Best AI visibility tools in 2026: what they track and what they cost

What do AI visibility tools measure?

An AI visibility tool takes a list of prompts, which are the questions your customers ask AI assistants, runs them on one or more AI platforms on a schedule and records what comes back. From the answers it works out whether your brand is mentioned, whether your pages are cited as sources, which competitors appear instead and which websites the AI relies on.

Vendors use different names for the same ideas. Ahrefs defines mentions (your brand name appears in the answer text), citations (the answer links to your pages), AI share of voice and estimated impressions. Semrush adds an AI visibility score and brand sentiment. Whatever the names, the data is a sample of generated answers. Google points out that no third-party tool has access to its internal ranking or AI systems.

Answers also change from run to run. A July 2026 survey of GEO research reports that commercial audits found low source overlap and substantial run-to-run variability. For you that means a tool should repeat its checks and show a trend, not report one snapshot.

Which kinds of AI visibility tools exist?

• SEO suites with an AI add-on. Semrush and Ahrefs add AI tracking to their existing products. They suit teams that already work in those tools.
• Dedicated AI visibility platforms. Peec AI, Otterly.AI and Profound are built around AI answer tracking and usually cover more engines.
• Developer-first tools. Serpel exposes AI checks through a dashboard, CLI, API and MCP server, with pay-per-check pricing and a narrower scope.
• Free first-party reports. Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools now report how often your pages appear in their own AI features.

Best AI visibility tools compared

The table lists what each vendor says it tracks and the pricing on its own public page on 10 Oct 2026. Prices are shown in euros as the pages displayed them, vary by region, and may differ in tax treatment and billing period, so treat them as a guide to scale rather than a quote.

Where does each tool fit best?

• Semrush. A natural fit if your team already works in Semrush. The Base plan includes Brand Performance analysis for one domain and 25 prompts, so several brands or markets need extra domains or an enterprise plan.
• Ahrefs Brand Radar. Lists six platforms and two modes: Custom Prompts, where you choose the questions, and an AI Visibility Index modelled on more than 470 million prompts from Ahrefs’ keyword database. Ahrefs itself says the Index works best once your brand already appears in AI search.
• Peec AI. Pricing follows prompts and models rather than seats, with unlimited users on every plan. It also lists a crawlability audit that shows which AI bots your robots.txt allows or blocks.
• Otterly.AI. The lowest entry price in this list, which suits small teams that need a few prompts. Cost rises with prompts and with each extra engine you add.
• Profound. Aimed at companies running marketing agents at scale. Its self-serve option is a seven-day trial and full pricing is by quote, so you cannot compare its price publicly.

Where does Serpel fit, and where does it not?

Serpel’s scope is narrow. It checks ChatGPT with web search and Google AI Overviews and nothing else today: no Perplexity, Gemini, Claude, Copilot or Google AI Mode tracking, and no sentiment scoring. If your customers mainly use those platforms, a dedicated platform covers more ground.

What you get is a precise record of the two surfaces it covers. Add prompts to a project, run them on demand and see for each one whether ChatGPT’s answer cited your domain (linked a page of yours) or only mentioned it, together with the answer’s sources and the history over time. Serpel also shows which domains are cited most often in answers, with yours highlighted, whether Google showed an AI Overview for your tracked keywords and cited you, and, from your last site crawl, which AI crawlers your robots.txt allows and whether an llms.txt file is reachable.

Serpel bills each check in credits. A credit is worth €0.01 at list price, so checking 25 prompts on both surfaces costs €1.00. The dashboard, CLI and API read the same data, so a CI job or a coding agent can run the checks and read the results. See AI visibility in Serpel and the pricing page for the current numbers. The limits to know are 50 prompts per project on the largest plan and two AI surfaces.

How do you choose an AI visibility tool?

1. Start from your audience. Track the AI products your customers actually use. Paying for nine engines is wasteful if two of them matter.
2. Count prompts, markets and engines. Cost grows with each. Peec AI says its pricing is based on tracked prompts and models, and Ahrefs counts one check per prompt, platform, location and update.
3. Check how often it repeats. Daily or weekly runs give you a trend. A single snapshot is noisy because answers vary between runs.
4. Look at data access. If you want results in dashboards, CI or an agent, check for an API, exports or MCP. Otterly.AI lists API and MCP access from its Standard plan, Profound lists API and exports for enterprise, and Serpel offers the dashboard, CLI and API on every plan.
5. Compare pricing models. Flat plans suit steady tracking. Per-check credits suit occasional audits and agent-driven workflows.
6. Ask how answers are collected. Which country and language does the tool use, is web search on, and how often is a prompt re-run? A reproducible method matters more than a polished dashboard.

Can you track AI visibility for free?

Partly. Two first-party reports are free. Search Console’s Generative AI performance report shows impressions in AI Overviews and AI Mode by page, country and device, and Google says it rolled out to all sites worldwide on 31 Aug 2026. Bing Webmaster Tools’ AI Performance report shows citation counts and cited pages for Copilot and AI summaries in Bing, in public preview. Neither covers ChatGPT.

For ChatGPT you can test prompts by hand: turn on search, ask your questions, open the sources and note whether your domain appears. That works for a handful of prompts and stops scaling quickly, which is where paid tools earn their price. Our guide on how to rank in ChatGPT explains the manual check in detail, and the generative engine optimization guide covers what to change once you have a baseline.