Otterly Lite is the lowest entry price at $29/month for 15 prompts, and Knowatoa Starter is $59/month with a $199/month Growth tier that adds all seven of its engines. The cheapest tool per tracked prompt depends on your volume — check the prompt allowance, not just the sticker price.
Do AI visibility tools work for agencies?
Yes, but white-label reporting is the feature to check. Apex's Agency plan ($399/month) includes white-label PDF reports, shareable client links and scheduled sends across three client workspaces; Otterly runs an Agency Partner program with agency-branded Looker Studio reports; Semrush sells its white-label Pro Report as a $20/month add-on. Most other tools keep client-ready reporting in enterprise tiers.
Do AI visibility tools replace SEO tools?
No. SEO tools measure rankings on a results page; AI visibility tools measure whether you're named or cited inside a generated answer. The two overlap in tactics but keep different scoreboards, and most teams end up running one of each.
The short version
Named recommendations, one line each:
- Most brands starting now: Apex Core — five engines and 100 prompts at $149/month, no enterprise contract.
- Smallest possible budget: Otterly Lite at $29/month; upgrade path via Knowatoa if you'll want all seven engines later.
- Enterprise: Profound for procurement-grade depth; Scrunch for agent-readiness inside a Sitecore stack.
- Already on Semrush: the AI Visibility Toolkit — don't add a vendor until 25 prompts stops being enough.
- Content machine wanted: Writesonic — it measures and writes.
- Agencies: Apex Agency for white-label reporting; Otterly's partner program as the established alternative.
- Analytics-first European teams: Peec.
Or skip the shortlisting entirely for now: run the free evaluation and see what the engines already say about you. That answer usually makes the tool decision for you.