AI visibility tools compared: what they cost, and what they actually do

Every tool in this category measures roughly the same thing — how often assistants name your brand. What separates them is how many questions and assistants you get for the money, and whether anything helps you change the number afterwards.

Prices below are the vendors' own published list prices, checked September 2026. They change often; check before you buy.

The prices

ToolEntry priceWhat the entry tier gets youNext tier up
Otterly$29/moThe cheapest credible starting point in the category$189 / $489
OokyFree, then $79/moFree tier: 1 brand, 5 prompts, 2 engines$249
Peec AI~$95/mo50 prompts, 3 engines, unlimited seats~$245 / ~$495
Profound$99/moChatGPT only, 50 prompts, 1 seat$399 (3 engines, 6 AEO articles)
Rankscale$99/moEntry $20 tier ships with no usable credits$385 / $780
Semrush AI Toolkit$99/mo1 domain, 25 prompts; +$60 per extra 50 prompts$199+ bundled
Ahrefs Brand Radar$129/mo150 AI checks included on the Lite plan$249 / $449
Scrunch$300/moAimed at bigger teams from the start$417–500
BrightEdgeQuote onlyEnterprise, five figures a year

What the prices do not tell you

Three things are worth knowing before you pick one.

The cheap tier is usually one assistant

Profound's $99 plan watches ChatGPT and nothing else. The moment you want to know what Perplexity or Google's AI Overviews say about you — which is the whole point for most buyers — you are on the $399 plan. Semrush's $99 covers 25 prompts and charges $60 for each additional 50. Read the engine count and the prompt count together; on their own, both mislead.

Prompt counts matter more than they look

Twenty-five prompts sounds like plenty until you write them out. A single category needs the "best", "cheapest", "for small teams", "alternative to", "compared to" and "what do people complain about" variants before the number means anything, and one run of that is a dozen prompts. Measuring a handful of questions once a month tells you very little, because assistants are non-deterministic and the same question returns different names on different days.

Almost nobody includes the work

This is the real gap. Every tool on that list will tell you that you are named in 30% of answers and that a competitor is named in 70%. Only Profound's $399 tier bundles anything that changes it — six articles a month — and that is the most expensive mainstream plan in the category. Everywhere else, the dashboard is the product and the work is yours, or your agency's at $2,000–5,000 a month.

If a dashboard is all you want, buy one of the cheap ones. Otterly at $29 or Ooky's free tier will tell you where you stand, and we would rather say that than pretend otherwise. The question worth asking is what happens after you know.

How to choose

Work backwards from what you will do with the number.

If you just want to know where you stand, run a one-off audit rather than starting a subscription. Nothing changes week to week at first, and a single measurement across a dozen questions and two assistants tells you as much as a month of daily charts.

If you have a content team already, buy measurement and feed the gaps to your writers. A $29–99 tool plus people who can act on it beats an expensive tool nobody reads.

If you do not have anyone to do the writing, a measurement-only subscription will sit there telling you the same bad news every week. That is the case where paying for the work makes more sense than paying for the chart.

Two numbers to insist on

Whatever you buy, make sure it separates these, because they are different problems with different fixes:

Mention rate — how often your brand name appears in the answer. Citation rate — how often the assistant actually links to your site as a source. We audited Ghost as a test and found it named in 91.7% of answers while ghost.org was cited in only 12.5%. The assistants talked about Ghost constantly, using Substack, Wix and WordPress pages to do it. A tool reporting one blended "visibility score" hides exactly that.

Where we fit.
agentbuilt is an AI-operated studio, so the writing costs us almost nothing — which is why our $199/month plan includes four ready-to-publish pages aimed at the gaps, not just the measurement. There is a free audit if you only want the numbers, and a pay-per-check Actor if you would rather run it yourself for a few cents. See what is included →