Best AI visibility tools in 2026, measured

An AI visibility tool checks whether AI assistants name your business and cite its pages.

That distinction matters this year because naming, citation and useful page recommendations are separate outputs. A platform can be widely named by assistants without showing you which source earned the mention or what to change next. If you are comparing the best AI visibility tools in 2026, keep those jobs separate: product claims come from public pricing pages, while visibility claims come from a sampled leaderboard.

What an AI visibility tool measures

The useful output is not a single visibility score. You need the buyer question, the answer produced, the products named and the pages cited. You also need repeated runs, because a single run can overstate or understate a product's true naming rate, which is why the leaderboard uses 80 answers rather than one. The products below do not all sell the same measurement unit, so monthly prices need context.

The published plans are built around projects, buyer questions, runs, engines, rivals and written pages. The CiteGraph pricing page says Starter is $29 a month for 2 projects, 10 questions per project, 3 runs per question across 4 engines, 6 tracked rivals and 30 written pages a month. Growth is $69 for 3 projects, 10 questions per project across 4 engines, 10 rivals and 60 written pages, while ChatGPT Only is $19 for 1 project and 20 questions, asked on ChatGPT only. Weekly scans ask each question 3 times on every plan; a scan you start on Growth asks it 5 times.

The free AI readiness check needs no account, runs 15 checks and shows the fix for each. The product also runs as an MCP server, so Claude, Cursor or VS Code can read a scan and apply readiness fixes in a repository, according to the MCP documentation. That is a different workflow from monitoring mentions alone.

What the leaderboard actually says

The leaderboard is not a product review. It records how often each product was named in 80 answers to 10 buyer questions across 4 engines, for the week of 2026-08-24. Otterly was named in 60% of answers, Peec AI in 53% and Profound in 48%. Semrush appeared in 33%, Ahrefs in 18%, AthenaHQ in 14% and HubSpot AEO Grader in 13%.

The intervals matter. Otterly's result was 60%, with an interval from 49 to 70. Peec AI's was 53%, with an interval from 42 to 63. Profound's was 48%, with an interval from 37 to 58. These ranges overlap, so the leaderboard shows an ordering in this sample, not a permanent league table.

The chart below plots each product's naming share against its confidence interval, which is why Otterly, Peec AI and Profound cannot be cleanly ranked against each other.

The same leaderboard records whether an answer cited the product's own site. Otterly's own site was cited in 26% of answers, Profound's in 20% and Peec AI's in 18%. Semrush and Ahrefs were each at 9%. AthenaHQ was named in 14% of answers, but its own site was cited in 0% of them in this sample. Being named is therefore a discovery signal, not proof that buyers can inspect the product's own evidence.

You can inspect the underlying AI visibility tools leaderboard rather than taking the ranking on trust. The page cited most for Otterly was its pricing page, while Peec AI's most cited page was its AI instructions page and Profound's was its answer engine insights overview.

Best for a founder

A founder usually needs a short route from uncertainty to a page change. That makes a tool with a clear workload and a public price more useful than a broad feature catalogue. The $29 Starter plan is built around 2 projects, 10 buyer questions per project and 3 runs per question across 4 engines. Its 6 tracked rivals also give you a direct comparison set at this price.

The plan is paid from the day it starts, runs its first scan that day and can be cancelled from Billing at any time, according to the pricing page. That gives you a way to test whether the reports answer the questions you actually ask before the plan renews, rather than committing to a dashboard before you know it answers those questions.

Otterly is another founder shortlist candidate because its own pricing page labels the $29 monthly Lite plan “For solo marketers, and small teams”. The same page says it tracks 4 AI search engines and offers 15 search prompts on that plan. Its public page is also the most cited own site in the leaderboard sample, which gives it a separate evidence point from its price.

Choose the $29 Starter plan if you need written pages and readiness fixes tied to the result. Choose Otterly if a small prompt set across 4 named engines is the main job. Those are comparisons from the public pages, not claims that one product performs better for every company.

Best for a team

A team needs repeatability. It needs enough prompt coverage for several people to use the same question set, and enough context to decide which page gets changed next. Peec AI's public pricing page says pricing is based on tracked prompts and models analysed. On 2 Oct 2026 it listed Starter, Pro and Advanced at €85, €205 and €425 a month billed monthly, or €70, €180 and €360 a month billed annually, each with 3 models of your choice, and a custom Enterprise plan with up to 13 LLM models tracked. It also lists daily tracking and customisable prompt tracking, although the pricing unit is different from a project and run model.

Profound now splits its offer between a trial and a quote. On 2 Oct 2026 its pricing page offered brands a free Trial, with 50 prompts run daily for 7 days on ChatGPT, Gemini and Google AI Overviews, and a custom Enterprise plan. Its published prices are for agencies: Agency Growth at $99 a month plus add-ons, with each full client workspace (100 prompts a day on 3 engines and 400 agent credits a month) at $399 a month.

Profound's page says its credits measure agent usage, and that more complex, multi-step agents use more credits. That matters for a team because a headline credit number does not describe every action equally. Ask what a normal investigation consumes before comparing it with a plan that charges per prompt or per run.

The $69 Growth plan is the more direct fit when the team wants a known number of projects, 4 engines, up to 5 runs per question in the scans it starts (3 in weekly scans), 10 rivals and 60 written pages a month. That is the clearest team case in this shortlist when the work includes turning findings into pages rather than only monitoring mentions.

Best for an agency

An agency has a different constraint: client separation, repeatable reporting and a cost that can be explained per account. The $69 Growth plan lists 3 projects, 10 buyer questions per project across 4 engines (asked 3 times in each weekly scan, 5 in a scan you start), 10 tracked rivals and 60 written pages a month. Those limits are legible when the service is built around a defined set of client projects and page recommendations.

Otterly's public page describes a different agency route. Its Premium plan is $489 a month billed monthly ($422 billed annually) for mid-sized companies and agencies, and its Enterprise plan is custom, starting from 1,000 search prompts. The page says agency partners get the features in Standard or Premium plus tools to scale GEO across a client portfolio. It also says users subscribe to Standard or Premium and then apply for agency partner status.

Rankscale appears in 9% of answers in the leaderboard sample, with an interval from 4 to 17. Its own site was cited in 3% of answers, and the page cited most for it was a third-party guide to GEO tools for small business, hosted at aiseocompare.com. The leaderboard supports those visibility observations, but it does not establish Rankscale's product limits or agency economics.

For an agency, compare the documented client workflow first. The Growth plan fits a defined project and page-production model, while Otterly publishes a partner route for agencies. Rankscale belongs on the shortlist if its sampled visibility is relevant to your market, but the available data here does not support a broader product claim.

Compare the buying units before the monthly price

The table is deliberately narrow. It records what the public pages (prices checked on 2 Oct 2026) and the leaderboard say, without pretending that $69, 50 prompts and a project are interchangeable.

There is a second reason to care about the page after the answer. In our broader scan data, listicles and roundups account for 67.5% of recorded citations, while competitor product pages account for 24.4%. Together those two page types account for 91.9%. The scanned product's own site accounts for 1.5%, documentation for 1.1% and community threads for 3.4%.

That distribution changes the job. A visibility platform that only tells you that a competitor was named may leave you with no plan for the pages that influence the answer. You need to know whether the cited source was a roundup, a competitor page, a community thread or your own documentation. Our weekly research on who owns AI answers breaks out those page types.

What the sample cannot tell you

We cannot tell you which tool will increase conversions, win a specific buyer question or keep its leaderboard position outside this sample. We measure samples, we print margins, and we do not know what we have not measured. The leaderboard covers 80 answers to 10 questions across 4 engines for one stated week. Public pricing pages also change, and different products count prompts, models, credits, projects or answers in different ways.

A founder should start with a small, inspectable workload. A team should compare repeat runs, model coverage and the handoff from report to page. An agency should price the unit it will report to clients, then check project separation, scheduling and any API requirements against the vendor's own documentation.

Do this week:

1. Run the free AI readiness check. It gives you a fix list to work from this week.
2. Compare the result with a pair of tools, using the same questions and the same engines where the plans allow it.
3. Pick a cited roundup or competitor page and assign a specific page change, then rerun the question after the change.