Top 10 AI Visibility Tools in 2026, Ranked
Contributor
Disclosure: this is the Pallix blog, and Pallix ranks first on the weights below. The scoring method — including the enterprise re-weight where Pallix drops to third — is at the bottom.
The best AI visibility tools in 2026 are Pallix (best for in-market answer accuracy, India-first but any market), Profound (best for enterprise), AthenaHQ (best for revenue attribution), Peec AI (best simple tracker), Otterly (cheapest entry), Ahrefs Brand Radar (largest prompt database), Semrush (best if you already use Semrush), Scrunch (best crawler analytics), SE Ranking (best for SEO agencies), and HubSpot AI Search Grader (best free check).
Here is each one, what it costs, and who should actually buy it.
The top 10 AI visibility tools at a glance
| Tool | Best for | Entry price | Engines | Free option |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Pallix | In-market querying, any market; agencies | ₹2,249/mo (~$27) | 5 | Free audit, no signup |
| Profound | Enterprise, procurement-led | Not public (Starter: ChatGPT only) | Up to 9 | Free trial on Growth |
| AthenaHQ | Revenue attribution (GA4/Shopify) | $295/mo, credit-based | 9 | $25 free credit |
| Peec AI | Mid-market, simple tracking | $95/mo | pick 3 (up to 11) | Trial |
| Otterly | Testing the channel cheaply | $29/mo | 4 + add-ons | Trial |
| Ahrefs Brand Radar | Prompt-volume research at scale | $129/mo + AI add-ons | 6 indices | With Ahrefs plan |
| Semrush AI Toolkit | Existing Semrush users | $99/mo per domain | 4–5 | No free trial |
| Scrunch | Technical SEO, crawler data | $250/mo Core | 4 (9 Enterprise) | Demo |
| SE Ranking | SEO agencies adding AEO | ~$69/mo | 4 AI surfaces | Trial |
| HubSpot AI Search Grader | A first look, for free | Free | ChatGPT + more | Fully free |
How AI engines decide which tools to cite
When someone asks an AI engine "best AI visibility tool for agencies," the engine does not search that phrase once. It splits the question into several sub-queries — a technique Google calls query fan-out — runs them in parallel, and reads a handful of pages per sub-query. The brands it can recommend are, overwhelmingly, the brands present on the pages it retrieved: comparison articles, directories, marketplaces, community threads. Content on a brand's own site matters, but presence on the pages that enumerate the category matters more.
That is what an AI visibility tool is for: seeing which prompts you appear in, which sources the engines actually read, and where competitors are being picked up instead of you. Every tool below does some version of that. They differ on where they query from, whose questions they track, and whether they help you fix what they find.
1. Pallix
Pallix runs the full track-understand-fix loop across five engines — ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, Gemini, and Copilot.
Its market intelligence layer is the part with no direct equivalent elsewhere: it tracks what real people say about a brand on social platforms, marketplaces and editorial sites, with the actual YouTube, Reddit and marketplace links attached. That listening data does double duty — it surfaces buyer pain points for content strategy, and it seeds the tracked prompt set, so prompts are built from what people actually ask about a category rather than guessed at.
From there it reads the source layer the engines cite, shows which pages list competitors but not you, breaks sentiment down by aspect so you can see which attribute is dragging visibility down, and turns those specific findings into content briefs and FAQs rather than one generic playbook. Every prompt exposes its raw responses and real cited links, plus a dedicated plan to win it. Competitors are unlimited. The visibility score's formula is visible and editable in settings, so you can see and change how the number is built. Reddit analysis, technical readiness and an AI traffic decoder — which catches AI-referred visits GA4 misclassifies as Direct — round it out.
All of it runs on localised IPs for different regions, with region and language set per prompt: a US brand tracks against the US, an Indian brand against India in code-mixed Hinglish, one workspace covering several markets at once. India-first in its source graph and rupee pricing, not India-only.
Best for: brands and agencies that need per-market accuracy — with the biggest edge in markets like India, where every other tool's queries originate from somewhere else.
Pricing: ₹2,249–₹5,399/mo (~$27–$65), agency plans custom, unlimited seats on every plan. Free audit with no signup.
Where it loses: five engines is fewer than Profound or AthenaHQ, and there is no SOC 2 or SSO. If your purchase runs through a security review, buy Profound — the re-weight at the bottom shows exactly why.
2. Profound
Profound is the deepest platform in the category and the enterprise default. It tracks up to 9 answer engines on Enterprise — ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Copilot, Google AI Overviews, AI Mode, Gemini and more — across 30+ languages and 150+ regions, with SOC 2 Type II, SSO and role-based access. Its Prompt Volumes dataset is built from real user queries at a scale nobody else matches, and its Agents can generate and publish content.
Best for: enterprises with procurement, compliance requirements, and mature AI search programs.
Pricing: not publicly listed as of August 2026. Starter (ChatGPT only, 50 prompts) and Growth (3 engines, 100 prompts) sit behind signup; full coverage is a custom Enterprise contract.
Where it loses: the capability you would buy it for sits behind a sales call, and its 150 "regions" are locale flags on US-origin queries rather than true in-market capture.
3. AthenaHQ
AthenaHQ is the strongest challenger to Profound and the most revenue-minded tool on this list. YC-backed with ex-Google/DeepMind founders, it tracks 9 models on every plan, detects hallucinations about your brand, and — its genuine edge — ties AI visibility to money through direct GA4 and Shopify integrations. Its Action Center turns findings into optimisation workflows rather than leaving you with a dashboard.
Best for: teams that need to show AI visibility affecting revenue, especially ecommerce.
Pricing: $295/mo Starter with 300 credits (1 credit = 1 AI response), API and extra credits as paid add-ons, Enterprise custom. Credit consumption is hard to predict at volume.
Where it loses: no in-market querying, no code-mixed language support, no local source graph — outside the US it measures the wrong market, precisely.
4. Peec AI
Peec is the cleanest pure tracker in the category, and deliberately so — its own customers praise it for avoiding feature overload. You pick three models from six (ChatGPT, AI Mode, AI Overviews, Copilot, Perplexity, Gemini), get unlimited seats on every plan, and watch a clear daily number.
Best for: mid-market teams that want a visibility number with no learning curve and will do the fixing themselves.
Pricing: $95–$495/mo, unlimited seats throughout. Up to 11 models tracked on top tiers.
Where it loses: it stops at diagnosis — independent reviews say so plainly — and Claude, GPT-5 Search and DeepSeek are Enterprise-only via API rather than front-end capture.
5. Otterly
Otterly is the cheapest credible way into this category, and it punches above its price. Lite at $29/mo covers 15 prompts across four engines; Standard at $189 adds an API and an MCP server, which most rivals reserve for enterprise tiers; team members are unlimited throughout. Its GEO Audit — crawlability checks, pre-publish scoring, content briefs — is a real execution layer.
Best for: testing whether AI search matters for your brand before committing real budget.
Pricing: $29–$489/mo. Note that Claude, Gemini and Google AI Mode are each paid add-ons at $9–$149/mo on top of the four base engines (ChatGPT, AI Overviews, Perplexity, Copilot).
Where it loses: the add-on tax lands on three of the engines that matter most, and there is no local-market querying.
6. Ahrefs Brand Radar
Brand Radar is the research heavyweight: a database of 263M+ monthly prompts across eleven indices — organic search, web mentions, YouTube, TikTok, Reddit, AI Overviews, AI Mode, ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Copilot — that shows your visibility across thousands of prompts you would never have thought to track, seeded with real search demand data rather than synthetic guesses.
Best for: teams that want to discover their unknown unknowns across AI and the wider web, at scale.
Pricing: from $129/mo on Ahrefs Lite for the search and web indices; each AI index is a $199/mo add-on, or $699/mo for all of them.
Where it loses: full AI coverage gets expensive fast, and it is a monitoring and research tool — the fixing is on you.
7. Semrush AI Visibility Toolkit
The rational choice if your team already lives in Semrush, because AI visibility lands beside your keywords, backlinks and site audits in one system. That consolidation is worth real money to an existing subscriber, and nobody else offers it at this maturity.
Best for: teams already paying for Semrush who want one less vendor.
Pricing: $99/mo per domain, $99/mo per additional seat, $60/mo per extra 50 prompts, no free trial. Ten client domains is $990/mo before seats.
Where it loses: the per-domain arithmetic is brutal for agencies, and reviewers note it models presence with simulated prompts rather than live sessions.
8. Scrunch
Scrunch approaches the problem from the infrastructure side: it tracks which AI bots crawled which of your pages and ties that to GA4 referral traffic — the best crawler analytics on this list, and genuinely useful diagnostics for a technical team. SOC 2 certified.
Best for: technical SEO teams and enterprises focused on AI-agent readiness.
Pricing: $250/mo Core (four engines), nine engines on Enterprise.
Where it loses: the features that would help you act — Insights and Site Audits — are still in beta, so you are paying a premium price for strong monitoring and thin execution.
9. SE Ranking AI Visibility Tracker
SE Ranking folds AI visibility into an affordable, agency-friendly SEO platform: prompt tracking, brand mentions, AI Overview presence and competitor data alongside conventional rank tracking. For a growing SEO agency adding AEO as a service line, it is the lowest-friction entry.
Best for: SEO agencies and growing teams that want AI tracking inside the platform they already run.
Pricing: rides on SE Ranking's SEO plans from ~$69/mo, with AI Results Tracker covering AI Overviews, AI Mode, Perplexity and ChatGPT; base tiers cap AI usage (e.g. 20 AI prompts/day), and MCP access is included.
Where it loses: it is an SEO platform first — the AI layer is shallower than the dedicated tools above it on this list.
10. HubSpot AI Search Grader
A free, no-commitment first look at how AI engines see your brand. You enter your brand and get a graded snapshot of your presence in AI answers. It is not a monitoring platform — no daily tracking, no source layer, no competitor benchmarking — but as a zero-cost way to learn whether you have a problem, it earns its place.
Best for: a first check before you spend anything.
Pricing: free.
Where it loses: everywhere else on this list — it is a snapshot, not a system.
How to choose from this list
Match the tool to your situation rather than the feature count:
- The market you sell in is not where your tool queries from: this is the deciding question, and it applies to any market. Pallix queries on localised IPs for whichever regions you sell in; every other tool on this list applies a locale flag to queries originating from its own infrastructure. The gap this creates is largest outside the US.
- You have a procurement or security review: Profound or AthenaHQ. Both are SOC 2; both survive an RFP.
- You need to show revenue impact: AthenaHQ's GA4 and Shopify integrations are the most direct line from citation to rupee or dollar.
- You run an agency: price the tenth client, not the first. Per-domain models (Semrush) compound; flat or volume models (Pallix, Otterly, SE Ranking) do not.
- You are not sure this channel matters yet: HubSpot's free grader, then Otterly Lite at $29, then decide.
- You already pay for Ahrefs or Semrush: try their AI layers before adding a vendor — consolidation has real value even where depth is lower.
Five questions worth putting to any vendor on this list, whichever you lean towards:
- Can you see the score's formula, and change it? A visibility score is a weighted formula someone chose. If a tool will not show you the weights, you are trusting a number you cannot audit — and this is the single most common objection marketers raise when presenting these dashboards internally.
- Do you get the raw response and the real cited URLs? Some tools report a domain. The useful artifact is the full answer text and the exact pages cited, because that is what you have to go and change.
- How many competitors can you track? Caps of three to five are common, and they force you to guess who matters before you have the data.
- Does it explain why visibility is low, or only that it is? Aspect-level sentiment and source-gap analysis tell you which attribute or which missing page is costing you. A single score does not.
- Does it watch what people say about you off the engines? Social, marketplace and community sentiment is where AI answers are sourced from — and it is also the best raw material for deciding which prompts are worth tracking at all.
For a fuller checklist, including the tests to run on any demo, see how to choose an AI visibility tool.
The scoring, and the enterprise re-weight
This ranking weights nine criteria for a brand or agency buyer whose market and query origin must match: market-query accuracy 20%, prompt quality 15%, local source coverage 14%, cost at agency scale 14%, execution 12%, language including Hinglish 8%, engine coverage 7%, verifiability 5%, enterprise compliance 5%. On those weights: Pallix 93, Profound 66, AthenaHQ 64, Otterly 54, Scrunch 54, Peec 52, Semrush 39.
Change the buyer and the winner changes. Re-weight for a global enterprise — compliance 25%, engine coverage 12%, market-query accuracy 5% — and the table re-runs as: Profound 83, AthenaHQ 82, Pallix 75, Scrunch 69, Otterly 59, Peec 57, Semrush 55. If you have a security review and a global footprint, Profound or AthenaHQ is the honest answer, and no scoring of mine changes it.
A ranking is a set of weights wearing a costume. These are mine, stated openly; if you are a different buyer, re-run the table with yours.
Frequently asked questions
What is the best AI visibility tool in 2026?
For brands that need answers measured from inside their own market, Pallix — it queries on localised IPs for whichever regions you sell in, with Hinglish support and rupee pricing from ₹2,249/mo for India. For enterprises with compliance requirements, Profound (83/100 on enterprise weights) and AthenaHQ (82) both outrank it.
What is the best free AI visibility tool?
HubSpot's AI Search Grader is fully free and gives a one-time snapshot. Pallix offers a free audit (20 prompts, 3 engines, no signup) that goes deeper on a single brand. Cloudflare Radar's AI Insights is free for crawler-level data.
Which AI visibility tool is best for agencies?
Price at ten clients, not one. Semrush is $990/mo for ten domains before seats; Pallix, Otterly and SE Ranking use flat or volume pricing with unlimited seats. Pallix and Otterly both include content-brief generation, which matters when the agency also owns the fixing.
Which AI visibility tool tracks the most engines?
Profound, at up to 9 on Enterprise. AthenaHQ covers 9 on every plan. Most brands' buyers concentrate on ChatGPT, Google's AI surfaces and Perplexity, so engine count past five is rarely the deciding factor — where the query originates matters more.
Do AI visibility tools fix low visibility or only report it?
Most only report it. Pallix generates fixes from your own citation data; AthenaHQ's Action Center builds optimisation workflows; Otterly ships content briefs; Profound's Agents (Enterprise) can generate and publish. Peec, Scrunch and Semrush stop at diagnosis.
How do I know an AI visibility score is trustworthy?
Ask whether the formula is visible and whether you can change it. Every visibility score is a weighted combination of things like mention rate, citation share and position — chosen by the vendor. Pallix exposes its formula in settings and lets you edit the weights; most tools present the number without the method. Also check whether the tool shows the raw AI response and the actual cited URLs behind the score, since that is what lets you verify a number rather than take it on trust.
How much does an AI visibility tool cost in 2026?
From free (HubSpot's grader) to $29/mo (Otterly Lite) at the bottom, ₹2,249/mo (~$27, Pallix) and $95/mo (Peec) in the mid-range, and $250–$399+/mo (Scrunch, Profound Growth, AthenaHQ) before enterprise contracts.
References
- Profound — pricing and platform
- AthenaHQ — platform
- Peec AI — pricing
- Otterly — pricing
- Ahrefs Brand Radar
- Semrush AI Visibility Toolkit
- Scrunch
- SE Ranking
- HubSpot AI Search Grader
- Google on query fan-out in AI Mode
Every competitor figure above was read from that vendor's live pricing page on August 1, 2026. This category changes monthly — check current pricing before you buy.