The best AI visibility tool in 2026 is the one that covers the layer you are missing. The category has split into five layers: answer monitoring (who is in the answer), source intelligence (which pages are cited), fan-out intelligence (what the engine searched), trajectory intelligence (how the answer changed across follow-ups), and closed-loop optimisation (changing the pages). Nearly every tool does the first; a growing number do the second and third; very few do the last. This guide compares eighteen platforms on those layers, engine coverage, methodology and price, checked against first-party pages in September 2026. If you want a number before a tool, the free AI visibility checker takes a minute.
Short version: Sprites leads for teams that want measurement plus execution, Profound leads for enterprise prompt demand, Peec and SE Visible are the transparent mid-market trackers, and the Ahrefs and Semrush add-ons are the path of least resistance for teams already on those suites. The detail is below; the AI visibility pillar links the rest of the cluster.
The five layers of AI visibility
| Layer | What is measured | Typical output | State of the market |
|---|---|---|---|
| Answer monitoring | Final answer to a repeated prompt | Mention rate, position, sentiment | Commodity; nearly every tool |
| Source intelligence | Citations, linked URLs, cited domains | Citation share, influential domains, gaps | Common in leading tools |
| Fan-out intelligence | The engine’s background searches | Subquery map, domains searched | Available from several tools |
| Trajectory intelligence | Successive prompts with changing context | Brand entry and exit turn, source influence | Rare; mostly positioning |
| Closed-loop optimisation | Measurement plus page changes | Rewritten pages, schema, remediation | Sprites, Scrunch, Goodie, Writesonic in different forms |
Two things to ask every vendor: how are answers collected (browser front end, which reflects what users see, or API, which may not), and what happens after the report. The AI visibility score explainer covers why two tools give different numbers for the same brand.
How we evaluated
- Layers covered, from the table above.
- Engine coverage and collection method.
- Prompt sourcing: curated list, search-demand model, or real conversations.
- What happens after the report: nothing, recommendations, or executed changes.
- Published price on a first-party page in September 2026; “not published” where none was found.
AI visibility tools compared
| Tool | Engines | Depth beyond monitoring | Published price | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Sprites | ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Google AI Overviews and AI Mode | Monitoring → page rewrite loop; tracking on a schedule with repeated runs | Free tier; self-serve plans | for measurement plus execution |
| Profound | Broad, browser-front-end capture | Fan-out visualisation for some engines; Prompt Volumes from 1.3B+ real conversations; Agent Analytics | Not published | enterprise prompt intelligence |
| Peec AI | Major engines via UI/browser collection | Dedicated query fan-out views; Agent Analytics for bot intent | Starter ~$95/mo, Pro $245, Advanced $495 | data transparency for SEO teams |
| Ahrefs Brand Radar | Major engines; 464M+ search-backed prompts index plus Custom Prompts | Fan-out analysis; index is modelled from search demand, not literal conversations | AI Visibility Index from ~$199/mo; Custom Prompts from ~$50/mo | for teams already on Ahrefs |
| Semrush AI Visibility | Major AI experiences; 25 custom prompts per day in the tier sampled | Monitoring and AI-readiness audits | ~$99/mo per domain (annual) | inside a mainstream SEO suite |
| SE Visible (SE Ranking) | ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Google AI Mode and AI Overviews | Dedicated query fan-out tool; 100M+ AI answers analysed monthly (vendor figure) | Basic $99/mo (200 prompts), Core $189 (450), Plus $355 (1,000) | rank-tracker-style operating model |
| Scrunch AI | Major engines via browser automation and digital-twin measurement | Agent Experience Platform (AXP) serves agent-oriented site content; prompt variants and personas | Core ~$250/mo; Enterprise custom | for agent-facing website infrastructure |
| HubSpot AEO | ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity | Prompt tracking with sentiment, competitive analysis and recommendations; CRM grounding | $50/mo standalone ($45 annual); bundled in some Marketing Hub tiers | for HubSpot customers |
| Writesonic | Up to 10 AI platforms on higher tiers | Action centre and agentic optimisation workflows | Agency Starter $200/mo billed annually; self-serve packaging separate | combined SEO + GEO content platform |
| LLMrefs | Broad engine coverage | 500 tracked prompts plus fan-out queries | $79/mo “All in One” | keyword-first abstraction at low cost |
| Otterly.AI | Major answer engines; some as add-ons | Prompt library, citation monitoring, GEO audits; Agent Analytics on higher plans | Lite $29, Standard $189, Premium $489 per month | SMB entry point |
| DemandSphere | Conventional SERPs plus LLM and agentic surfaces | Fan-out mapping, topic clusters, correlation with GSC, GA4 and log data; BigQuery-centric | Not published | for data teams |
| Rankscale | Major engines | Explicit attention to the searches and domains probed under each prompt | Not verified | for fan-out inspection |
| AthenaHQ | 11+ LLM and AI surfaces (vendor figure) | Agents and cross-platform visibility; agentic positioning | Not published | AEO-native command centre |
| Goodie AI | Major engines | Research → monitor → optimise → measure, with attribution and agentic-commerce features on higher tiers | Pro $999/mo; Agency Growth $350/mo; enterprise custom | closed loop with attribution |
| Promptwatch | Major engines | Monitoring plus automated optimisation workflows | Not published | for agentic optimisation positioning |
| Mentionable | Multiple answer engines | Emphasis on the follow-up questions attached to topics and answers | Not verified | for follow-up question analysis |
| Elmo | Several major engines | Open-source, inspectable monitoring | Cloud from ~$29/mo; self-host free | self-hosted option |
The best AI visibility tools in 2026
1. Sprites: Best for measurement plus execution
Sprites tracks buyer prompts across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Google’s AI surfaces, records mention, position, sentiment and citations per engine, and then does the part the rest of the category leaves to you: it rewrites or drafts the page that lost the citation, with answer-first structure, entity coverage and FAQ or HowTo schema, and publishes it through your CMS under approval. It sits inside a broader marketing agent that also runs SEO and paid media, so the paid and organic sides of a prompt are handled together. The Sprites AI visibility platform page covers the measurement side; the free AI visibility checker is the front door.
Best for: growth and marketing teams that want the citation fixed, not charted. Limits: not a standalone enterprise reporting suite; vendor lift figures are vendor claims.
2. Profound: Best enterprise prompt intelligence
Profound is the enterprise AEO stack: Answer Engine Insights, Prompt Volumes grounded in more than 1.3 billion licensed real-user conversations, Agent Analytics for bot traffic, and automation agents. Its distinctive asset is real-conversation demand data rather than a synthetic prompt list, and it captures browser-front-end responses rather than treating model APIs as the consumer experience. It exposes query fan-out for some engines.
Best for: enterprise brands and agencies that need audience-level prompt demand. Limits: price on request; reporting-centric.
3. Peec AI: Best data transparency for SEO teams
Peec tracks visibility, average position, sentiment, share of voice, citations and prompt-level results, collecting most engines through the UI to resemble real user behaviour, with API, MCP and export workflows. Its fan-out views show the background searches behind an answer, which makes it one of the more diagnostic tools at its price.
Best for: SEO and AEO teams that want transparent data without an enterprise contract. Limits: monitoring, not execution.
4. Ahrefs Brand Radar: Best for teams already on Ahrefs
Brand Radar pairs a very large AI Visibility Index, derived from Ahrefs’ keyword and People Also Ask data with semantic expansion, with Custom Prompts for exact tracked questions, all tied to the Ahrefs SEO dataset. The index is a modelled corpus rather than a panel of human conversations, which is the right thing to know when comparing it with Profound.
Best for: Ahrefs customers who want AI visibility next to traditional demand data. Limits: reporting only.
5. Semrush AI Visibility: Best inside a mainstream SEO suite
Semrush adds AI visibility, prompt research, competitor comparison and AI-readiness audits inside its SEO suite. For teams standardised on Semrush it is the lowest-friction way to get AI-search data next to keyword and content workflows.
Best for: Semrush shops. Limits: prompt allowance; no execution loop.
6. SE Visible (SE Ranking): Best rank-tracker-style operating model
SE Visible is SE Ranking’s standalone AI visibility product: mentions, sentiment, source intelligence and prompt-level data across the main engines, with a fan-out tool and a familiar rank-tracker feel. Straightforward pricing by prompt count.
Best for: SEO agencies and mid-market marketers. Limits: monitoring only.
7. Scrunch AI: Best for agent-facing website infrastructure
Scrunch pairs AI-search monitoring with an Agent Experience Platform that presents an agent-oriented representation of your site. It treats serving AI agents as an infrastructure problem, not only a dashboard problem, which is a genuinely different angle from the rest of the list.
Best for: enterprise brands whose sites are consumed by agents at scale. Limits: packaging changes often; check current plans.
8. HubSpot AEO: Best for HubSpot customers
HubSpot’s AEO product tracks prompts across the three big engines and ties the results to CRM and marketing execution inside HubSpot. Engine coverage is narrower than the specialists; the strategic advantage is customer context.
Best for: HubSpot Marketing Hub customers. Limits: three engines; HubSpot-centric.
9. Writesonic: Best combined SEO + GEO content platform
Writesonic has grown into an integrated SEO and GEO platform: AI-search visibility, content and site workflows, an action centre and agent-assisted optimisation. It is moving explicitly toward remediation, which puts it closer to Sprites than to the pure trackers.
Best for: agencies and content-heavy teams wanting monitoring and remediation under one vendor. Limits: content-centric; no paid-media side.
10. LLMrefs: Best keyword-first abstraction at low cost
LLMrefs argues marketers should not have to invent every prompt: it starts from keywords and topics, aggregates responses, citations and brand data, and includes fan-out queries. A strong price for the coverage.
Best for: SEO and growth teams that think in keywords. Limits: monitoring only.
11. Otterly.AI: Best SMB entry point
Otterly offers straightforward prompt and citation monitoring with GEO audits, and adds agent analytics, API and MCP on higher plans. The Lite plan is the cheapest credible way into the category.
Best for: SMB and mid-market teams. Limits: engine add-ons at the low tiers.
12. DemandSphere: Best for data teams
DemandSphere treats AI search as an information-retrieval system: prompt research, fan-out mapping, citation and sentiment analysis, correlated with Search Console, GA4 and log data in a BigQuery-centred approach. Closest on this list to a data-engineering product.
Best for: enterprise SEO and data teams. Limits: not self-serve.
13. Rankscale: Best for fan-out inspection
Rankscale is a specialist AI-search analytics platform with a focus on what the engines search, not only who they name. For technical GEO practitioners the fan-out and domain inspection is the point.
Best for: technical GEO practitioners. Limits: pricing not verified in this pass.
14. AthenaHQ: Best AEO-native command centre
AthenaHQ positions itself as an end-to-end AEO/GEO command centre with agents across eleven-plus AI surfaces. The breadth is real; a reproducible multi-turn methodology should not be assumed from the marketing language.
Best for: brands wanting an AEO-native operational platform. Limits: no self-serve price located.
15. Goodie AI: Best closed loop with attribution
Goodie spans visibility research, monitoring, optimisation actions and measurement including attribution. Its “research, act, measure” framing is closer to Sprites than to the trackers, at an enterprise price.
Best for: larger growth teams and agencies that want revenue attribution. Limits: price.
16. Promptwatch: Best for agentic optimisation positioning
Promptwatch is an AI-search monitoring platform with an increasingly agentic optimisation story and large answer-data claims. As with several vendors here, “agentic” is a positioning word; ask what the agent actually changes.
Best for: growth teams that want monitoring plus workflows. Limits: price not published.
17. Mentionable: Best for follow-up question analysis
Mentionable tracks brands across engines and places unusual weight on follow-up questions, which is conceptually close to the multi-turn problem. A follow-up question is not the same as an observed user session, but it is the right direction.
Best for: marketers interested in conversational demand. Limits: pricing not verified.
18. Elmo: Best self-hosted option
Elmo is an open-source, self-hostable AI visibility tracker with a cloud option. For technical teams that want to inspect the methodology and own the data, it is the only choice on the list.
Best for: technical teams. Limits: monitoring only; you run it.
How to improve your AI visibility once you can measure it
- Fix the entity first. One canonical name, an About page, Organization and Product schema, consistent descriptions everywhere.
- Earn mentions on the sources the engines cite. Every tool above lists them; that list is the outreach plan.
- Write answer-shaped pages for the buyer prompts: answer in the first sentences, question headings, comparison tables, FAQ markup. The AEO guide and GEO guide cover the pattern.
- Watch the follow-up turn. A buyer adds a constraint; a competitor with a page on that constraint enters the shortlist. Write that page.
- Repeat the measurement weekly so a change can be attributed to a cause. That is what AI visibility tracking is.
The bottom line
Monitoring is now cheap and widely available; several tools on this list do it well for under $100 a month. The scarce capability is what happens after the report. If you have a content team that will act on a dashboard, Peec, SE Visible, LLMrefs or your existing SEO suite’s add-on will serve you. If you do not, or you want the same agent to fix the page, run the SEO and manage the paid side of the same keyword, Sprites is the recommendation, and the free checker is where to start.
Replace your marketing agency with $66/month. Sprites tracks the engines, rewrites the losing pages, runs your SEO and manages paid media, with your approval on every change. See plans.
Frequently asked questions
What is an AI visibility tool?
An AI visibility tool runs buyer prompts against answer engines such as ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Google AI Overviews on a schedule, and records whether a brand is mentioned, where it appears, how it is described and which pages were cited. Most report; a few also change the pages that are losing citations.
What is the best AI visibility tool?
For teams that want the citation fixed rather than charted, Sprites, because it tracks the engines and rewrites the losing pages under approval. For enterprise prompt-demand data, Profound. For transparent monitoring at mid-market prices, Peec or SE Visible. For teams already on Ahrefs or Semrush, their add-ons. The right answer depends on which of the five layers you need.
How much do AI visibility tools cost?
From about $29 a month (Otterly Lite, Elmo cloud) through $79–$99 (LLMrefs, SE Visible Basic, Semrush) and $95–$495 (Peec, Otterly Standard and Premium) to enterprise pricing (Profound, Goodie Pro at $999). Sprites has a free tier and a free checker. Prices from first-party pages in September 2026; verify before buying.
Which AI engines should an AI visibility tool cover?
ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Google AI Overviews or AI Mode are the minimum in 2026, because that is where buyer research happens. Coverage of Copilot, Claude, Grok and others matters by audience. Ask how each engine is collected: browser-front-end capture reflects what users see; API calls may not.
What is query fan-out and does it matter?
Query fan-out is the engine turning one prompt into several background searches before answering; Google documents it for AI Mode. It matters because the query you typed is not necessarily the query your page has to win. It is no longer a differentiator: Profound, Peec, Ahrefs, SE Visible, LLMrefs and Rankscale all expose or estimate it.
Is there a free AI visibility checker?
Yes. The AI visibility checker on this site queries ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity live and returns a 0–100 score per engine without an email. Ahrefs and HubSpot publish free checkers with their own methods. A checker is a snapshot; tracking is what shows a trend.