How to choose an AI visibility tool: 10 tools compared

How did we compare the tools?

sirefs wrote this guide, and sirefs is one of the tools in it. To keep the comparison fair, every fact about another tool comes from that tool's own pricing page, documentation or FAQ, read on 8 October 2026 and listed in the sources at the end. Where a vendor doesn't say something, such as how it collects answers, we write "not disclosed" instead of guessing. We didn't run our own prompts through every tool, so this compares what each vendor publishes, not the quality of its data.

Prices are each vendor's monthly price before tax, in the currency its page showed us. Some vendors show dollars in the US and euros in Europe, and prices change often, so check the vendor's page before you buy. We didn't score or rank the tools: the right one depends on your engines, markets, budget and the tools you already pay for. The guide gives you the criteria and the facts, and says plainly where another tool is the better choice.

What should you check before choosing an AI visibility tool?

How does the tool collect its answers?

This decides whether the numbers describe what your buyers see. There are three ways to get an answer out of an AI engine:

• The consumer app, as a logged-out visitor. The tool, or its data vendor, asks the question on chatgpt.com or perplexity.ai the way a new visitor would, and records the answer and its sources. The app decides which model to use, whether to search the web and which pages to read. This is as close as you can get to what a new buyer sees.
• The search results page. Google AI Overviews and AI Mode live on Google's own results pages, so tools read them there, with their linked references.
• A developer API. The tool calls the vendor's API with web search switched on. It's simpler and steadier to collect, but it isn't the app. In a Genezio study of 3,645 conversations about UK banking over 27 days, ChatGPT.com and the GPT-5.2 API never once ran the same search query behind the scenes, and only 12.3% of the source pages they used appeared in both.¹

An API isn't useless. Some apps can't be used logged out at all (claude.ai is one), and then the API is the only way in. What matters is that the tool tells you which method is behind each number and never mixes methods in one trend line. Be wary, too, of tools that run prompts in your own logged-in account through a browser extension: those answers are shaped by your chat history and memory, so they say more about you than about a new buyer.

Ask every vendor the same question: which engines do you collect from the app, which from an API, and do you show it?

Which engines come with the plan?

Many tools advertise eight or more engines but include fewer on the entry plan, so check the plan, not the product. At the entry price, Peec AI tracks 3 models you choose, Otterly.AI 4 (Claude, Gemini and AI Mode are add-ons), Scrunch 4, Semrush's prompt tracking 3 and SE Visible 5.^{2, 3, 4, 5, 6} LLMrefs and sirefs include every engine they collect on every paid plan.⁷

Start from the engines your buyers use. If you don't know, ask a few recent customers where they research tools, and look at referrals from AI assistants in your analytics.

Which markets and languages does it cover?

Answers change with the country and the language: local brands, local sources, local prices. A good tool sets a market on each prompt and asks the engine for that market. Check how many markets your plan covers and whether a second market costs more.

Otterly.AI lists 50+ countries on every plan, and LLMrefs 50+ countries and 20+ languages.^{3, 7} Scrunch's Core plan and AthenaHQ's Starter plan cover one country and one language.^{4, 8} SE Visible lets you configure five languages.⁶ Peec AI says countries and languages don't change its price.² sirefs covers 14 markets.

What do you pay for: prompts, credits, checks or answers?

This is where comparing like for like gets hard, because vendors price on different units:

• Prompts. You pay for questions, and each one runs on every engine in the plan at the plan's frequency. sirefs, SE Visible, Otterly.AI and Semrush price this way. It's easy to budget, but check how many engines and how often.
• Prompts and models. Peec AI sells prompts with a set number of models. Its agency plans count credits: one prompt on one model for one day is one credit.⁹
• Answers. AthenaHQ sells credits, and 1 credit is 1 AI response.⁸ Scrunch caps the responses a plan collects each month.⁴
• Checks. Ahrefs counts one check per prompt, per platform, per location and per update, and a Claude update uses 8 checks.^{10, 11}

To compare, turn everything into answers per month: prompts × engines × runs a month. 40 prompts on 7 engines checked weekly is about 1,200 answers a month. 50 prompts on 3 models checked daily is 4,500, the figure Peec AI gives for its Starter plan.² Daily checking collects about seven times as many answers as weekly, which is why daily plans usually cost more.

Then decide where you want the answers. More prompts cover more of your category; more runs per prompt narrow the margin of error on each one.

Does it show how sure each number is?

AI engines rarely give the same answer twice. SparkToro and Gumshoe had 600 volunteers run 12 prompts through ChatGPT, Claude and Google's AI 2,961 times, and found less than a 1 in 100 chance that ChatGPT or Google's AI would give the same list of brands in any two responses. Their conclusion: how often a brand appears across many runs is a reasonable metric; its exact position isn't.¹²

So a rate is only as good as the number of answers behind it. 2 mentions in 6 answers is "33%", but its 95% confidence interval runs from 10% to 70%. Look for a tool that shows the sample size and an interval next to each rate, and that only calls a change a change when it passes a significance test.

Of the tools here, sirefs shows an interval on every rate and alerts only on significant changes (reading the numbers explains the test). LLMrefs says it aggregates results across prompts to reach statistical significance for each keyword.⁷ We didn't find intervals or significance tests described on the other vendors' pricing or method pages, so ask them how they handle it.

Does it show which sources the engines cite?

Citations are where the work is. A good tool lists the pages each engine cites for each prompt and sorts them into your own pages, your competitors' and third-party pages such as review sites, forums and lists. The third-party pages are your outreach list. Most tools here report citations in some form, so compare how deep they go: per prompt and engine, per domain, per URL, and over time.

Does it find new competitors?

Tracking the five competitors you already know is easy. The useful part is the brands the engines name that you don't track yet. Check whether the tool suggests new competitors from the answers it collects, and whether share of voice counts the whole field or only your list.

Does it check your site as well?

Monitoring tells you where you stand; an audit tells you whether AI crawlers can read your site at all. Several tools include one: Otterly.AI's GEO audit, Scrunch's site audits, Semrush's AI checks in Site Audit, Peec AI's check of your robots.txt rules for 40+ AI bots and sirefs' 26-check GEO audit.^{2, 3, 4, 13} An audit makes you eligible, not chosen: What is GEO? explains why.

Exports, API and seats

If the numbers feed a client report or a BI tool, check exports and the API on the plan you'd buy. Otterly.AI includes an API from its Standard plan, LLMrefs on its one plan, and SE Visible has one too.^{3, 6, 7} At Peec AI, Profound and Scrunch the API is an Enterprise feature, and at AthenaHQ a paid add-on.^{2, 4, 8, 14}

Most of the tools here have unlimited seats: Peec AI, Otterly.AI, LLMrefs, SE Visible, AthenaHQ, Profound and sirefs' paid plans. Scrunch's Core plan has 5 user licences, and Ahrefs and Semrush charge for extra users.^{4, 11, 15}

Agency features

Agencies need many brands on one bill, a way to pitch prospects and reports clients can read. Peec AI's agency plans let you allocate credits across client and pitch projects.⁹ Otterly.AI's Agency Partner programme adds prompts, pitch workspaces and branded Looker Studio reports.³ LLMrefs includes unlimited projects on its one plan.⁷ sirefs' Agency plan covers 25 brands and 250 prompts; client report links and white label are planned, not built.

Which AI visibility tools are worth a look?

We looked at ten tools in three groups: dedicated trackers priced for small and mid-size teams, enterprise platforms, and AI tracking inside an SEO suite. Within each group they're in alphabetical order, and every price was checked on 8 October 2026. The comparison table puts them side by side.

Which trackers suit small and mid-size teams?

LLMrefs

• Best for: SEO teams and agencies who work from keyword lists and want every engine and many markets at one flat price.
• Tracks: keywords rather than prompts. LLMrefs generates prompts from each keyword, up to 500 prompts on its All in One plan, on ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, AI Mode, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude, Grok, Copilot, Meta AI and DeepSeek. 50+ countries and 20+ languages, unlimited projects and seats, CSV export and an API.⁷
• How it collects answers: not disclosed.
• From: $79 a month, marked as a limited-time price (€79 shown in Europe), with a 7-day free trial.
• Limits: the dashboard updates each keyword at least once a week, not daily. LLMrefs writes the prompts from your keywords, so if you want to track exact buyer questions word for word, check how much control you get.

Otterly.AI

• Best for: small teams that want daily tracking and a GEO audit on a small budget.
• Tracks: 15 prompts daily on the Lite plan, on ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity and Microsoft Copilot. Claude, Google AI Mode and Gemini are add-ons. 50+ countries, unlimited team members, one workspace and a GEO audit.³
• How it collects answers: through the AI platforms' websites, such as chatgpt.com, except Claude, which it collects through the API. Each prompt can be set to a country.¹⁶
• From: $29 a month (€29 shown in Europe), with a free trial.
• Limits: 15 prompts is a small slice of most categories. Adding AI Mode, Gemini and Claude to Lite costs $47 a month more, and the API and Looker Studio connector start on Standard at $189.

Peec AI

• Best for: marketing teams and agencies that want daily tracking, a wide feature set and agency tooling, and have the budget for it.
• Tracks: 50 prompts daily on 3 models you choose on Starter, from ChatGPT, Google AI Mode and AI Overviews, Microsoft Copilot, Gemini and others; more models are paid add-ons. Unlimited users and one project. Looker Studio comes with Advanced, and the API and up to 13 models with Enterprise. The product also covers source analysis, a robots.txt check for 40+ AI bots and AI shopping.²
• How it collects answers: UI scraping with browser automation, which Peec AI says reflects what a logged-out user sees.¹⁷ Its pricing page marks some Enterprise models, such as Claude, Grok and DeepSeek, as API.²
• From: €85 a month (Starter), with a free trial and 15% off for yearly billing.
• Limits: every self-serve plan tracks 3 models unless you buy add-ons, and the API is Enterprise only. Our Peec AI alternatives guide looks at it in more depth.

SE Visible

• Best for: teams that want a lot of prompts checked daily on Google's AI surfaces, ChatGPT and Perplexity at a mid-range price.
• Tracks: 200 prompts daily on ChatGPT, Gemini, Google AI Mode, Perplexity and AI Overviews, about 30,000 answers a month, in 3 projects, with unlimited users. Five languages: English, French, German, Dutch and Spanish. An API.⁶
• How it collects answers: "using a browser and graphical user interface, not simulated answers or API-based results," SE Ranking says.⁶
• From: $99 a month, or $79 a month billed yearly, with a 10-day free trial.
• Limits: no Claude yet (SE Ranking says it's coming), and no Copilot or Grok. Five languages.

sirefs

• Best for: small B2B teams and founders who want every engine on a modest budget, with the method and the margin of error shown on every number.
• Tracks: 40 prompts weekly on Starter, on ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Google AI Mode, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude and Grok; daily on Pro and Agency, with Claude and Grok weekly. 14 markets, unlimited seats on paid plans, suggested competitors, cited sources, alerts on significant changes, a weekly digest, CSV export and a 26-check GEO audit.
• How it collects answers: ChatGPT and Gemini from the app as a logged-out visitor, through data vendors; AI Overviews and AI Mode from Google's results pages; Claude, Grok and, for now, Perplexity through their APIs. Every number is labelled ui, serp or api. See how we collect answers.
• From: €29 a month (Starter), excluding VAT. A free plan keeps 5 prompts running weekly on ChatGPT, AI Overviews, AI Mode, Gemini and Perplexity, and new workspaces get 14 days of Starter without a card. All plans are on the pricing page.
• Limits: Microsoft Copilot isn't collected yet. Weekly on Starter. No API or Looker Studio connector yet, and sirefs is new. More below.

Which platforms are built for enterprises?

AthenaHQ

• Best for: teams that want monitoring, content work and on-site actions in one platform, with credits they can spread across many engines.
• Tracks: 3,600 credits a month on Starter, where 1 credit is 1 AI response, across 11 models: ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews and AI Mode, Gemini, Claude, Copilot, Grok, DeepSeek, Meta AI and Mistral. Unlimited seats, CSV export and a content optimisation agent. One region and language on Starter, more on Enterprise.⁸
• How it collects answers: not disclosed.
• From: $295 a month (Starter). A free Essential plan includes 300 credits on 5 engines.
• Limits: the API and extra credits are paid add-ons. Credits go quickly across 11 models: checked daily on all of them, 3,600 credits cover about 10 prompts.

Profound

• Best for: large brands that want wide engine coverage, many regions and enterprise controls, and buy through a sales team.
• Tracks: on Enterprise, up to 9 engines (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Mode, Gemini, Microsoft Copilot, DeepSeek, Claude, Google AI Overviews and Exa Search), with custom prompts, languages and regions, checked daily. Also AI agent analytics, Prompt Volumes data on what people ask AI engines, CSV and JSON exports, an API, SSO and SOC 2.¹⁴
• How it collects answers: "We capture directly from the browser," Profound says, and it runs every tracked prompt daily.¹⁸
• From: price on request. A free trial runs 50 prompts daily for 7 days on ChatGPT, Gemini and Google AI Overviews.¹⁴
• Limits: no published self-serve paid plan, and the trial has no exports or API.

Scrunch

• Best for: mid-size and enterprise brands that also want to change what AI agents see on their site, not only measure it.
• Tracks: on Core, 125 prompts and up to 5,000 responses a month on ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews and Copilot, in one country and one language, with 5 competitors, 5 user licences and 5 site audits a month. Enterprise adds Claude, Gemini, Meta AI, Google AI Mode and Grok, the API and its Agent Experience Platform (AXP).⁴
• How it collects answers: "a mix of browser automation and official platform APIs," chosen per platform; Scrunch doesn't say which platform uses which.¹⁹
• From: $250 a month (Core), with a 7-day free trial.
• Limits: four engines, one country and one language on Core. The API and AXP are Enterprise only.

Can you track AI visibility in Ahrefs or Semrush?

Yes: both sell AI visibility tracking alongside their SEO tools, as a toolkit or an add-on.

Ahrefs Brand Radar

• Best for: Ahrefs customers, and anyone who wants to see a whole market's AI visibility at once without writing prompts.
• Tracks: two things. The AI Visibility Index holds 462 million+ prompts modelled from Ahrefs' keyword data, run on Google AI Overviews, AI Mode, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Copilot and re-tested monthly. Custom prompts are your own questions, checked daily, weekly or monthly, on the same platforms plus Claude.¹⁰
• How it collects answers: Ahrefs says it runs the prompts through each AI platform and stores the responses. Whether that's the app or an API is not disclosed.¹⁰
• From: custom prompt packages from $50 a month for 2,500 checks, for example 80 prompts daily on one platform. Every paid Ahrefs plan includes some daily custom prompts: 5 on Lite, which is $129 a month. The AI Visibility Index starts at $199 a month.^{10, 11}
• Limits: checks are counted per prompt, platform, location and update, so the cost grows with every engine you add. Ahrefs says the index works best for brands and topics with real search demand and may cover small brands thinly.¹⁰

Semrush AI Visibility Toolkit

• Best for: teams already working in Semrush who want AI visibility next to their SEO data.
• Tracks: 25 prompts daily in Prompt Tracking, on ChatGPT, Google AI Mode and Gemini;⁵ market reports from a database of more than 317 million prompts and responses on ChatGPT, Gemini, Google AI Overviews and AI Mode;²⁰ AI checks in Site Audit for up to 100 pages. 50 more prompts cost $60 a month.¹³
• How it collects answers: for its prompt database, "Prompt responses are captured from real requests and not via any APIs of LLMs," Semrush says.²⁰ It doesn't say separately how Prompt Tracking collects.
• From: $99 a month for the toolkit on its own, with no free trial.¹³ Semrush One plans, which bundle SEO and AI visibility, start at $199 a month with 50 tracked prompts.¹⁵
• Limits: 25 tracked prompts at $99, on three engines, and one domain for brand performance reports.

How do the tools compare?

Entry plans side by side, cheapest first. Monthly billing, before tax, as shown on each vendor's pricing page on 8 October 2026.

The sources for each row are in the tool sections above.

Where does sirefs fit, and when is another tool better?

What sirefs does well

• The method on every number. Each answer is labelled ui, serp or api, and answers from different methods never share a trend line.
• Honest numbers. Every rate comes with its sample size and a 95% Wilson interval, and alerts fire only on changes that pass a significance test.
• Prompt-based pricing with every engine. A prompt is one question in one market, checked on every engine in your plan. Every paid plan includes all seven engines we collect, with no credits and no per-engine add-ons.
• A low entry price. €29 a month for 40 prompts on seven engines, and a free plan that keeps running.
• A GEO audit. 26 checks of whether AI crawlers can read, trust and quote your site, each with a fix.

Where sirefs falls short

• Microsoft Copilot isn't collected yet. Our data vendor's Copilot collector hits a sign-in wall, so Copilot joins only when that works.
• Some engines come through APIs. Perplexity comes from its Sonar API until the app collector is connected, and Claude and Grok are API only because their apps can't be read logged out. All three are labelled api.
• Weekly on Starter. Daily tracking starts on Pro at €99, and Claude and Grok stay weekly even there.
• Fewer integrations. CSV export, email alerts and a weekly digest, but no API, MCP server, Looker Studio connector, Slack alerts or white-label reports yet. They're planned, not built.
• Fewer markets. 14, against 50+ countries at Otterly.AI and LLMrefs.
• New. sirefs launched in October 2026, so there's no long track record, no third-party reviews and no case studies beyond our own projects.
• No market-wide database. You track the prompts you choose. There's no index of millions of prompts like Ahrefs' or Semrush's, no prompt-volume estimates, no AI shopping tracking and no AI crawler log analytics.

When another tool is the better choice

• You need enterprise controls such as SSO, SOC 2, many regions and dedicated support: Profound, or the Enterprise plans of AthenaHQ or Scrunch.
• You already pay for Semrush or Ahrefs: try their AI tracking first. Ahrefs' paid plans include a few custom prompts at no extra cost, and both add market-wide data sirefs doesn't have.
• You need Copilot today: Otterly.AI includes it on every plan, and Peec AI, LLMrefs, Scrunch, AthenaHQ and Ahrefs all list it.
• You need an API or a Looker Studio connector now: Otterly.AI from Standard, LLMrefs or SE Visible for an API; Peec AI Advanced for Looker Studio.
• You track many countries or languages: LLMrefs or Otterly.AI.
• You want many prompts checked daily on Google, ChatGPT and Perplexity: SE Visible checks 200 prompts daily for $99.
• You sell products rather than services: Peec AI and Profound have AI shopping features; sirefs doesn't.

sirefs is a good fit if you're a small B2B team or a founder, want every engine we collect for one price, and care more about knowing whether a change is real than about a long feature list.

How do you test a tool before you buy?

Most of these tools have a free plan or a trial. Use it like this:

1. Pick 10 to 20 prompts your buyers ask, without your brand name in them, in one market. How to track your brand in AI search shows how to choose them.
2. Ask them yourself in a private browser window, logged out, and save what ChatGPT and Google show you, with the cited links.
3. Set the same prompts up in two tools, in the same market.
4. Compare after a week. Do the brands and sources look like what you saw? Does each number say which method produced it and how many answers it rests on?
5. Export the answers. Make sure you can get the raw answers and citations out, not just the charts.
6. Price your real setup: your prompts, engines, markets and frequency, as answers per month.

Your own answers won't match a tool's word for word, because engines vary from run to run. You're checking that the tool's answers look like the app's, not that they're identical.

To start without a trial, run the free check: it scores your site in the GEO audit and shows whether ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews and Perplexity mention you for three buyer questions.