Best AI visibility tools in 2026, compared on published prices

The short answer

• If you need checking every day rather than when you ask for it, every daily tracker here beats SEOBuilder, and Otterly.AI at $29 a month is the cheapest way in.
• If you already pay for Ahrefs or Semrush, check what your plan already includes before buying anything. Ahrefs bundles 5 to 20 tracked AI prompts into plans you may already have.
• If you want the citation URLs rather than a score, and are one person, SEOBuilder (our product) is $19 a month and asks all seven engines the same buyer questions.
• Priced per prompt tracked daily, we are not the cheapest option on this page. The arithmetic is below.

All prices in this post come from each vendor's own pricing page, read on 15 August 2026. Prices in this category move, so check the link before you buy.

What each vendor publishes

Two things in that table matter more than the prices.

The first is that a "prompt" means something different at every vendor, so the column does not compare cleanly. Otterly's 15 prompts are checked daily across four engines. Our 25 questions are checked when you run a scan, three times a month on Solo. The first twenty of them go to all seven engines and the rest to Google AI Overviews, which is the one place our coverage is not flat. So their check buys you frequency and ours buys you coverage. Those are not the same product and we should not pretend they are.

The second is that Profound is the only tool here that publishes a price without publishing what you get for it. The pricing page lists Starter at $99 a month and Growth at $399 a month, both billed yearly, with Enterprise as custom. It does not say how many prompts or which platforms sit inside those tiers. For a solo founder deciding on a Tuesday afternoon, "book a demo to find out the allowance" is itself a data point, and usually a disqualifying one.

The unit that decides the price is a prompt tracked daily

The published monthly price is the number vendors compete on. It's the wrong number. Divide by what you actually receive and the ranking changes, including for us.

Sorted by cost per check, cheapest first. Every plan each vendor publishes an allowance for, including all three of ours.

Profound is missing because it doesn't publish an allowance, so there is nothing to divide by.

Three rows are ours and none of them wins. Pro is our best at eight cents and still sits behind Ahrefs, Peec and both Otterly plans. Agency is twelve cents. Starter is the most expensive check on the page.

Updated 28 August 2026 after a price change. Our rows moved in both directions and the honest summary is that we got better where we sell more scans and worse where we sell fewer: Pro went from $0.098 to $0.079 and now beats Semrush, Agency went from $0.089 to $0.115 and now loses to it, and the entry plan went from $0.253 to $0.145. We are still behind four of the five competitors on this measure.

Correction, 19 August 2026: this table used to put Agency second at $0.045, on 100 questions a scan. Agency sells 50, and has since we capped it, so the real figure is 2,000 checks at $0.089 and the row belongs three places lower. The number was stale in the direction that flattered us, in the one table on this site that compares us to other people's prices, which is the worst place on the site for it to have been.

Those positions come from the same design. We sell scans you trigger, not prompts tracked daily, so the allowance moves in steps rather than smoothly. Solo's 75 checks are the smallest step and carry the whole $19. Agency's 2,000 are the largest step we sell, which brings the price per check down by nearly three against Solo and still leaves it behind three of the daily trackers.

That also means cost per check is not the only number that matters, and we would be misleading you if we left it there. A daily-tracked prompt gives you a time series, so you can see the week a citation disappeared. Forty on-demand scans give you more total checks and no automatic history. If your job is to spot a drop the day it happens, Otterly at $29 beats our $19 plan outright, and it beats our $179 plan on that specific job too.

We think the on-demand trade is defensible for one person watching one site, because a daily reading of an AI Overview mostly measures Google's own variance rather than anything you changed. We would rather sell 75 honest checks at $19 than 450 you never open. That is an argument, not a fact, and the table above is there so you can disagree with it.

One more thing no vendor's pricing page tells you: a large share of the questions you track will return no AI Overview at all. Bright Data's own AI Overview API page puts the rate at roughly 15 to 20 percent of queries, though we measured four of four on commercial buyer questions in our own test, which is a sample of four. Either way, some of the checks you paid for will come back empty through no fault of yours. A tool that scores those as a miss is telling you that you failed to be cited in an answer that never existed. Ask any vendor how they count that before you compare two visibility scores.

Where each tool is the right choice

Otterly.AI, if you want four engines for under fifty dollars. Lite is $29 a month for 15 prompts across ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity and Copilot. Claude, Google AI Mode and Gemini are paid add-ons on every tier, which the pricing page states plainly. That is the cheapest honest entry into daily multi-engine tracking we could find. On engine coverage alone our own free tier and $19 Solo now ask more engines, but they scan on demand rather than every day, and those are different products.

Peec AI, if you run several brands or markets. Starter is $80 a month billed annually for 50 prompts and one project, and the Advanced tier at $420 adds multi-country tracking and a Looker Studio integration. If your reporting has to land in a client's existing dashboard, that integration is worth more than any score.

Profound, if you are buying for a company rather than for yourself. The self-serve tiers start at $99, but the product is built around enterprise questions like agent traffic and brand share of voice. If you have a procurement process, the demo call that annoys a solo founder is just the normal way you buy things.

Semrush or Ahrefs, if you already pay them. This is the recommendation most AI visibility comparisons refuse to make, because it sells nothing. Ahrefs Lite at $129 a month already includes 5 tracked AI prompts, Standard includes 10 and Advanced includes 20, with extra prompt packs from $50 a month. Semrush sells its AI Visibility Toolkit at $99 a month per domain for 25 daily-tracked prompts. If five prompts answer your question, you are already paying for the answer.

SEOBuilder, if the question is specifically "do the AI answers name us, and who do they name instead". Seven engines on the same buyer questions, $19 a month on Solo, and the free tier gives you one scan of ten questions with no card.

What SEOBuilder does not do

We don't track anything daily. A scan runs when you trigger it, so you get more total checks and no automatic time series, and if your job is to spot a drop the day it happens that is a real reason to pick one of the daily trackers above.

We don't cover Grok, and Claude answers through Anthropic's API rather than claude.ai, which is the same model and the same web search but not the consumer app. We would rather spell that out than let a logo imply otherwise.

We also don't do sentiment analysis, share of voice across markets, agent or bot traffic analytics, or a Looker Studio integration. We have no public customers, no reviews and no case studies, because the product has not launched. Anyone telling you a user count in this category is either much further along than us or making it up.

What we do have is the citation URLs, from seven engines asked the same buyer questions: Google AI Overviews, Google AI Mode, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Microsoft Copilot and Claude. For each answer we return the domains it cited and where you sat in that list, or that you were absent. That is one narrow question answered cheaply, and it is the whole product. If you want the method rather than the tool, how to measure AI visibility walks through doing it by hand.

How to choose in ten minutes

1. Write down how often you need to be checked. If the answer is every day, skip us and start at Otterly Lite; our scans run when you trigger them.
2. Open your current SEO tool's plan page and search for "AI prompts". If you already have 5 to 25 of them, run those first and buy nothing this month.
3. Count the prompts you genuinely need tracked. Most solo sites need 10 to 25 buyer questions, not 400.
4. Divide the price by prompts times tracking frequency, the way the table above does. Compare that number, not the sticker.
5. If the answer comes out as "Google AI Overviews, about 25 questions, one person", our pricing page has the free tier and the $29 plan. Lifetime is $499 once and capped at 10 seats, which is a real cap and not a countdown timer.

One last thing worth knowing. The spread on this page runs from $29 to $489 for what reads like the same job, and almost none of that gap is access to private data. These tools differ on how many engines they ask, how often they ask, and what they build on top. Google's own AI features guidance says optimising for AI Overviews is SEO rather than a separate discipline, so nobody here is selling you a secret index.