Multi-engine coverage is no longer the differentiator: nearly every tool here covers ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity. What separates them now is packaging: whether the engines you need are included or sold as add-ons, how often the data refreshes, and whether the tool stops at reporting or also prioritises fixes. Read the plan you would actually buy, not the logo row on the homepage.
A tool tells you where you stand. The AI Visibility Audit I run for clients tells you why, and gives you a prioritized 7-day fix plan, $1,500 flat. See the AI Visibility Audit →
01: How this list was put together
I’m an AI visibility consultant. I don’t sell these tools and I have no affiliate relationship with any of them.
This page used to carry star ratings (4.5/5, 3/5, and so on) and a rank order running from 1 to 10. I have removed them, and the reason matters more than the ratings did. There was no published rubric behind those numbers: no weighting across the five criteria, no count of prompts run, no test dates, no per-tool subscores. A reader could not reproduce them, and neither could I. A number like “4.5/5” reads as measurement when it was opinion, which makes it the wrong kind of wrong for a page about accuracy.
What replaced them is narrower and checkable. For each tool below you get two things I can point at a source for: the engines the vendor documents and the entry price the vendor publishes, each linked to the page it came from, all read on August 11, 2026. Where a vendor publishes no pricing, this page says so instead of inventing a range: three of the nine tools here fall into that bucket, and the dollar figures this page used to quote for them came from nowhere.
The judgement calls (who a tool suits, what a buyer would get wrong) are labelled as judgement, not scored. Where I have used a tool with clients I say so in the entry; where I am reading documentation, that is what the source link represents.
02: What changed since the first version
This post first ran in June 2026. Enough of it was wrong by August that a quiet edit would have been dishonest, so here is what changed and why.
“Most SEO tools only cover Google AI Overviews.” This was the organising claim of the original piece and it is no longer true. Semrush covers AI Overviews, AI Mode, ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini. Ahrefs’ Brand Radar covers seven AI platforms. SE Ranking spun its AI coverage out into a separate product, SE Visible, covering five. The AI-Overviews-only framing described the market of a year ago.
Two tools should not have been here. The original list included Mention and Wincher as AI visibility tools. Checking their own documentation, neither has a documented AI answer-tracking product. That section is below, kept rather than deleted, because the same two names appear on other lists.
“Every tool gives you a dashboard; none gives you a prioritized fix list.” Too strong. Yext Scout recommends actions and executes some of them through its Action Center. Semrush’s Content Toolkit generates optimization recommendations. Otterly ships weekly recommendations, and Frase hands a losing prompt to its editor as optimization insights. The honest version of this point is further down, and it is narrower.
Prices and product names moved. Profound now sells self-serve from $99. Otterly starts at $29, not $100. BrightEdge’s AI product is AI Hyper Cube, not Generative Parser. Details are in each entry.
03: Coverage and pricing at a glance
Every row was read from the linked vendor page on August 11, 2026. “Not published” means the vendor does not disclose pricing publicly, not that it is expensive, though in practice these are enterprise contracts.
04: The tools, by category
Dedicated AI visibility platforms
Built for this job first. Tracking AI answers is the product, not a feature added to something else.
Profound
A purpose-built answer-engine monitoring platform. It runs a prompt set on a daily schedule and reports mentions, citations, sentiment and competitive presence, plus a separate Agent Analytics product that tracks AI-referred traffic to your own domains.
Engines covered: Starter: ChatGPT only. Growth: 3 answer engines (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews). Enterprise: up to 9, adding Google AI Mode, Gemini, Copilot, Grok, DeepSeek and Claude.
Published pricing: $99/mo (Starter, billed yearly, 50 prompts, 1 seat) · $399/mo (Growth, 100 prompts, 3 seats) · Enterprise custom
Who it fits: Teams that want cross-engine tracking as the primary job of the tool, not a feature bolted onto something else.
What to watch for: The commonly repeated line that Profound is enterprise-only is out of date, but so is the opposite reading. The $99 tier tracks ChatGPT and nothing else. Cross-engine coverage starts at the $399 tier, and the full nine engines are Enterprise. Price the plan against the engines you actually need, not the logo list on the homepage.
Source: Profound pricing page, read 2026-08-11
Otterly.ai
Daily prompt tracking with brand visibility scoring, link citation analysis, competitor comparison and a GEO audit, across 50+ countries. API, MCP access and Looker Studio reporting start at the Standard tier.
Engines covered: Included on every plan: ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity, Microsoft Copilot. Gemini, Google AI Mode and Claude are paid add-ons.
Published pricing: $29/mo (Lite, 15 prompts) · $189/mo (Standard, 100 prompts) · $489/mo (Premium, 400 prompts) · Enterprise from $1,000/mo
Who it fits: Small teams and agencies that want systematic multi-engine tracking at a price that does not require a procurement process.
What to watch for: The engine list is the thing to read carefully. Copilot and AI Overviews are included; Gemini and Claude are not. Adding Gemini costs $9–$149/mo depending on plan, and Claude $29–$439/mo. A quoted base price can understate the real cost by a wide margin if Gemini or Claude matter to you.
Source: Otterly.ai pricing page, read 2026-08-11
SE Visible (SE Ranking)
SE Ranking's dedicated AI visibility product (a separate app from its SEO suite, not a checkbox inside rank tracking). Covers visibility, sentiment, cited sources and competitor benchmarking with weekly updates across 7 countries and 5 languages.
Engines covered: ChatGPT, Gemini, Google AI Mode, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, all on every tier.
Published pricing: $99/mo (Basic, 200 prompts) · $189/mo (Core, 450 prompts) · $355/mo (Plus, 1,000 prompts)
Who it fits: Teams that want the same five engines on the cheapest tier rather than an add-on ladder.
What to watch for: Do not confuse SE Visible with SE Ranking's classic rank tracker. They are separately priced products, and older comparisons (including an earlier version of this page) described the rank tracker's AI Overviews flag as if it were the whole AI offering. Coverage is 7 countries and 5 languages; narrow if you sell outside them.
Source: SE Visible product page, read 2026-08-11
Frase
Daily prompt tracking with share of voice against competitors you nominate, the full response text behind each citation, alerts when visibility moves, and a log of which AI crawlers are actually reaching your pages.
Engines covered: ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini, Google AI.
Published pricing: Plans from $39/mo billed yearly; AI visibility tracking is part of the platform.
Who it fits: Content teams that want the tracking and the content work in the same place (a gap you spot hands off to the editor rather than to a separate tool).
What to watch for: Frase is usually filed under content optimization, and this page filed it that way too until this revision. That is now wrong: it does daily multi-engine tracking. The trade-off is depth of the tracking analytics compared with a tool that does only tracking.
Source: Frase AI visibility feature page, read 2026-08-11
SEO platforms with AI visibility products
You may already be paying for the base platform. The AI coverage is real, but it is packaged and priced separately in every case below.
Semrush
A full AI visibility toolkit rather than an AI Overviews flag: share of voice and sentiment tracking, competitor benchmarking against up to four rivals, a prompt research database, and a site audit that flags which AI crawlers you are blocking.
Engines covered: Google AI Overviews, Google AI Mode, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini; tracked weekly in Brand Performance.
Published pricing: AI Visibility toolkit from $99/mo · Semrush One (SEO + AI visibility) from $199/mo · free plan shows AI mentions, citations and a visibility score
Who it fits: SEO teams already inside Semrush, and anyone who wants one bill covering both classic search and AI answers.
What to watch for: Which toolkit you are on determines what you see. Google and AI Overviews tracking is on any plan including the free one; tracking on ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini requires Semrush One or the AI Visibility toolkit. Brand Performance runs on Semrush-generated synthetic prompts based on your domain and location (useful, but not your customers' actual wording).
Source: Semrush AI visibility documentation, read 2026-08-11
Ahrefs Brand Radar
A discovery-first tool. Instead of only running prompts you define, it queries a standing index of 405M+ search-backed prompts derived from People Also Ask questions, so there is history to look at from the moment you get access: back to May 2025 for chatbot sources and August 2024 for AI Overviews.
Engines covered: Seven AI platforms: Google AI Overviews & AI Mode, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Copilot, Grok (data collection currently paused), and Claude (custom prompts only). Plus SEO, YouTube, Reddit and TikTok indexes.
Published pricing: AI indexes are a paid add-on on any plan: $199/mo per single platform, or $699/mo for all platforms. Custom prompt tracking is separate: $50 / $100 / $250 per month by volume.
Who it fits: Teams that want breadth and back-history rather than a small, hand-picked prompt set, and that already live in Ahrefs.
What to watch for: Two things the pricing page does not put up front. The AI indexes are an add-on, not something included with a standard Ahrefs plan; describing Brand Radar as bundled at $100/mo is wrong. And the AI chatbot index refreshes once a month; only AI Overviews and your own custom prompts move faster than that.
Source: Ahrefs Brand Radar documentation, read 2026-08-11
Enterprise brand and search platforms
Broad platforms where AI visibility is one capability among many. None of the three publishes pricing.
BrightEdge
Enterprise SEO platform with a dedicated AI search layer. AI Hyper Cube maps which prompts mention you, which sources the engines lean on, how competitors appear alongside you, and whether the narrative is positive or negative. AI Agent Insights covers the other direction: blocked pages and broken paths that stop AI systems reaching you.
Engines covered: AI Hyper Cube covers ChatGPT, Gemini and other generative engines; AI Agent Insights reports which AI bots are hitting your own site.
Published pricing: No public pricing. BrightEdge does not publish rate cards; figures elsewhere are third-party guesses.
Who it fits: Enterprises with an existing BrightEdge relationship and a search team to run it.
What to watch for: "Generative Parser" is the name older comparisons still use, including an earlier version of this page. The current product is AI Hyper Cube, launched March 2026, and it is not AI-Overviews-only. Any figure you see quoted for BrightEdge pricing (including the $2,000+/mo this page previously carried) is not from BrightEdge.
Source: BrightEdge AI Hyper Cube announcement (March 10, 2026), read 2026-08-11
Yext Scout
Visibility measured location by location rather than only at brand level, head-to-head win rates against your 20 closest competitors, sentiment themes (Yext's own example: "long wait times"), citation-source tracking, and an Action Center where agents update listings, correct business data and respond to reviews.
Engines covered: Google Search, Google Maps and Google AI Overviews, plus ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and Perplexity.
Published pricing: No public pricing. A free Scout scan is available without a contract.
Who it fits: Multi-location brands: the per-location view is the reason to choose it over a brand-level tracker.
What to watch for: Scout is the clearest counter-example to the claim that AI visibility tools only diagnose. It prioritises fixes and executes some of them. The trade-off is the Yext ecosystem: the execution side runs on Yext's listings and Knowledge Graph products, so the value depends on committing to those.
Source: Yext Scout product page, read 2026-08-11
Brandwatch
Brandwatch's AI coverage sits in a named Search Intelligence and GenAI Monitoring product, powered by Trajaan, not as an afterthought inside social listening. It monitors how leading LLMs cite your brand and competitors across thousands of prompts, surfaces sentiment shifts, identifies which media domains and pages the LLMs trust, and flags high-risk narratives early.
Engines covered: GenAI engines including ChatGPT, alongside Google, Amazon, TikTok and Baidu search data, across 150+ countries.
Published pricing: No public pricing.
Who it fits: Enterprise brand and comms teams who need social, news and AI in one place and would otherwise buy two platforms. The early-warning framing (catching a reputational problem in LLM answers before it surfaces in social) is the distinctive part.
What to watch for: This page previously described Brandwatch as social listening "with some AI" and quoted $1,000+/month. The first understated the product badly and the second had no public source. Brandwatch publishes no pricing; treat any number you read as someone's estimate.
Source: Brandwatch Search Intelligence, read 2026-08-11
05: Two tools that are often listed here and shouldn't be
Both of these appeared in the first version of this post. Neither has a documented product that monitors AI-generated answers. They are good at what they do; that is a separate thing.
Mention
Mention's own site describes three products (Monitor, Analyze and Engage) across web and social sources. There is no AI answer monitoring in the product navigation, the feature pages or the source list. Mention has AI features in the sense that it uses AI to summarise and classify mentions, which is a different thing from monitoring what ChatGPT or Perplexity says about you. Mention was acquired by Agorapulse.
Source: Mention product site, read 2026-08-11
Wincher
Wincher documents a rank tracker, local rank tracker, keyword explorer and on-page checker. Its feature list mentions SERP features generically. There is no documented AI Overviews product and no AI answer tracking. An earlier version of this page said Wincher's AI Overview detection was accurate; there is no public evidence for that, and no product page to check it against.
Source: Wincher product site, read 2026-08-11
The general lesson is worth more than the two names: “uses AI” and “monitors AI answers” are different claims, and vendor marketing blurs them. A tool that summarises your mentions with an LLM is not tracking what ChatGPT says about you. Before you buy, find the page that names the engines. If there isn’t one, that is your answer.
06: Content and schema tools
Trackers measure where you appear. Content tools help you earn the appearance. The two categories overlap more than they used to: Frase does both, and Semrush’s Content Toolkit scores drafts against factors it correlates with citation rates.
Clearscope and MarketMuse remain the established options for topical depth and coverage gaps. Neither markets itself as an AI visibility tool, and neither should be bought as one.
On schema, this page was giving bad advice. It previously said FAQPage and HowTo schema were “non-negotiable for AEO.” That is wrong on both counts. Google’s own documentation now carries a deprecation notice: as of May 7, 2026, FAQ rich results no longer appear in Google Search, and even before that they were restricted to well-known, authoritative government and health sites. HowTo rich results were removed earlier. And no published evidence shows either schema type is a condition of being cited by an LLM.
Structured data still earns its place: Organization, Article, LocalBusiness and Product markup describe entities in a form machines read reliably. But the honest framing is that schema helps machines parse a page that was already clear, not that a particular schema type buys you a citation. See Google’s FAQPage documentation for the deprecation notice.
07: Free vs paid
Free methods are a legitimate starting point, and there are more of them than there were: Semrush’s free plan surfaces AI mentions, citations and a visibility score; Yext offers a free Scout scan; several vendors run free one-off checkers.
One correction on Google. This page previously referred to Search Console’s “AI Overviews data.” The report is called Generative AI features, it is in Beta, it covers Google’s AI surfaces together rather than AI Overviews alone, and it reports total impressions only, no clicks, no CTR, no position, and no query-level breakdown. I use it on my own properties; that is what is in it.
The real constraint on free methods is not breadth any more, it is repetition. Free tiers give you a reading. Tracking is what tells you whether a change worked, and that is what you are paying for.
For the full breakdown of what free checkers show and where they fall short, see how to check AI visibility for free.
08: How to choose
Coverage lists have converged, so choose on the things that still differ:
- Which engines are included, not listed. Otterly bundles Copilot and AI Overviews but charges extra for Gemini and Claude. Profound’s cheapest tier is ChatGPT-only. Ahrefs’ AI indexes are an add-on. SE Visible and Semrush include five engines from the entry tier.
- How often it refreshes. Daily (Otterly, Frase, Profound), weekly (Semrush Brand Performance, SE Visible), or monthly for the standing chatbot index (Ahrefs). If you are shipping changes and want to see movement, monthly is too slow.
- Whose prompts. Some tools run the prompts you write; Semrush generates synthetic prompts from your domain and location; Ahrefs queries a standing index built from People Also Ask data. Each answers a slightly different question.
- Whether it stops at reporting. Yext Scout prioritises and executes. Frase and Semrush hand you content recommendations. Profound is deliberately strong on data and lighter on prescription.
- Which platforms you actually need. Coverage costs money, and not every engine is worth the same to every business: the traffic split between them is the cheapest way to narrow this before you buy.
- Geography and language. SE Visible covers 7 countries and 5 languages. Otterly covers 50+ countries. If you sell in more than one language, check this before anything else.
An AI visibility audit is often the right starting point before committing to ongoing tracking software: it tells you which platforms you have exposure on and which to prioritise, so you don’t buy a platform that tracks the wrong thing.
09: What tools still don't do
The gap is no longer that tools only report. It is that what they recommend is generic to the platform, not specific to your business.
The original version of this section claimed every tool lacked accuracy review, competitor explanation and a prioritized action plan. Several now do some of that. The narrower version that survives scrutiny:
Whether a citation helps you is a commercial judgement. Sentiment analysis tells you an answer was positive. It cannot tell you that being cited as the cheap option is bad for a premium positioning: that requires knowing what you sell and to whom.
Diagnosing absence is still manual. Ahrefs, Semrush, BrightEdge and Frase all log AI crawler activity now, which covers the technical layer. Whether the real problem is content extraction, entity ambiguity or plain authority still takes someone looking at the pages.
Recommendations don’t know your constraints. A tool that recommends 40 fixes has not told you which three you can ship this quarter with the team you have. Prioritisation that ignores cost is a list, not a plan.
Citations are not customers. No tool in this list connects citation volume to revenue, because the platforms don’t expose the data to connect it with. On one of my own sites, the single most-cited page earned 6,500 AI citations and 24 Google clicks in the same three months. A dashboard showing 6,500 would have looked like a win.
Need a picture before you pick a platform?
The audit covers ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews and Gemini, with platform-specific citation analysis, accuracy review, competitor gap mapping, and a prioritized action plan.
Book an AI Visibility Audit →10: Frequently asked questions
Is there a free AI visibility tracker?
There are free entry points, but no free tool that tracks multiple engines on a schedule. Semrush's free plan shows AI mentions, citations and a visibility score in Domain Overview, and audits 100 pages for AI readiness. Yext offers a free Scout scan. Google Search Console's Generative AI features report shows impressions from Google's AI surfaces for your own site. Beyond that, free means manual: you run the prompts yourself. For ongoing multi-engine tracking, paid tools are the only systematic option.
What's the difference between AI visibility tools and SEO tools?
SEO tools track rankings, traffic and backlinks in traditional search. AI visibility tools track whether you are mentioned and cited in AI-generated answers, and what those answers say. The line has blurred: Semrush, Ahrefs and SE Ranking all now sell AI visibility products covering ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity as well as Google's AI surfaces. The practical difference is usually packaging and price: in Ahrefs the AI indexes are a paid add-on, in Semrush they are a separate toolkit, and in SE Ranking's case an entirely separate product called SE Visible.
Can AI visibility tools track Perplexity citations?
Yes, and this is now the normal case rather than the exception. Profound (from the Growth tier), Otterly.ai, SE Visible, Frase, Semrush's AI Visibility toolkit, Ahrefs Brand Radar and Yext Scout all document Perplexity coverage. If a tool does not cover Perplexity in 2026, that is the unusual thing.
Do I need an AI visibility tool or a consultant?
It depends on where you are. If you have no AI visibility foundation and don't know where you stand, start with an audit. Once you have a baseline and an action plan, ongoing tracking tools make sense. Buying a tracking platform before you have a strategy is like buying a fitness tracker before you know what you're trying to improve.
How accurate are AI visibility tracking tools?
Directionally accurate rather than precise, and for a structural reason: AI answers vary between sessions, models, phrasings and locations, so any single reading is a sample. Refresh rates differ too: Otterly, Frase and Profound track daily, Semrush's Brand Performance updates weekly, and Ahrefs' AI chatbot index refreshes monthly. Two tools reporting different numbers for the same brand are not necessarily contradicting each other. Manual verification of the queries that matter commercially is always worth doing.
What is Profound AI visibility?
Profound is a dedicated answer-engine monitoring platform. It runs a prompt set daily and reports mentions, citations, sentiment, ranking and competitive presence, plus AI-referred traffic through a separate Agent Analytics product. Self-serve plans start at $99/month for ChatGPT-only tracking, $399/month for three answer engines, and Enterprise plans cover up to nine.
Disclosure. I have no affiliate relationship with, and receive no compensation from, any tool named on this page. I sell an AI visibility audit, which competes for the same budget as some of them. Engine lists and prices were read from the linked vendor pages on August 11, 2026; the judgements about fit are mine and are not scored.
For the full AI visibility strategy framework and how tools fit into it, see the hub. For free one-off checks, see how to check AI visibility for free.
Hami Tahm is an independent AI visibility consultant based in Toronto.