Tools

The best AI visibility tools in 2026, honestly compared

By Arnav Mukherjee, founder of TofuBofu · July 7, 2026

I build one of these tools, so you should read this with that in mind. But I would rather give you an honest map than a sales pitch, partly because a dishonest one is easy to see through, and partly because the honest version is more useful to you and, frankly, better for us. When I ran our own product on our own site early on, it scored us near zero and named a competitor as the leader. I am not going to pretend the category is simpler or that we are the answer to every version of this question. We are not.

So here is the real landscape, organized the way that actually helps you choose: not by a feature checklist, but by the job you need done. The most important line runs between tools that only measure and tools that also help you fix.

Every tool, priced and compared

Before the map, the numbers. Vendor pricing in this category drifts constantly and most comparison posts quote figures nobody rechecked, so I opened all nine pricing pages on 5 August 2026 and read them, then re-read Profound, Peec and Otterly on 28 August 2026 when Profound started publishing a price. The column worth studying is the last one, because it is the one buyers discover after paying.

Read from each vendor's own pricing page on 5 August 2026, with the Profound, Peec and Otterly rows re-read on 28 August 2026. Ordered by cheapest paid tier, not by preference; TofuBofu is ours and is highlighted so you know which one to discount. TofuBofu and AthenaHQ also have free plans. Prompts, credits and checks are different units, so compare the job rather than the number. Full working in the Otterly alternatives breakdown.

The landscape by job to be done

Enterprise monitoring. Profound is the category leader here. It has deep analytics and the enterprise polish that comes with a 96 million dollar Series C at a 1 billion dollar valuation in February 2026, led by Lightspeed, bringing total funding to 155 million. Two things the funding headline does not tell you: there is no public pricing, and the entry Starter tier tracks ChatGPT only. You need Enterprise for the full nine engines. If you are a large brand with a marketing team and a procurement process, this is the serious end.

Mid-market monitoring. Otterly's Lite plan is 29 dollars a month for 15 prompts across four engines, with Claude, Gemini and Google AI Mode sold as add-ons rather than included. Peec is the cleanest European option, from 80 dollars for 50 prompts, though paid tiers let you pick only three models. Scrunch sits higher at 250 dollars for 125 prompts and is the strongest on how AI crawlers actually consume your site. The AI features inside Semrush and Ahrefs are solid trackers if you already pay for those platforms. All of these are good at showing you where you stand.

Free snapshot. HubSpot's AEO Grader is free, needs no account, and scores how AI perceives your brand across several dimensions in one shot. It is the easiest possible starting point, and a genuinely good way to see whether this even matters for you before spending anything.

Measure and fix. This is the thin part of the market, and where we built TofuBofu, aimed at B2B founders. Almost everything above tells you the score. Very little, especially below about 100 dollars a month, turns the score into a prioritized fix list, drafts the content and schema to act on, publishes it to your CMS, and re-scans to show whether the answer changed. AthenaHQ has moved furthest in this direction among the monitors. That is the gap we chose to fill, which is a claim you should test against the others rather than take on faith.

Two things in that table deserve more attention than the prices do. Five of the nine tools treat Claude as an add-on, an Enterprise feature, or do not offer it at all, so check the engine list before the price if your buyers use it. AthenaHQ and TofuBofu are the two that include it on a free plan. And most tools in this category lead with a single blended visibility score, which matters more than it sounds: our own research across five metros found 85 percent of firms were named by exactly one engine out of four, so an average is close to meaningless at the local level. Whichever tool you pick, ask to see per-engine numbers before you pay.

Which engines each tool actually covers at its entry price

Every vendor publishes an engine list. Almost none of them makes clear which engines you get at the price you are about to pay, versus which arrive on a higher tier or as a paid add-on. This is the table I wanted when we were choosing what to build, and I could not find it anywhere, so here it is. It reads at the entry tier, because that is the tier most readers will actually buy.

Read from each vendor's own pricing page on 5 August 2026, with the Profound, Peec and Otterly rows re-read on 28 August 2026, at the entry tier named. "Higher tier" means the engine exists but costs more, either as an add-on or on an upper plan. Peec lets Starter customers pick any three of the six engines it lists. Profound's Starter tier is ChatGPT only. Note our own honest gap: TofuBofu covers Google AI Mode and not AI Overviews, because Google renders no AI Overview on most commercial vendor queries, which is the moment we care about.

The Claude column is the one worth staring at. Three of the nine do not offer it at any price, two sell it as an upgrade, and one lets you have it only if you spend one of three slots on it. If your buyers use Claude, that column just eliminated most of this list for you, and you would not have learned it from any pricing page headline.

What none of these tools can do yet, including ours

Every vendor on this page, us included, will show you a chart that goes up. Four things none of us can honestly give you, which is worth knowing before you judge any of these products by their demo.

A trustworthy revenue attribution number. AI referral tracking structurally undercounts, because a large share of AI answers produce no click at all. The buyer reads that you are credible, then arrives days later by typing your name into Google or going direct. That visit attributes to branded search or direct traffic, not to the AI answer that caused it. Nobody in this category runs holdout tests, so anyone handing you a confident ROI figure is modelling, not measuring.

A reliable answer to why a competitor won. Every tool can tell you a competitor was named and you were not. None can tell you which specific source caused it, because the engines do not expose that reasoning and citation lists are incomplete. What you get is a plausible story assembled after the fact. Ours included, which is why we show you the verbatim answers rather than only our interpretation of them.

Stability you can trust month to month. These are moving targets. Model updates change answers under you, and the variance is larger than most dashboards admit. Our own research across five metros found 85 percent of firms were named by exactly one engine out of four, with none named by all four, so a single reading on a single day is not a measurement. Any tool that reports one number without showing you the spread is flattering you.

The work itself, in most cases. This is the honest version of the category's biggest gap. Measuring is now close to a commodity, and at 50 dollars a month HubSpot proves it. The expensive, slow part has always been writing the pages, fixing the schema and earning the third-party mentions. Most of these tools hand that back to you, and it is worth pricing the person who will do it alongside the tool that finds it.

How to run a two-week trial that tells you something

Most trials of these tools get wasted on admiring the dashboard. Five things to do instead, in order, and they work on any product on this list.

How to actually choose

An earlier version of this post told you to ignore the engine-count arms race, on the grounds that every serious tool now covers the major engines. Building the table above disproved that, so I have corrected it. Coverage is not a solved problem and it is not marketing noise: it is the first thing to check, because the gaps are hidden one click below the pricing page. After that, one question decides the rest: is my bottleneck seeing the data, or doing the work?

If you have a marketing team that will act on a dashboard, a good monitor is all you need, and Profound, Otterly, or your existing SEO tool's AI features will serve you well. If you are a founder without that team, more data is not your problem. You already suspect you are invisible. The bottleneck is turning that into shipped fixes, and that is a different kind of tool. Buy for your bottleneck, not for the longest feature list.

What to do