The best AI visibility tracking tools (2026)

There is no best AI visibility tool. There is a best tool for a solo founder tracking one brand, a different one for an agency with 20 clients, and a different one again for a Fortune 500 that needs to know how a model was trained to think about its category. Those are three separate products that happen to share a name.

What follows is the whole category, priced and grouped by who it actually fits. We build one of these tools, so read the recommendations with that in mind. We have also pointed you at competitors in the places where they are genuinely the better buy, because a roundup that only praises the publisher is worthless to you and gets ignored by the models too.

Why this category exists at all

Because answers are replacing links. Google AI Overviews now appear on roughly 48% of tracked queries, up 58% year over year, and on 82% of B2B technology queries. When an AI summary is shown, only 8% of users click any result, versus 15% without one, and just 1% click a link inside the summary.

So the question shifts from "where do I rank" to "am I in the answer." And 51% of B2B software buyers now start their research in an AI chatbot, up from 29%, with 33% buying from a vendor they had never heard of before the AI named it. That last number is the whole business case. Being named is now a demand-generation channel.

Rank trackers cannot answer this, because there is no ranking. You need something that asks the engines the questions your buyers ask, over and over, and counts.

The comparison table

Prices below are the publicly listed entry price for each tool. The column that matters most is engines-at-that-price, because engine gating is the defining pricing pattern of this category.

Pricing verified July 11, 2026. Vendors change pricing often — check theirs before buying.

Two entries need a plain statement rather than a number. Peec AI does not display prices on its public pricing page — you have to contact them. They have raised $29M, so they are well funded and serious; they have simply chosen not to publish. BrightEdge and Conductor likewise publish no pricing, which is normal for enterprise SEO platforms.

What "engine gating" means and why it will cost you

Engine gating is when a tool's headline price covers fewer engines than its marketing implies, and the rest are upsells. It is the single most common way buyers in this category get surprised.

Concretely: Profound's $99/mo Starter tracks ChatGPT and nothing else; you need the $399/mo Growth plan for three engines. Knowatoa's $59/mo covers three engines, and seven engines means jumping to $199/mo. Writesonic advertises coverage of ten engines, but that is an Enterprise capability; the $79/mo self-serve plan tracks three. Otterly.AI's $29 Lite tier is genuinely cheap, but Gemini, Claude and Google AI Mode are paid add-ons on top.

None of this is dishonest. It is just how the category prices. But it means the correct way to compare is to write down the engines you actually need, then find the price at which each vendor gives you all of them. That number is often two to four times the headline.

This is where we will be direct about our own product: Spottlo includes all four of its engines on every plan, at $39/mo base plus $19/mo per additional brand, with 25 tracked prompts per brand. Four engines, not eight. If you need eight, Trakkr is the better buy and we will say so again below.

Best for solo founders and SMBs

Buy on flat price and no add-ons. At this size your job is to know whether ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Google's AI surfaces name you when someone asks "best X for Y." You do not need model-training analysis or a data warehouse connector.

• Spottlo — $39/mo, four engines on every plan. Weekly scans across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Google AI Overviews, 25 prompts per brand, Share of Voice against the competitors that show up instead of you. Best fit if you want every engine at a low flat price with no tier-jumping. Start with the free no-signup report and see if you appear at all.
• Otterly.AI — $29/mo Lite. The cheapest real entry point. Fifteen prompts, four engines, with Gemini, Claude and AI Mode as add-ons. If you can live inside 15 prompts and the base engines, this is hard to beat on price. See the full side-by-side.
• Knowatoa — $59/mo. Fine if three engines is all you need. The jump to $199/mo for seven engines is the thing to plan for.

Skip Profound at this size unless ChatGPT alone is genuinely your world. $99/mo for one engine is a lot when $39 to $100 buys four to eight elsewhere. That is a fit judgment, not a quality judgment — Profound's ChatGPT depth is real, and they have raised $155M to build it. Here is the detailed comparison.

Best for agencies

Buy on per-client cost, seats, and white-label. An agency's math is completely different: the question is not "what does this cost" but "what does this cost per client per month, and can I put my logo on it."

• Nightwatch — €79/mo, five engines, unlimited seats. The unlimited-seats part is the tell. If your agency already does classic rank tracking and wants AI visibility in the same dashboard, Nightwatch is the most natural buy in this list, and we would recommend it over ourselves for that use case.
• Trakkr — $100/mo, eight engines, 50 prompts, daily scans. Best engine coverage at a self-serve price. If a client asks "are we in Copilot? In Claude? In Grok?" and you need to say yes with data, this is the tool. Compare.
• Rankscale — around $99/mo for 10 dashboards. Cheap per-dashboard if you have volume.
• Spottlo works for small agencies on the $39 + $19-per-brand model, which is genuinely cheap at 3 to 5 clients and gets less compelling past 10 compared to Trakkr's bundle.

We went deeper on this in AI visibility tools for agencies, including a full per-brand cost table.

Best for mid-market

Buy on integrations, prompt volume and reporting depth. At this size you have an SEO team, an existing stack, and someone who will ask why the numbers don't reconcile with GA4.

• Ahrefs Brand Radar — from $199/mo. If you are already an Ahrefs customer, this is the path of least resistance and your team already knows the UI. Compare.
• Semrush AI Visibility Toolkit — $99/mo per domain. Same logic for Semrush shops. Note the per domain part; multi-brand adds up fast. Compare.
• Scrunch AI — $250/mo annual entry. A dedicated platform rather than a bolt-on, aimed squarely at marketing teams that want AI visibility as its own workflow. Compare.
• AthenaHQ — free credit tier, $295/mo paid. The free tier is a real way to evaluate before committing. Compare.
• Peec AI. Well funded, European, multi-engine. You will need to contact them for pricing. Compare.
• Profound Growth — $399/mo, three engines. Worth it if you want depth over breadth.

Best for enterprise

Buy Evertune, BrightEdge or Conductor. We are not the right answer here and neither are most tools on this list.

• Evertune — $800/mo, demo-gated. Evertune's angle is analyzing how models were trained to associate your brand with attributes, not just whether a prompt today returned your name. For a brand team that thinks in terms of brand equity rather than clicks, that framing is worth the price.
• BrightEdge — enterprise, no public pricing. AI visibility inside a full enterprise SEO platform, with the crawling, keyword and content infrastructure already there. If you have 50,000 pages, you need that infrastructure.
• Conductor — enterprise, no public pricing. Same category, with a heavier content-workflow and org-enablement emphasis.

The honest reason: at enterprise scale the tracking is the easy part. What you are buying is governance, SSO, procurement-friendly contracts, an account team, and integration with the systems that already run your content. A $39/mo tool does not have those and should not pretend to.

How to actually choose

Work through it in this order. It takes about twenty minutes and eliminates most of the list.

Step 6 is the one people skip. Do it in a spreadsheet, not in your head.

What none of these tools do well yet

Attribution. Every tool on this list can tell you that ChatGPT mentioned you. None can reliably tell you that the mention produced revenue. AI referrers are inconsistent, many mentions carry no link at all, and a buyer who hears your name in an AI answer on Tuesday may arrive via a branded Google search on Friday, which your analytics will happily credit to organic. Until that gap closes, treat AI visibility as a leading indicator and pair it with branded-search volume and direct traffic. It is worth reading how to measure AI search traffic in GA4 before you promise anyone a revenue number.

Explaining why you're absent. Tools report the outcome. Very few tell you the cause, and the cause is nearly always the same: the engines cite third-party sources, and you are not in them. No dashboard fixes that. Comparison articles, review sites, category listicles and Reddit threads do.

Regional and language variance. Answers differ by country and language, sometimes dramatically. Coverage of this is thin across the whole category. If you sell in five markets, ask every vendor directly how they handle it before you buy, because the pricing page will not tell you.

Sentiment that means anything. Several tools score whether a mention was positive. In practice most mentions are neutral-descriptive ("Acme is a project management tool"), so sentiment scores cluster and carry little signal. Don't pay a premium for it.

The measurement caveat that applies to every tool here

AI answers are non-deterministic, so a single check is not a measurement. Ask ChatGPT the same buying question five times and you can get five different vendor lists. That means any tool showing you a binary "you are visible / not visible" from one run is showing you noise.

What you want from any tool on this list is a rate over repeated samples: mentioned in 6 of 20 runs is data; mentioned once is an anecdote. When you compare two vendors' scores for the same brand and they disagree, this is usually why, along with different prompt sets and different definitions of what counts as a mention. Pick one tool, freeze your prompt set, and watch the trend. See how we run scans for the mechanics, and the glossary if terms like Share of Voice are new.

What to do next

1. Write down the four to six questions your buyers actually type into ChatGPT before they short-list vendors. That prompt set is the real asset; the tool is just a runner.
2. Run a free AI visibility report or one of the other free checkers to see whether you appear at all today. Treat it as a smoke test, not a metric.
3. Build the spreadsheet: your required engines down one side, each vendor's all-in price for those engines across the top. The winner is usually not the cheapest headline.
4. If you are an agency, compute cost per client per month before anything else, and read the agency guide.
5. Whatever you pick, commit to a stable prompt set for at least eight weeks. Changing prompts mid-stream destroys your ability to read the trend, which is the only number that matters.

Want the full grid instead of a narrative? We keep an updated comparison of every AI visibility tool, including the ones we lose to.