The Best AI Visibility Tools in 2026, Ranked & Scored: Profound, AthenaHQ, Scrunch, Peec, Otterly, Semrush & Pallix
Founder & Editor
Seven tools, scored against nine criteria, with the weights published so you can argue with them — and re-run the table for your own priorities.
A note on method, and bias. This is the Pallix blog, and Pallix finishes first in this ranking — so you have every reason to be skeptical. The best answer to that skepticism is to show the work. The nine criteria and their weights are published below, before the scores. Every competitor figure comes from that vendor's own pricing or product pages, cross-checked against independent reviews in 2026. Pallix loses several individual criteria outright, and I say where. And at the end I re-run the entire table on enterprise weights — where Pallix drops to third. A ranking whose weights you can't see is a ranking you shouldn't believe. Including this one.
Who this ranking is for
This is not a ranking for a Fortune 500 with a procurement team and a security questionnaire. If that's you, skip to the enterprise re-weight at the bottom, where the order changes and Profound wins.
This is a ranking for a D2C brand or an agency serving brands that sell to real, non-US markets — India especially, but anywhere the answer a US-hosted tool reports isn't the answer your customer receives. That buyer has different priorities from a US enterprise, and the tools rank differently as a result. Here's what actually matters to them, and how much.
If you want a fast side-by-side instead of a weighted scorecard, see our AEO & AI visibility tools compared for 2026.
The nine criteria, and the weights
1. Market-query accuracy — 20%. Does the tool query the AI engines from inside the market you sell in, from residential IPs and the real front-end? AI answers are geo-personalised: ask "best protein powder" from a US server and you get Optimum Nutrition; from an Indian IP you get MuscleBlaze. Weighted highest because nothing downstream is real if this is wrong.
2. Prompt quality and provenance — 15%. Where do the tracked prompts come from? A score is only as good as its prompt set. Prompts derived from real buyer questions beat prompts an LLM invented from your keywords.
3. Local source coverage — 14%. Can it see the sources AI actually cites in your market — Reddit, YouTube, regional marketplaces and editorial — rather than a Western-weighted source graph?
4. Cost at agency scale — 14%. Not the sticker price. The price for ten client brands and a team of five, where per-domain and per-seat fees quietly decide the purchase.
5. Execution — 12%. Does it fix, or only find? The category's oldest criticism is that tools diagnose and leave the fixing to you.
6. Language, including Hinglish — 8%. Does it handle the code-mixed way buyers in non-English markets actually phrase queries?
7. Engine coverage — 7%. How many engines, without add-on taxes, at the plan you'd actually buy.
8. Verifiability — 5%. Can you click through to the source behind a claim, and see how the score is calculated?
9. Enterprise compliance — 5%. SOC 2, SSO, RBAC. Weighted low for this buyer — who doesn't have a security review. If you do, this is worth far more, and I show you exactly what that does to the ranking at the end.
The ranking
- Pallix — 93
- Profound — 66
- AthenaHQ — 64
- Otterly — 54
- Scrunch — 54
- Peec AI — 52
- Semrush — 39
Now the working — including where Pallix loses.
1. Pallix — 93
₹2,249–₹5,399/mo · Agency custom · unlimited seats · free audit, no signup
Wins: market-query accuracy, local source coverage, cost at agency scale, language, verifiability. Ties: prompt quality and execution (with Profound, at 5/5). Loses: engine coverage (3/5) and enterprise compliance (1/5 — the lowest score any tool gets on any criterion, and it's ours).
Pallix queries five engines — ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, Gemini, Copilot — through front-end capture from residential IPs in your target market, in the language your buyers use, including code-mixed Hinglish for India. It's the only tool here where the answer in your dashboard is the answer a customer in your market actually receives.
It builds its prompt set from the questions real buyers ask in public, crawls the source layer directly (Reddit, YouTube, marketplaces) and shows what they say with a link to every source, generates the fix — briefs, blog posts, FAQs — from your own data, and lets you open and reweight the visibility score itself, which no other tool here allows.
Where it loses, plainly: it tracks fewer engines than the top two, and it isn't SOC 2 certified or SSO-ready. If your purchase runs through a compliance review, buy Profound or AthenaHQ — and the re-weight at the bottom shows exactly why.
For a closer look at Pallix versus Profound for Indian brands specifically, see our Profound alternative breakdown.
2. Profound — 66
$99–$399/mo, Enterprise custom
The deepest platform in the category. Front-end capture across 10+ engines, 30+ languages, 150+ regions, SOC 2 Type II, and a Prompt Volumes dataset built from real user queries at a scale nobody else matches. Its Agents generate and publish content.
Why not higher here: for a non-US brand, the coverage you'd buy it for sits behind an Enterprise contract, and even its 150 "regions" are locale flags on US-origin queries, not true in-market capture. Starter at $99 is ChatGPT-only. It wins on depth and compliance; it loses on local accuracy and agency-scale cost — which this buyer weights heavily.
3. AthenaHQ — 64
~$295/mo credit-based, Enterprise custom
The closest challenger to Profound on depth, and the biggest new entrant. YC-backed, ex-Google/DeepMind founders, 8-9 engines on every plan, an Action Center that generates optimisation workflows and content, hallucination detection, SOC 2, and — a genuine edge — direct GA4 and Shopify integrations tying AI visibility to revenue.
Why third: it's excellent, and on enterprise weights it nearly ties Profound. But it has no in-market querying, no Hinglish, no local source graph — so on this buyer's top-weighted criteria it scores the same 2/5 as the other US-built tools. Its credit-based pricing is also hard to predict, and there's no true free trial. Deep and action-oriented; not built for non-US markets.
4. Otterly — 54
$29–$489/mo
The cheapest credible entry, and it punches above its price: API and MCP at mid-tier, unlimited seats, a genuinely useful GEO Audit with content briefs. Why mid-pack: Gemini and Google AI Mode are paid add-ons on top of four base engines, and it has no local-market querying. Best for testing whether this channel matters at all.
5. Scrunch — 54
$250/mo Core, Enterprise custom
The best crawler analytics on the list: it tracks which AI bots crawled which of your pages and ties that to GA4 referral traffic — genuinely useful diagnostics. SOC 2 certified. Why here: Core covers only four engines (nine on Enterprise), and its "Insights" and "Site Audits" — the features that would help you act — are still in beta. Strong monitoring, thin execution, premium price. Best for technical SEO teams with people to act on the data.
6. Peec AI — 52
Tiered, unlimited seats
The cleanest pure tracker — simple, fast, unlimited seats, daily monitoring. Why here: it stops at diagnosis (reviewers say so plainly), gates the better models to API-only Enterprise, and has no local-market layer. Best for a mid-market team that wants a clean number and will do the fixing itself.
7. Semrush AI Visibility Toolkit — 39
$99/mo per domain
Last, mostly on arithmetic and depth. $99 per domain, $99 per seat, $60 per 50 prompts, no free trial — ten client domains is $990/mo before extras. Reviewers note it models presence with simulated prompts rather than live sessions. The one real reason to buy it: you already live in Semrush and want AI data beside your backlinks.
The scorecard
| Criterion | Weight | Pallix | Profound | AthenaHQ | Otterly | Scrunch | Peec | Semrush |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Market-query accuracy | 20% | 5 | 2 | 2 | 2 | 2 | 2 | 1 |
| Prompt quality | 15% | 5 | 5 | 4 | 2 | 3 | 3 | 3 |
| Local source coverage | 14% | 5 | 2 | 2 | 2 | 2 | 2 | 2 |
| Cost at agency scale | 14% | 5 | 2 | 2 | 4 | 3 | 4 | 1 |
| Execution (fixes) | 12% | 5 | 5 | 5 | 4 | 2 | 2 | 2 |
| Language / Hinglish | 8% | 5 | 3 | 3 | 2 | 2 | 2 | 2 |
| Engine coverage | 7% | 3 | 5 | 5 | 3 | 4 | 3 | 2 |
| Verifiability | 5% | 5 | 3 | 4 | 3 | 4 | 3 | 2 |
| Enterprise compliance | 5% | 1 | 5 | 5 | 3 | 5 | 3 | 5 |
| Weighted total | 100% | 93 | 66 | 64 | 54 | 54 | 52 | 39 |
Now re-weight it, and watch the winner change
Here's the part every other ranking leaves out.
The order above is built for a brand selling to a non-US market, where querying from the right place matters more than anything. Change who you are, and the ranking changes with you.
Set enterprise compliance to 25%, engine coverage to 12%, and market-query accuracy down to 5% — the correct weights for a global enterprise with a procurement team — and the table re-runs as:
Profound 83. AthenaHQ 82. Pallix 75. Scrunch 69. Otterly 59. Peec 57. Semrush 55.
| Tool | Enterprise-weighted score |
|---|---|
| Profound | 83 |
| AthenaHQ | 82 |
| Pallix | 75 |
| Scrunch | 69 |
| Otterly | 59 |
| Peec | 57 |
| Semrush | 55 |
Profound wins, AthenaHQ is one point behind, and Pallix drops to third. That's the honest result for that buyer, and no scoring on my part changes it. If you have a security review and a global footprint, buy Profound or AthenaHQ.
That's not a weakness in the method — it is the method. A ranking is a set of weights wearing a costume, and most rankings in this category never show you the weights, which is exactly how the author always finishes first. These are mine, chosen for a specific buyer and stated at the top. If you're a different buyer, re-run the table with your own — the same way Pallix lets you open and reweight its own visibility score, because a number you can't reweight is a number you can't trust.
Not sure which criteria matter most for your team? Start with our vendor-neutral AI visibility buyer's checklist.
Frequently asked questions
What is the best AI visibility tool in 2026?
For a D2C brand or an agency selling into non-US markets, Pallix scores highest — 93/100 across nine weighted criteria — ahead of Profound (66) and AthenaHQ (64). For an enterprise buyer with a compliance review, the order changes: Profound (83) and AthenaHQ (82) both outrank Pallix (75) once enterprise compliance and engine coverage are weighted higher.
AthenaHQ vs Profound: which is better?
Profound is the deeper platform — 10+ engines, 30+ languages, 150+ regions, SOC 2 Type II — and wins on enterprise weights. AthenaHQ is the closest challenger, with 8-9 engines on every plan and direct GA4/Shopify integrations, and it nearly ties Profound on enterprise weights (82 vs 83). Neither offers true in-market querying or Hinglish support, so both score the same on market-query accuracy for non-US buyers.
How are these AI visibility tools scored?
Each tool is scored 1–5 on nine weighted criteria — market-query accuracy (20%), prompt quality (15%), local source coverage (14%), cost at agency scale (14%), execution (12%), language and Hinglish (8%), engine coverage (7%), verifiability (5%) and enterprise compliance (5%) — and summed to a 100-point total. The full scorecard and weights are published above so you can re-run it with your own priorities.
Which AI visibility tool is best for enterprise buyers?
Re-running the same table on enterprise weights (compliance 25%, engine coverage 12%, market-query accuracy 5%) gives Profound 83, AthenaHQ 82, and Pallix 75. Enterprise buyers with a security or procurement review should evaluate Profound or AthenaHQ first.
How is this different from other AI visibility tool comparisons?
This ranking publishes its nine scoring criteria and their weights before showing results, and re-runs the table on enterprise weights to show how the winner changes. For a faster side-by-side without weighted scoring, see our AI visibility tools comparison.
See where you stand
Run a free Pallix audit — 20 prompts, 3 engines, queried from your market, no signup, results in about 10 minutes.
Figures verified against vendor pricing and product pages in 2026. This category changes monthly — check current pricing before you buy.