The Best AI Visibility Tools, Compared

An AI visibility tool tracks how often, and how accurately, your brand shows up in answers from AI search engines like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google's AI Overviews, and Gemini. The category is young but already crowded. The leaders include Elmo, Profound, and Peec AI, alongside SEO suites like Ahrefs that have added AI tracking. This guide compares nine of them.

Key takeaways

The sections below go deeper on each tool. Pricing notes reflect public information as of early 2026, so always confirm current pricing on the vendor's site.

Elmo is an open-source, self-hosted AI visibility platform. It tracks how your brand shows up across AI models, monitoring mentions, analyzing which sources get cited, and benchmarking competitors, with every metric computed by code you can read. It covers an unusually wide set of engines, including ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Grok, Perplexity, Copilot, DeepSeek, Mistral, and Google's AI Mode and AI Overviews, pulling responses via the models' own APIs or OpenRouter.

It suits teams that want to own their AI-visibility data outright and avoid vendor lock-in. The self-hosted core is free under the MIT license, with unlimited prompts and all models. The trade-offs: you run the infrastructure (Docker, PostgreSQL) and supply your own LLM API keys, which carry their own usage costs, and the managed Cloud option is still listed as "coming soon," so the no-ops hosted path isn't generally available yet.

Profound is an enterprise answer engine optimization platform that helps brands understand, analyze, build for, and measure their presence in AI-generated answers. It monitors how AI represents a brand and analyzes the consumer AI-search queries behind that presence, with broad platform coverage spanning Perplexity, ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Grok, Copilot, Meta AI, DeepSeek, and Google AI Overviews.

It is aimed at marketing organizations and agencies at the mid-market-to-enterprise end, and positions itself as the creator of the AEO category. The feature set reaches beyond monitoring into content and agent building, making it a fuller "AEO platform" than a pure tracker. The main considerations for smaller teams: pricing isn't public (the site routes to a demo), and the enterprise framing suggests it sits at the higher end of the market. See our Elmo vs Profound comparison for a closer look.

Peec AI is a self-serve AI search analytics platform focused on share of voice. It measures how often your brand appears when AI systems answer buyer questions, tracks brand mentions and source citations, and benchmarks you against competitors across LLMs. It lists coverage of ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Copilot, Grok, and Google's AI Mode and AI Overviews, and offers a dedicated product for agencies tracking multiple brands.

Peec's appeal is transparent, relatively affordable self-serve pricing with unlimited users, purpose-built for AI search rather than bolted onto another tool. Two caveats are worth noting: cost scales with the number of tracked prompts and the AI answers they generate, and several reviews report that some engines beyond the core set carry per-model add-on fees, so the real cost can climb above the headline tier. Confirm exactly which engines your plan includes. Our Elmo vs Peec AI page compares the two directly.

AirOps pairs AI search visibility tracking with a content-operations engine, so it is as much a "fix it" tool as a "measure it" one. On the tracking side it offers citation tracking, competitor intelligence, and share of voice across AI engines; on the execution side, its Quill agent produces and refreshes content at scale, and the platform unifies SEO, AI search, and GA4 data.

It fits content and SEO teams that want to act on visibility data by shipping or updating content, not just watch a dashboard. The key limitation for visibility-only buyers: multi-engine tracking is gated to the Pro tier, while the free and Solo tiers track ChatGPT only, and reviewers note a sizeable jump to reach multi-engine coverage. There is a genuinely free Insights tier ($0) if you only need ChatGPT tracking to start. See Elmo vs AirOps for a feature-by-feature view.

Ahrefs Brand Radar is an AI-visibility module inside the well-established Ahrefs SEO suite. What sets it apart is that it draws on Ahrefs' database of real, search-backed prompts rather than synthetic queries, and it sits alongside the keyword, backlink, and site-audit tools Ahrefs users already rely on. It tracks AI Overviews and AI Mode, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Copilot, Gemini, and Grok, with YouTube, TikTok, and Reddit tracking free during beta.

It's the natural choice for existing Ahrefs customers extending their work into AEO and wanting AI share of voice next to search demand. Two caveats: several independent reviews report accuracy issues on ChatGPT and Perplexity (reviewer opinion, not vendor-confirmed), and because Brand Radar is priced on top of a base Ahrefs subscription, full AI coverage gets expensive. Compare it with our tool on the Elmo vs Ahrefs Brand Radar page.

Scrunch AI is a generative-engine-optimization and brand-monitoring platform that goes beyond "did we appear" to explain why. It tracks mentions, citations, competitors, sentiment, and prompt performance, surfaces which sources influenced an answer, supports persona-based prompting, and audits whether AI agents can actually read your site. A GA integration attributes AI-referral traffic and monitors AI-crawler behavior. Coverage includes ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, Google AI Mode and AI Overviews, and Meta.

It suits brands and agencies running a serious GEO program who want source-level insight and site-readiness audits rather than a bare mention count. The main considerations: entry pricing is higher than several self-serve trackers, making it less suited to very small budgets, and prompt volumes are capped per tier. A short free trial is available. The Elmo vs Scrunch comparison breaks down the differences.

Otterly is an AI search monitoring tool built around per-engine Brand Reports: brand mentions, brand coverage, domain citations, link-position changes over time, and competitive share of voice. It adds a GEO audit tool and a prompt-research tool, and it's notable for a low, transparent entry price with unlimited team members and daily tracking. Its core tiers cover ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity, and Copilot.

Otterly is a good fit for smaller businesses and lean marketing teams that want affordable, no-friction AI-visibility tracking. The limitations follow from the price: Gemini and Google AI Mode are paid add-ons rather than included, and prompt counts are modest on lower tiers, with extra prompt blocks billed separately. If your priority is breadth of engine coverage out of the box, check the per-tier details. See Elmo vs Otterly for a direct comparison.

Nightwatch is, first and foremost, a mature SEO rank tracker. It has monitored keyword rankings across Google, Bing, YouTube, and other engines for over a decade, and has since added AI visibility tracking. Its AI layer covers ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Perplexity, with "Citation Intelligence" connecting AI mentions to resulting traffic, and AI tracking is bundled into every plan rather than sold as an add-on.

It's a strong pick for SEO professionals and agencies that want traditional rank tracking and AI visibility in one place, especially given unlimited seats and white-label reporting on every tier. The honest caveat is that AEO is secondary to its core rank-tracking purpose, so AI-specific depth (sentiment, source-level reasoning, persona prompting) is narrower than in dedicated GEO tools, and AI engine coverage is limited to four LLMs. Our Elmo vs Nightwatch page compares the AI features side by side.

Frase began as an AI content-optimization and SERP-research tool, pulling headings, questions, and sources from top-ranking pages into writer-ready briefs, and has since added GEO optimization and AI-visibility tracking. That makes it a tool that can both create content and lightly monitor how it performs in AI answers. Every plan includes its AI agent, content optimization, visibility tracking, and site audits; only volume changes by tier.

Frase fits content marketers and agencies who want one tool to produce search-optimized content and keep an eye on AI citations. The caveats are about depth: AI-visibility tracking is a newer, lighter feature, prompt allowances are small at entry tiers, and the pricing page quantifies coverage by number of platforms per tier without naming the specific engines tracked, so it's not a dedicated AEO monitor. The Elmo vs Frase comparison shows where each tool focuses.

The right tool depends less on a feature checklist than on how you plan to use it. A few things to weigh:

Whichever you choose, the goal is the same: a reliable, repeatable read on your presence in AI answers. For the method behind the metrics, see our guide to tracking your brand in AI search, the AI visibility software hub, and the broader concept of answer engine optimization.