Every AI visibility tool sells the same core loop: define the questions your buyers ask, run them across AI engines on a schedule, and report how often you are named. The category barely existed in 2024. In 2026 it spans $29-a-month trackers to five-figure enterprise contracts, and the tools differ far more on price and reporting depth than on what they fundamentally do.
The market in one paragraph: entry-level tracking starts at $29 per month (Otterly.AI, 15 prompts). Mid-market platforms run roughly $90 to $500 per month by prompt volume (Peec AI, Otterly's upper tiers). SEO suites sell AI tracking as an add-on for $99 per month (Semrush AI Toolkit) to $199 per platform or $699 bundled (Ahrefs Brand Radar). Enterprise platforms (Profound, Scrunch AI) run custom contracts commonly reported in the five figures per year. And every one of them measures the problem rather than fixing it, which matters more than the price differences.
Which AI visibility tools should you compare?
| Tool | Type | Engines tracked | 2026 pricing (list) | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Otterly.AI | Standalone tracker | ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity, Copilot; Claude, Gemini, AI Mode as paid add-ons | $29/mo (15 prompts), $189/mo (100), $489/mo (400); enterprise from ~$1,000/mo | Cheapest serious entry point |
| Peec AI | Standalone tracker | ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Copilot, AI Mode, AI Overviews | Tiered by prompts; roughly $90-$500/mo in published roundups, exact pricing via sales | Mid-market teams and agencies |
| Profound | Enterprise platform | Major assistants plus agent/crawler analytics | Custom; commonly reported five figures/yr | Enterprise brands with budget |
| Scrunch AI | Enterprise platform (acquired by Sitecore, 2026) | Major assistants | Reported from ~$250/mo, custom above | Mid-market to enterprise, Sitecore shops |
| Semrush AI Toolkit | SEO-suite add-on | AI Overviews, ChatGPT and other major engines | ~$99/mo add-on (25 prompts) on top of a Semrush plan | Teams already paying for Semrush |
| Ahrefs Brand Radar | SEO-suite add-on | Per-platform AI indexes (AI Overviews, ChatGPT, more) | $199/mo per platform or $699/mo bundled, plus base plan from $129/mo | Teams already paying for Ahrefs |
| Free graders (e.g. HubSpot AEO Grader) | One-off audit | Varies | Free | A rough first look |
| Continuum AI Visibility Check | One-off live share-of-voice check | ChatGPT, Gemini, Grok, Brave | Free, no signup | Founders who want a real number today |
Prices are vendor list prices or published figures as of August 2026 and change often; several vendors moved pricing behind sales conversations this year, so treat ranges as ballpark.
Disclosure: Continuum (this site) makes the free check in the last row. The honest framing is that it is a one-off diagnostic, not a scheduled tracker; if you need daily monitoring across many prompts, the paid tools above do that and ours does not.
What does an AI visibility tracker actually do?
Mechanically, all of them: take a prompt set (your buyers' questions, not your brand name), run it against AI engines on a schedule (daily on most paid plans), parse the answers, and report three things: how often you are named (share of voice), which sources the engines cited, and which competitors appear where you do not.
Three caveats the sales pages underplay:
- Answers vary between identical runs. The same prompt to the same engine on the same day can name you once and skip you twice. Single-run scores are noisy; trends over weeks are the real signal.
- Personalization skews everything. An engine queried from your logged-in browser already knows who you are. Serious tools query via API or clean sessions, and any manual check you do should too.
- The engine list is a moving target. Google shipped AI Mode broadly in 2025, ChatGPT's underlying search sources keep shifting, and every tool charges more to cover more engines. Check which engines are in the base price; on some tools, Gemini and Claude are paid add-ons.
Why does measuring your AI visibility not improve it?
Because visibility is lost at a gate no tracker touches. In an August 2026 first-hand study, we took 45 queries a site already ranked for on Google at position 12 or better and asked whether AI actually cited it. Live web search surfaced the site on 60 percent of queries, so retrieval was mostly won. A browsing AI cited it on 7 of 45 queries, 15.6 percent. A non-browsing model, answering from training memory, named it 0 times in a 9-query check.
A tracker would have reported that 15.6 percent accurately, every day, forever. Moving it required two different jobs: reshaping pages so the key numbers read as neutral, quotable market facts rather than vendor pitches (the lift gate), and earning authentic third-party mentions so models recall the brand without searching (the recall gap). That is content and PR work, not dashboard work. Budget for it, or the tracker becomes an expensive way to watch a flat line. The AEO vs SEO breakdown covers what that fixing work actually looks like.
Which tool should you pick?
- Enterprise brand, dedicated team, real budget: Profound or Scrunch. You are paying for depth, agent analytics, and someone to call.
- Agency or mid-market marketing team: Peec or Otterly's Standard tier ($189/mo, 100 prompts). Best depth-to-price ratio in the category right now.
- Already paying for Semrush or Ahrefs: try the add-on first. It is the same core data next to the SEO data you already use, though per-platform pricing (Ahrefs) adds up fast.
- Founder who wants an answer before spending anything: run the free AI Visibility Check. It puts your buyers' questions to four engines live, takes about 30 seconds, and shows your share of voice, the questions where you are invisible, and who is named instead of you.
Whatever you pick, decide up front who owns the fixing work. A number that nobody is assigned to move is just a subscription. If the check shows you invisible and you want it fixed rather than watched, that is the work Continuum does.