Best AI Search Visibility (GEO) Tools for 2026
The 2026 field splits into three families. Dedicated trackers: AthenaHQ (free tier, 11 engines), Otterly.AI (lowest entry price), Peec AI (three models of your choice per plan), Profound (enterprise depth) and Scrunch (agent-ready pages). SEO suites with an AI module: Ahrefs Brand Radar, SE Visible and Semrush. AirOps and Writesonic go further and produce the content.
AI search visibility tools, also sold as GEO (generative engine optimization) or AEO (answer engine optimization) software, measure how a brand shows up when someone asks ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Copilot or Google's AI Overviews a question. They run a set of prompts on a schedule, read the answers, and report three things: whether the brand is mentioned, how it is described, and which pages the engine cited to get there. That last part matters most in practice, because the cited sources (a review site, a Reddit thread, a competitor's comparison page) are what a marketing team can actually act on.
The category barely existed in 2024. Specialists arrived first and raised quickly: Profound closed a $180M Series D in September 2026. The SEO suites followed with modules built on their keyword databases, and consolidation has started, with Adobe completing its acquisition of Semrush in April 2026 and Sitecore buying Scrunch in June. One caveat applies to every tool below. AI answers vary from one run to the next, so these products sample, and Semrush says so in its own documentation: "no platform can provide exact numbers on visibility". Read the scores as trends, not as measurements.
We assessed each tool on five criteria: (1) the AI engines it tracks, and which ones cost extra, (2) depth of analysis, meaning citations, sentiment and competitor benchmarking, (3) prompt demand data, that is whether the tool can say which questions people actually ask, (4) AI crawler analytics, the visits AI bots and agents make to your own site, and (5) what it does beyond reporting, from recommendations to content it writes and publishes. Assessments are based on each vendor's public product pages, pricing pages and documentation, read in October 2026. Prices are the vendors' published list prices at that date, in the currency the vendor displays; several vendors show different figures by region, so check before you budget. Pricing is described rather than scored. Tools are grouped by family (dedicated trackers, SEO suites with an AI module, content and action platforms) and listed alphabetically within each family; the order is not a ranking. Vendors can suggest an entry or a correction; entries are written and scored by Soft Atlas from public sources, and no placement is paid. Last updated October 2026.
| Tool | Engine coverage | Citations & sentiment | Prompt demand data | AI crawler analytics | Recommendations & content |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| AthenaHQ | Very strong | Strong | Standard | Limited | Strong |
| Otterly.AI | Strong | Strong | Limited | Standard | Standard |
| Peec AI | Strong | Strong | Standard | Strong | Standard |
| Profound | Very strong | Very strong | Very strong | Very strong | Strong |
| Scrunch | Strong | Strong | Standard | Very strong | Strong |
| Ahrefs Brand Radar | Strong | Standard | Very strong | Standard | Limited |
| SE Visible | Standard | Strong | Limited | Limited | Limited |
| Semrush AI Visibility Toolkit | Strong | Strong | Very strong | Limited | Standard |
| AirOps | Strong | Strong | Limited | Strong | Very strong |
| Writesonic | Standard | Standard | Standard | Strong | Strong |
NoLimitedStandardStrongVery strong
01AthenaHQ
AthenaHQ came out of Y Combinator's winter 2025 batch and is the youngest company in this guide. The product reaches further than tracking: alongside prompts, sources, sentiment and competitor benchmarking, it estimates prompt volumes, checks whether AI crawlers can read the site, and generates content it can publish to WordPress, Webflow, Contentful, Sanity, Framer, Wix or Shopify.
Two choices set it apart. The free Essential plan (300 credits, five engines) is a real way to look around before talking to anyone. And the Starter plan, $295 a month or $245 billed annually, covers 11 engines, including Claude, Grok, DeepSeek and Mistral, where most competitors keep the long tail for enterprise contracts. The catch is the unit: AthenaHQ bills by AI response, not by prompt. Starter's 3,600 monthly credits are 3,600 answers collected, which is about eleven prompts if each one is run daily on all 11 engines.
- free tier; 11 engines on the first paid plan; unlimited seats and competitors; content generation with CMS publishing; shopping visibility.
- credit-based billing makes the real prompt capacity hard to read; Starter is limited to one language and one region; the recommendation engine, persona targeting and SSO are Enterprise only; a small and very young company; how answers are collected is not documented.
AthenaHQSee the verified profile on Soft AtlasNo reviews yet02Otterly.AI
Otterly.AI is an Austrian tracker with the most approachable price list in the category: Lite starts at $29 a month for 15 prompts, Standard is $189 for 100, Premium $489 for 400, and every plan includes unlimited team members and daily tracking in more than 50 countries. Gartner named it a Cool Vendor for AI in marketing in 2025.
The core engines are ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity and Microsoft Copilot. The others are add-ons, and this is where the bill grows: Gemini and Google AI Mode cost $59 a month each on Standard, Claude $109. A Standard account that tracks all seven engines therefore costs $416, not $189. Beyond monitoring, Otterly audits your URLs for AI readiness (5,000 a month on Standard) and gives on-page recommendations. The API, the MCP server and agent analytics start at Standard.
- lowest entry price in this guide; unlimited seats on every plan; public pricing, add-ons included; GEO audits; multi-country by default.
- Gemini, AI Mode and Claude are paid add-ons on every plan; Lite is capped at 15 prompts and lists no API access; it recommends and briefs but does not write the content.
Otterly.AISee the verified profile on Soft AtlasNo reviews yet03Peec AI
Peec AI is a Berlin company founded in 2025 that raised a $21M Series A in November of the same year. It stays on the measuring side and organises it around three numbers per prompt: visibility, position and sentiment. A sources view shows which domains the engines leaned on, and a recommendations panel turns that into suggestions, such as building a profile on a review site that keeps being cited. Agent Analytics reads server logs (Cloudflare, Vercel, WordPress or an uploaded file) to show which AI bots crawl which pages. Peec states that it collects answers from the engines' interfaces as a logged-out user, not through model APIs, which is closer to what a person sees.
Pricing is in euros: Starter €85 a month for 50 prompts, Pro €205 for 150, Advanced €425 for 350, all with unlimited users and daily runs. Each plan covers three models of your choice; a further one costs €25 to €115 a month depending on the plan. Reporting is well served, with CSV exports, a Looker Studio connector, an API and an MCP server.
- clear metrics and source analysis; unlimited users; interface-based collection, documented; agent analytics from server logs; API, MCP and Looker Studio.
- three models per plan, each additional one is extra; several models are reserved for the Enterprise plan; it suggests actions rather than writing content; prompt allowances are modest at the entry level.
Peec AISee the verified profile on Soft Atlas3.52 reviews04Profound
Profound is the best-funded company in the category by a wide margin: founded in New York in August 2024, it raised a $180M Series D in September 2026 at a $1.8B valuation. The money shows in the breadth. Answer Engine Insights tracks up to nine engines, DeepSeek and Claude included. Prompt Volumes estimates what people actually ask, from a dataset Profound says is built on real user conversations. Agent Analytics reads how AI bots crawl and cite your pages. A Shopping module follows products in ChatGPT down to the SKU, and a set of agents drafts marketing work for approval. Like Peec AI, Profound says it captures answers from the consumer interface rather than from APIs.
The limits are commercial. There is a free trial (50 prompts, three engines, seven days), then a custom Enterprise contract: no paid plan has a public price. Customers shown on the site include Ramp, MongoDB, Zoom and Plaid.
- widest feature set in this guide; nine engines; demand data; agent analytics and shopping tracking; SOC 2, SSO and SCIM for large organisations.
- no public pricing beyond the free trial; built and sold for enterprise teams, a small one will find it oversized; projects, shopping and full prompt volumes are locked during the trial.
ProfoundSee the verified profile on Soft AtlasNo reviews yet05Scrunch
Scrunch started in 2023 and was acquired by Sitecore in June 2026, which says something about where the category is heading: toward the CMS. Its monitoring covers the usual ground (prompts, citations, sentiment, five competitors), and its Agent Traffic module measures AI bot visits at the CDN, with connectors for Akamai, CloudFront, Cloudflare, Fastly and Vercel.
The distinctive piece is the Agent Experience Platform, which serves AI agents a version of your pages built for them rather than for a browser. It is the most direct answer here to the question of what to do once you know you are invisible, and it is reserved for the Enterprise plan. The self-serve Core plan costs $250 a month for 125 prompts on four engines (ChatGPT, Perplexity, AI Overviews, Copilot), in one country and one language. Claude, Gemini, Meta AI, AI Mode and Grok require Enterprise, as do the API, the MCP server and Looker Studio.
- agent-readable pages, unique in this guide; AI bot traffic measured at the CDN; a public price for the entry plan; the backing of a large CMS vendor.
- Core is narrow (four engines, one country, one language, no API); the differentiating features are Enterprise only; the trial requires a credit card and converts automatically; the roadmap now depends on Sitecore.
ScrunchSee the verified profile on Soft AtlasNo reviews yet06Ahrefs Brand Radar
Brand Radar approaches the problem from Ahrefs' strength, the database. Instead of asking you to guess which prompts matter, its AI Visibility Index holds more than 476 million prompts derived from Ahrefs' keyword data and re-tested monthly, so you can look up any brand or competitor without setting anything up. Impressions are estimated from the search volume of the keyword behind each prompt, which gives a sense of scale that pure trackers lack. Custom Prompts add the tracker behaviour: your own questions, daily, weekly or monthly, on seven platforms including Claude.
Ahrefs is candid about method. Questions go into the web version of each chatbot with the default model, and the company describes the approach as sampling, not real-time monitoring. The index costs $199 a month per platform, or $699 for all of them, with or without an Ahrefs plan; custom prompt packages start at $50 for 2,500 checks. One check is one prompt on one platform in one location, and Claude consumes eight.
- largest prompt index in this guide; no setup needed to research a market; impressions tied to search demand; no cap on the brands you analyse; API, MCP and a Looker Studio connector.
- index data is refreshed once a month; no sentiment score, sentiment is read by hand in the captured answers; content tools are sold separately; per-platform pricing adds up quickly; brands with little search volume may be thinly covered.
AhrefsSee the verified profile on Soft Atlas4.53 reviews07SE Visible
SE Ranking sells AI visibility two ways: as a toolkit inside its SEO platform, and as SE Visible, a standalone product with its own sign-up that needs no SEO subscription. SE Visible tracks ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, AI Overviews and AI Mode, and reports a visibility score, share of voice, position, net sentiment and the sources behind each answer, with a competitor grid by topic. The company states that answers are collected through a browser and the real interface, not through APIs, and refreshed daily.
The price is the argument: from $99 a month for 200 prompts and three projects, $189 for 450, $355 for 1,000, with unlimited users and a ten-day trial. What you give up is everything around the tracking. Recommendations are announced rather than delivered, and the product stops at the report.
- generous prompt allowances for the price; unlimited users; no SEO subscription required; interface-based collection; an API and a Looker Studio connector.
- recommendations are planned, not yet available; Claude is not tracked yet; no white-label reports; prompt volume data is not documented; the site gives two different figures for country coverage.
SE RankingSee the verified profile on Soft AtlasNo reviews yet08Semrush AI Visibility Toolkit
Semrush, part of Adobe since April 2026, sells the AI Visibility Toolkit for $99 a month on its own, or bundled with its SEO tools as Semrush One from $199. Like Ahrefs it leads with a database: more than 300 million prompts and responses across 117 regional databases, sourced from clickstream data and Google's keyword dataset. That powers Prompt Research, with volume, difficulty and intent by topic. Brand Performance adds share of voice, sentiment and the narratives AI attaches to a brand, and a site audit checks whether eight AI crawlers are blocked.
The toolkit is thinner on your own prompts than on its database. The $99 plan tracks 25 of them, for one domain, one location and one language; another 50 cost $60 a month, another domain $99. Engine coverage also changes from one report to the next, and Perplexity appears in some and not in others. Enterprise AIO, a separate product with custom pricing, lifts most of these limits and adds Claude and log file analysis.
- prompt research with volumes and difficulty; sentiment and narrative analysis; ties into a full SEO suite; site audit for AI crawler access.
- 25 tracked prompts at $99; one domain, one location and one language per licence; the engines covered differ by report; no free trial for the toolkit on its own; log analysis and Claude sit in Enterprise AIO.
SemrushSee the verified profile on Soft Atlas3.98 reviews09AirOps
AirOps comes at visibility from the production side. The company raised a $40M Series B led by Greylock in November 2025, and its platform ties three steps together. Insights tracks prompts daily across eight engines, with citations, theme-based sentiment and a competitor leaderboard, and an Opportunities view proposes what to write or refresh next. Workflows then draft the content from your brand kit and knowledge base, a human review step pauses the run for approval, and the result publishes to one of thirteen CMSs, among them WordPress, Webflow, Contentful, Sanity and Shopify.
AI crawler traffic is read from CDN logs (Cloudflare, CloudFront, Netlify, Vercel), with no script to install. The weak point is how hard the cost is to read: plan prices are not public, usage is counted in tasks, and one answer from Claude consumes four units where the other engines consume one.
- measurement and content production in one tool; human review built into the workflows; thirteen CMS integrations; crawler analytics from CDN logs; an API and an MCP server.
- prices are not public; task-based usage is hard to forecast; the Solo plan tracks ChatGPT only; prompt volume data is not documented; crawler analytics need a supported CDN.
AirOpsSee the verified profile on Soft AtlasNo reviews yet10Writesonic
Writesonic made its name as an AI writing tool and has rebuilt itself around AI search. The current product combines a visibility tracker, an Action Center that lists what to fix (off-page, new content, technical), an article writer for long pieces, and server-side AI traffic analytics that run through a Cloudflare Worker, a WordPress plugin or a log drain, without JavaScript. Finished work lands in the CMS as a draft, and the company states that nothing is published automatically.
Self-serve plans are billed annually: Starter at $79 a month for 50 prompts and 15 articles, Basic at $199 for 100 prompts, Growth at $399 for 200. Read the grid closely, because the headline features thin out below Enterprise. The three self-serve plans track ChatGPT, Gemini and Google AI Overviews only; the five other engines, the full Action Center, and the GA4 and Looker Studio integrations are Enterprise. Sentiment starts at Growth.
- tracking and article production in one subscription; public pricing; server-side AI traffic analytics; ChatGPT ads and shopping tracking; drafts always go through review.
- three engines on the self-serve plans; the full Action Center and most integrations are Enterprise only; one market per self-serve plan; sentiment only from Growth.
WritesonicSee the verified profile on Soft AtlasNo reviews yetThe right tool depends on what you already own, and on how far past the dashboard you want to go.
- You want to start small, with a public price and no sales call → Otterly.AI or AthenaHQ
- You run SEO in-house or for clients and want clean tracking with solid reporting → Peec AI
- You are an enterprise that needs demand data, agent analytics and governance in one contract → Profound
- You want your site itself served in a form AI agents can read → Scrunch
- You want to research a market's prompts before tracking anything → Ahrefs Brand Radar or Semrush
- You want many tracked prompts for a modest budget → SE Visible
- You want the tool to write and publish the content, with a human approving → AirOps or Writesonic
Whatever you choose, test it the same way. Pick twenty prompts your buyers really ask, run them in two or three tools over the same two weeks, and compare what the tools captured with what you see when you ask the engines yourself. Then count the true monthly cost with the engines you need, since add-ons, credits and per-platform fees move the price more than the plan name does. And keep one thing in mind in front of any dashboard in this category: the numbers are samples of answers that change from one run to the next. A trend over a month is information. A two-point move in a day is not.
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FAQ
- AI search visibility is how often, and how favourably, a brand appears in the answers generated by ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Copilot or Google's AI Overviews. SEO measures a position in a list of links; here there is no list, only an answer that names a few brands and cites a few pages. The work overlaps, since pages still have to be crawlable, clear and trusted, but the levers differ: AI engines lean heavily on third-party sources such as review sites, forums and comparison articles, so being well described elsewhere counts as much as your own pages.
- In practice, yes. Generative engine optimization (GEO), answer engine optimization (AEO) and LLM optimization (LLMO) are three labels for the same job: getting a brand mentioned and cited in AI-generated answers. Vendors pick the term that suits their positioning, and the tools in this guide use all three.
- They are samples, not measurements. An AI engine can answer the same question differently twice in a row, and the answer changes with location, model version and whether the user is logged in. Tools handle this by running prompts repeatedly and reporting averages. Two things are worth checking: how the answers are collected (Peec AI, Profound and SE Visible state that they read the real interface rather than an API, which is closer to what a person sees) and how often (daily for most trackers, monthly for the prompt index of Ahrefs Brand Radar).
- Published entry prices in October 2026 run from free to a few hundred dollars a month. AthenaHQ has a free tier, Otterly.AI starts at $29 a month, Writesonic at $79 billed annually, Peec AI at €85, SE Visible and the Semrush toolkit at $99, Ahrefs Brand Radar at $199 per platform, Scrunch at $250 and AthenaHQ's paid plan at $295. Profound and AirOps do not publish prices. The plan price is rarely the real one: extra engines, extra prompts, credits and per-platform fees are where the bill grows, so price the configuration you need, not the entry tier.
- Yes, to a point. AthenaHQ's Essential plan is free with 300 credits, Profound offers a free seven-day trial with 50 prompts, and HubSpot runs a free AEO Grader that scores a brand once across OpenAI, Perplexity and Gemini models. The manual method also works for a first look: ask the engines your ten most important buyer questions, logged out, and note who gets named and which sources are cited. What the paid tools add is repetition, history and competitors.
- Start with where your buyers are, not with the longest list. ChatGPT and Google's AI Overviews reach the widest audience, Perplexity matters for research-heavy purchases, and Copilot for companies standardised on Microsoft. Then check what each plan really includes, because coverage is the most common upsell in this category: Otterly.AI sells Gemini, AI Mode and Claude as add-ons, Peec AI includes three models per plan, and Scrunch and Writesonic keep most engines for their Enterprise plans.