AI visibility tools: what actually tracks whether AI mentions you

A new category of software appeared in the last two years, and it sells you an answer to one question: when somebody asks an AI assistant to recommend a business like yours, does it say your name? The tools are real, several of them are good, and the prices run from nothing to $699 a month. This is what each one actually does, what it costs as of 11 August 2026, and the part most of these comparisons leave out, which is how much of it you can do yourself in an hour.

We have written separately about the underlying problem, in how to get your business to show up in ChatGPT. That piece is about the fixes. This one is about measurement, which is the part people usually buy first and should usually buy second.

First, which kind of visibility do you mean

There are two different questions hiding under the phrase AI visibility and the tools below only answer one of them. It is worth thirty seconds to work out which one you are asking, because buying the wrong category is the most common expensive mistake here.

• Do AI assistants mention my business when somebody asks for a recommendation? That is what every tool on this page measures.
• Does AI help me get seen more on Instagram and TikTok? That is a different category entirely, and it is the one we compared in 10 best AI social media tools. Nothing on this page will help with it.

The two are related, and the relationship runs one way. Posting more on social does not directly make ChatGPT name you. But the places assistants read, review sites, forums, local directories, YouTube transcripts, are places your customers end up because of everything else you do, and one tool below has started measuring exactly that overlap.

Start with the free one

Before spending anything, run Ahrefs' free AI visibility checker. It takes no signup and no card, it queries ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Copilot, Google AI Overviews and Google AI Mode, and it returns a count of mentions by platform, the topics those engines associate with your brand, and the pages they cite when they talk about you.

That last part is the valuable one and it is the part people skim past. The list of cited pages is a map of which third party sources the models are actually reading about you. If your own site is not on it, and a directory listing from 2019 with your old opening hours is, you have learned something worth more than a month of any subscription below.

The free checker answers the question. What you pay for, at every price point above it, is watching the answer change over time and next to a competitor.

The six tools, and what each costs

Prices below were read off each vendor's own page on 11 August 2026, rechecked on 8 September, and every one is linked. They are grouped by who the tool is priced for rather than ranked, because a ranking would imply we ran them side by side for a month, and we did not. This table is the entry tier of each product. If what you want is the whole ladder including what the expensive tiers add, that is enterprise versus affordable AI visibility tools, which prices sixteen tiers across five vendors.

Ahrefs AI Visibility Checker, free

No account, no card, no cap on how many brands you look up. It uses prompts derived from real Google searches rather than invented ones, which matters more than it sounds: a tool that asks a model questions nobody types will report visibility nobody has. Its limit is that it is a snapshot. There is no history, so you cannot see whether last month's work moved anything.

Otterly.AI, from $29 a month

The cheapest way to turn the snapshot into a trend. Its Lite plan tracks fifteen prompts daily across ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity and Copilot, with unlimited team members. Fifteen prompts is genuinely enough for a single location business with one service line, and it is the only plan on this page a sole trader would not wince at. Above it the jump is steep: 189 euros for a hundred prompts, 489 for four hundred, and Enterprise from a thousand. Note the currency: Otterly prices in euros, and an earlier version of this article gave these figures in dollars.

Semrush AI Visibility Toolkit, $99 a month

Sold as an add-on rather than part of a plan, at $99 a month for one domain and twenty five tracked prompts a day, with fifty more prompts costing $60 on top. It includes an AI search site audit, which is the piece the pure trackers do not have: rather than only telling you that you are absent, it looks at whether your own pages are readable by the crawlers in the first place. If you are already paying Semrush for something else, this is the path of least resistance. If you are not, $99 a month to answer one question is a lot.

Profound, from $99 a month billed yearly

The most obviously venture funded product in the category and the one with the deepest feature set, priced from $99 a month on annual billing with a Growth tier at $399. It is built for marketing teams that have someone whose job includes this, and the honest read is that if nobody at your business has that job, most of what you are buying will not be opened. Its own positioning covers everything from bootstrapped startups to global enterprises, which is a claim worth reading sceptically in either direction.

Ahrefs Brand Radar, $398 a month

The expensive one, and the interesting one for anybody reading this blog. Brand Radar tracks brand mentions across ChatGPT, AI Overviews, Copilot, Gemini, Perplexity and Grok, and it also watches YouTube metadata and transcripts, Reddit visibility in Google results, and TikTok trends. $398 a month covers selected platforms and $699 covers all of them with custom prompts.

That combination is the only one on this page that treats AI visibility and social visibility as the same measurement problem, which is what they are becoming. It is also four hundred dollars a month, so this is a tool for an agency running it across twenty clients rather than for a cafe.

Peec AI, price on application

Four tiers, annual billing, six models covered from the Starter plan, and no public prices as of the day we checked. The product looks capable and European, which some readers will care about for data reasons. We are not going to guess at a number, and a vendor choosing not to publish one is itself a signal about who the tool is priced for.

What none of them can tell you

Every tool here works the same way underneath. It types prompts into assistants, reads the answers, and counts. That is a perfectly reasonable thing to do and it is also the whole method, which has two consequences nobody's marketing page leads with.

• It is a sample, not a census. The assistant does not answer identically twice, and a tool tracking fifteen prompts is looking through a keyhole. A change in your score between two weeks may be your work or may be the weather.
• It cannot see why. There is no view into what a model learned during training, and OpenAI's own bot documentation describes crawlers with different jobs, one of which is not a crawler at all. Whether an assistant names you because it read your site last week or because it absorbed something about you a year ago is not a question any dashboard can answer, and the ones implying otherwise are selling inference as measurement.
• It measures mention, not consequence. Being named in an answer nobody acts on and being named in one that sends a booking look identical from inside these tools.

The twenty prompt spreadsheet

Here is the method we actually run for customers, in full, so that nobody has to take our word for whether the paid tools are worth it. It costs nothing except an hour, and it is the same technique the $400 products automate.

• Write down twenty questions a customer would ask an assistant before choosing a business like yours. Not questions about you. Questions about their problem: "best pilates studio in Kosice for back pain", "is it worth getting a survey on a 1930s house", "who repairs ceramic sinks near me".
• Put them in a spreadsheet, one per row, with a column for each assistant you care about. ChatGPT and Gemini is enough to start.
• Ask all twenty, in a fresh chat each time, with no memory of you. Log whether you were named, and which businesses were named instead.
• Add a column for where the assistant said it got the answer, when it says. That column is your actual to do list.
• Repeat monthly. Twenty minutes once you have the sheet.

The competitor column is the part that earns the hour. You will learn, usually uncomfortably, that the same three businesses come up repeatedly, and then you go and look at what is written about them in public that is not written about you. In almost every case we have run this for, the answer was reviews, a local directory kept current, and somebody having written about them on a site they did not own. None of that is fast, and none of it is a subscription.

Where social media actually fits

This is the section where our own interest is largest, so we will keep it short and unenthusiastic. We sell a tool that publishes social content. Social posts are not, by themselves, a strong route into an AI assistant's answer, and anybody telling you that posting three times a week will get you named by ChatGPT is selling something.

What is true is narrower. Public social content is increasingly ordinary indexed text: Instagram made public posts from professional accounts eligible for search engines in July 2025, and Brand Radar's decision to track YouTube transcripts and TikTok alongside AI engines is a vendor betting real money that these are one surface rather than two. A business that is described consistently across its site, its profiles and its video captions gives every one of these systems the same answer to copy, which is most of the argument for writing your brand voice down once rather than improvising it per platform. That is the mechanism, and it is a slow one.

When paying starts to make sense

Three conditions. If none of them describe you, run the free checker quarterly and spend the money on something else.

• You are tracking more than one brand. This is the clearest one. An agency or a group with several locations passes the threshold immediately.
• Somebody's job description contains this. A trend line nobody reads is a subscription, not a tool. The same test applies to everything in this category, and we have applied it to our own before: is AI social media worth it for a small business.
• You have already fixed the obvious things. If your website still does not say in plain text what you do and where, a tracker will document that at $99 a month. The fixes are here, and they are free.

The short version

• Run the free checker today. It answers the question you actually have.
• Build the twenty prompt sheet. An hour, and it tells you who is being named instead of you.
• If you want a trend line and you are one business, Otterly at $29 is the only entry price on this page aimed at you.
• If you are an agency, or your audience lives on video, Brand Radar is the only one measuring AI and social as one thing.
• Fix the source before you buy the dashboard. Almost every invisible business we have looked at was invisible for the same unglamorous reason.