The 12 Best AI Visibility Tools in 2026 (Compared, With Real Prices)

In the first four months of 2026, 68 percent of United States Google searches ended without a click. That figure comes from SparkToro's analysis of Similarweb clickstream data, published in June 2026, which puts the exact number at 68.01 percent, up from 60.45 percent in 2024. Search Engine Land's coverage of the same study notes AI Overviews now appear on more than 20 percent of searches and cut click-through rate by roughly 60 percent when they do.

That is the problem AI visibility tools exist to measure. Your Google rankings can look healthy while your brand is absent from the AI answers your buyers actually read, and nothing in a traditional rank tracker will tell you.

This comparison covers twelve tools. What separates it from the others is narrow and checkable: every price below was read off the vendor's own pricing page on 16 September 2026, and where a vendor publishes no price, that is stated plainly instead of being softened into a vague range. The previous version of this article quoted figures like "from approximately $89 per month" that matched no actual plan, and those have been corrected.

Only four of these twelve vendors publish a price

This is the first thing a buyer should know and no comparison says it. Checked at source on 16 September 2026, exact figures are published by Otterly.ai, Semrush, Surfer and Writesonic. Profound publishes only a free trial of ten prompts run once against ChatGPT, with everything else marked Enterprise and custom. Evertune, Conductor and AthenaHQ publish nothing. Peec AI lists four tiers with no numbers attached to them.

Practically, that means half this market is a sales call, and the quote you receive will be driven by prompt volume. Know the number of prompts you need before you take the call.

Published prices and prompt allowances, verified 16 September 2026

Prompt allowance is the real unit of value in this category. It is what separates a $29 plan from a $489 one, and it determines whether a trend line is trustworthy or noise.

Two details worth carrying into a negotiation. Otterly charges per engine beyond its base four, with Claude adding $29 to $439 a month depending on tier, so headline prices understate multi-engine coverage. And Semrush's base SEO plan at $139 monthly already includes AI search performance tracking and AI sentiment monitoring, which many existing subscribers do not realise they are paying for.

What actually separates these tools

Dashboards look alike. These are the axes that change what you can do with the data.

• Prompt volume and refresh frequency. Assistant answers vary between runs. Fifteen prompts checked daily tells you far less than two hundred, and a tool's sample size is what makes its trend line believable.
• Multi-engine coverage. The workable minimum in 2026 is ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Claude. Check whether engines are included or sold as add-ons.
• Prompt-level detail. An aggregate score is not actionable. You need to know which specific prompts you lose and to whom.
• Citation source attribution. Knowing you were cited matters less than knowing which page was cited, because the page is what you can change.
• Competitive share of voice. Your mention rate means little without three to five named competitors measured on identical prompts.
• Diagnostics. The better tools connect a low citation rate to a fixable cause: blocked AI crawlers, pages excluded from snippets, thin coverage of the question.

The tools with published pricing

Otterly.ai - cheapest credible entry point

Otterly publishes the clearest price ladder in the category: Lite at $29 monthly or $25 annual for 15 search prompts across ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity and Microsoft Copilot with unlimited team members; Standard at $189 for 100 prompts adding API and MCP access; Premium at $489 for 400 prompts with 10,000 GEO URL audits a month; Enterprise from $1,000. Extra prompt blocks are $99 per hundred.

The honest trade-off at the entry tier is sample size. Fifteen prompts is a keyhole view, and Claude, Gemini and Google AI Mode are paid add-ons rather than included. For a solo marketer establishing a baseline it is the right first purchase.

Surfer - AI tracking split into its own product

Surfer separates content optimisation from visibility measurement. AI Search Analytics is its own plan at $98 monthly or $82 annual, covering 50 AI prompts tracked daily across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI and Gemini with 5 brand spaces and mention gap analysis. Writing plans run separately from $59. If you want optimisation and tracking, you are buying two things.

Writesonic - now a visibility platform that also writes

Writesonic's own pricing page describes the product as an AI Search Visibility Platform. Starter is $99 monthly or $79 annual for 50 prompts and 50 answers tracked daily plus fifteen AI articles a month, rising to $499 for Growth with 200 prompts and sentiment analysis. Enterprise tracks all ten supported platforms including Grok, DeepSeek and Meta AI. The closed loop from measurement to content is real, and it is the reason to choose it over a pure tracker.

Semrush AI Toolkit - the path of least resistance

For teams already inside Semrush this is the cheapest marginal step. The $139 monthly SEO plan includes AI search performance and sentiment monitoring; Starter at $199 adds 50 prompts tracked daily on one domain; Pro+ at $299 gives 100; Advanced at $549 gives 200. Depth is the trade: source attribution and diagnostics are thinner than in purpose-built platforms. If AI visibility is a reporting line, this is enough. If it is a strategic priority, you will outgrow it.

The enterprise tools that will not quote you a price

Profound

Profound goes deeper than most on the technical side, offering crawler-level data about AI bot behaviour on your site rather than only the answers those bots eventually produce, plus agent analytics and compliance-grade reporting. Its published trial is ten prompts run once against ChatGPT; the Enterprise tier covers up to nine engines with SSO, SOC 2 and API access at custom pricing. Best suited to regulated industries where accuracy of AI descriptions carries legal weight.

Evertune

Evertune built its platform around an AI Brand Index that scores how models contextualise and position a brand rather than whether they merely mention it, across a model set including Meta AI and DeepSeek. Its pitch is statistical rigour at scale, which matters given how volatile answers are between runs. Enterprise pricing only.

Conductor

Conductor is an established enterprise content intelligence platform that added AI visibility as its scope expanded, with real-time analytics across ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews, technical crawler auditing and a content module in the same interface. It makes sense for organisations already standardised on Conductor, not as a standalone purchase.

AthenaHQ

AthenaHQ targets mid-market brands wanting serious workflows without enterprise implementation. Its Action Center is the distinctive part: rather than only surfacing missed queries, it maps the source content competitors are cited from and the content you would need to close the gap. It also flags instances where assistants describe your brand inaccurately. No published pricing.

Peec AI

Peec AI handles large prompt sets efficiently with a strong European customer base, and its citation source classification is a genuine differentiator: it reports what type of content drives your citations, whether news coverage, product pages, blog posts or third-party reviews, which tells you where to invest. Four tiers are listed with no figures attached.

Tools where AI visibility rides along with something else

SE Ranking

SE Ranking offers prompt-level AI tracking inside a full SEO platform, with the advantage of cross-channel context: AI citation data beside organic rankings, GA4 traffic and social analytics in one view, plus API and MCP access. Useful for agencies running both workstreams on one subscription. We could not verify its current published price at source on 16 September 2026, so the previous approximate figure has been removed rather than repeated.

Ahrefs Brand Radar

Ahrefs integrated AI mention and citation tracking into Site Explorer rather than building a separate product, so the data sits beside backlinks, organic rankings and content gap analysis. Included in higher subscription tiers. Coverage and the action layer are thinner than dedicated platforms; it is a first look, not a programme.

AI Rank Lab

Disclosure: this is our own product, so weigh this section accordingly and treat the eleven tools above as the fair comparison set.

AI Rank Lab tracks mention and citation rate across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Claude broken down by prompt, competitor and platform, and pairs that with AI bot crawl monitoring so you can see whether assistants are being blocked from the pages you want cited. The AEO audit layer checks whether a given page is structured for clean extraction. As the table above shows, prompt tracking itself is no longer a differentiator in 2026, so compare us on prompt allowance, engine coverage and diagnostics like anyone else.

What no visibility tool can do for you

Every tool here measures an outcome. None of them creates it, and two failure modes make the data meaningless before you start.

The first is eligibility. Google's guide to optimizing for generative AI features, last updated 10 July 2026, states that to be shown in generative AI features a page must be indexed and eligible to be shown in Google Search with a snippet. A noindex or nosnippet directive makes a page uncitable no matter what you spend on monitoring. The same guide confirms structured data is not required and that machine readable AI text files are ignored by Google Search, which saves you a common detour.

The second is crawler access. If AI crawlers are disallowed in robots.txt, your pages cannot ground an answer. This is the single most common fixable cause of a flat citation rate, and it costs nothing to check.

How to choose without overbuying

Work in this order. Open your existing SEO subscription and find the prompt allowance you already pay for. If none, start with Otterly Lite at $29 monthly and accept that fifteen prompts is a baseline rather than a programme. If you need engine coverage beyond the base four, price the add-ons before comparing headline figures, because that is where the quoted price and the real price diverge. Move to a $199 to $499 tier only when you can name the decision the extra prompt volume would change. And take the enterprise sales calls only with a prompt count already in hand, since that number is what the quote will be built on.

Check the data weekly for trends and monthly for decisions. Daily checking mostly surfaces run-to-run variance. The exception is structural change: a migration, a robots.txt edit, or a competitor moving hard into your category.