How do you choose an AI visibility tool in 2026?

Why are AI visibility tools hard to compare?

Every tool in this category does the same basic thing: it sends a set of prompts to one or more AI assistants, reads the answers, and reports whether a brand appears, how it is described and which pages are cited. The differences that matter are hidden in the method. An AI assistant does not give the same answer twice: ask "best project management tool for a small team" ten times and a brand may appear in six answers, then in three the next day, with nothing having changed. A tool that runs each prompt once a day reports that as a drop. A tool that runs it several times and shows an interval reports that nothing can be said yet.

Prices are hard to compare for the same reason. Vendors count different things: prompts, prompts per language, models, "AI answers" (prompts × models × days), credits, domains, users. A plan with 50 prompts tracked daily on three models produces 4,500 answers a month; a plan with 20 prompts sampled weekly on three engines produces about 360. Neither number is right or wrong, but they are not the same product, and the cheaper one may be the more careful one.

Which six questions separate measuring from counting?

1. How many times is each prompt run on each engine, and how often? One run a day gives a fresh number every morning and no way to tell signal from noise. Several runs a week give a rate with a margin of error. Ask for the number, and for how it changes with the plan.
2. Are answers collected through official APIs or from consumer interfaces, and with web search on? Official APIs are stable, documented and cheap to repeat; consumer interfaces show what a logged-in user sees, including personalisation, and break when the interface changes. Either is defensible if the vendor says which one it uses and whether web search or grounding is on, because that decides whether citations exist at all.
3. Are confidence intervals shown? A visibility rate of 40% from ten answers means "somewhere between about 17% and 69%". A tool that shows the interval lets you decide when a change is real. A tool that does not leaves you to guess. The free AI visibility calculator shows what the interval is for any count.
4. How are the mention, tone and claim classifiers validated, in which languages, and against which targets? Every tool uses a model to decide whether an answer mentions you, whether it is positive, what it claims. Ask for the measured accuracy, the languages it was measured in, and the target the vendor holds itself to. "We use GPT-5 for sentiment" is not an answer; "F1 0.82 on 600 labelled Italian answers" is.
5. Are scores versioned, and can history be re-scored? Models improve. When the vendor swaps its sentiment model, does last month's tone change silently, or is the old score kept next to the new one? Without versions a trend can be an artefact of a model update.
6. Are the full answers kept, so that any number can be audited? If a chart shows a drop, you should be able to open the answers that caused it. Tools that keep only aggregates cannot be checked, and a number that cannot be checked cannot be defended in a meeting.

Two more questions decide the fit rather than the quality: which engines you need (Google AI Overviews and AI Mode matter for search-driven brands, Claude and Perplexity for research-heavy audiences, Copilot for Microsoft-centred companies) and which languages and countries you need, because answers and sources differ by language.

Which AI visibility tools are there, and what do they cost?

Nine tools with a published pricing page, in alphabetical order, as their pages read on 10 November 2026. "Entry plan" is the cheapest paid plan; what it includes is reproduced from the vendor, not normalised. Where a page did not state something, the cell says so. Prices exclude tax; currencies are as shown by each vendor (Peec AI, Otterly.AI and Ahrefs show euros from Europe).

Not in the table because no price was readable on their pages on that date, or because they are checks rather than trackers: HubSpot's AI Search Grader and Ahrefs' AI Visibility Checker (free one-off checks), and enterprise platforms sold only through sales. The four detailed comparisons (Peec AI, Profound, Otterly.AI, Semrush) go through plans, engines and features line by line.

Which tool fits which situation?

Read with the table above; this is a reading of the vendors' pages, not a test.

• You already pay for Semrush or Ahrefs. Their modules sit next to your SEO data and, for Ahrefs, Custom Prompts come free with a paid plan. Check whether the engines and languages you need are covered, and whether per-domain and per-user prices fit your team.
• You want daily numbers on hundreds of prompts. Peec AI, Otterly.AI, Rankscale and Scrunch are built for volume, with daily tracking and prompts in the hundreds. Ask question 1 and 3 above: how many runs per day, and is an interval shown.
• You are an enterprise with procurement. Profound, Scrunch Enterprise and AthenaHQ Enterprise list SSO, APIs and dedicated support; Profound and AthenaHQ publish no self-serve price at that level.
• You have a small budget. Rankscale Essentials, Otterly.AI Lite, Tonecast Essential and the custom prompts in Ahrefs' paid plans all start under €50 a month, and AthenaHQ has a free tier. Compare what each gives for the money: prompts, engines, frequency, and whether Claude or Gemini cost extra.
• You need to know why answers change, with numbers you can defend. Look for formative sources (the pages engines draw on without citing them), fact-checking of claims, intervals and a written methodology. Tonecast is built around these; Peec AI lists source analytics and fact-checked prompts; AthenaHQ lists claim review on Enterprise. Outside the table, on the pages we checked on 10 November 2026, Evertune and Gumshoe publish margins of error for their visibility numbers, and Evertune and Promptwatch list fact checks on their higher plans. None of the pages we checked publishes the measured accuracy of its own classifiers.
• You work in several languages. Check whether prompts are counted per language and whether classifiers were validated in yours. Peec AI tracks any country or language at no extra cost; Tonecast counts prompts per language and publishes its quality targets for English, Italian and French; Semrush's Brand Performance is set per location and language, with extra locations paid.

How do you run a fair two-week evaluation?

1. Write 15 to 20 prompts the way customers ask them, across discovery ("best X for Y"), comparison ("A vs B"), evaluation ("is A reliable?") and price. Use the same set on every tool.
2. Run every tool during the same two weeks. Engines change week to week; a tool evaluated in week one cannot be compared with one evaluated in week three.
3. Write down each tool's visibility rate for the same prompt and engine, and ask the vendor how many runs sit behind it. Put the counts through the calculator: if the intervals overlap, the tools agree, whatever the headline numbers say.
4. Open five answers at random and check the classifications by eye: was the brand really mentioned, was the tone really positive, is the claim really wrong? This is where tools differ most and where the pages say least.
5. Pick one cited page and ask each tool what it knows about it: which engines cite it, on which prompts, what it says about you. A tool that explains the sources will save you the work of reading them.
6. Check the exit. Can you export the full answers and citations as CSV, and does the price change if you add a language, a user, a domain or an engine?

Where does Tonecast fit, and where does it not?

Tonecast is a SaaS platform that shows what AI assistants (ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity) say about a brand, product, person or topic, and which web pages shaped those answers. It answers the six questions above on its methodology page: weekly sampling through official APIs with web search or grounding, several runs per prompt and engine, a 95% interval on every rate, classifiers validated on labelled data against published targets, versioned scores, and every answer kept in full. It adds a source graph with formative pages, claim checking against your fact sheet and an early-warning indicator that only switches on when the evidence is statistically significant.

It is the wrong choice if you need daily numbers (it samples weekly), Google AI Mode, AI Overviews or Copilot today (not covered yet), prompt-volume estimates, crawler analytics from your server logs, content generation, or a free trial (there is a free check of your own brand and a public demo instead). Plans start at $34 a month, €29 for companies in Europe.

Questions people ask

What is the cheapest AI visibility tool?

On 10 November 2026 the lowest published entry prices were Rankscale Essentials ($17 a month, yearly billing only), Otterly.AI Lite (€29 a month for 2,000 credits, about 20 prompts daily on three engines), Tonecast Essential ($34, or €29 in Europe, for 20 prompts per language) and Ahrefs, whose paid plans include 5 to 20 custom AI prompts (extra packages from €46.7 a month). AthenaHQ has a free tier with 300 credits. The plans differ so much in prompts, engines and frequency that the price alone says little.

Do I need a tool, or can I check AI answers by hand?

You can start by hand: a clean session, a fixed set of prompts, each prompt asked several times, results written down as rates. That is enough to learn where you stand. A tool earns its price when you need it every week, across engines, languages and competitors, with the answers kept so that any number can be audited.

Is a free trial a good way to compare tools?

Only if you run the same prompt set on each tool during the same days and compare the numbers side by side. Engines answer differently from one run to the next, so two tools can report different visibility for the same brand and both be right. Ask each vendor how many runs sit behind each number and whether an interval is shown.

Sources and verification

All read on 10 November 2026. Vendors change prices and features often: check the linked pages before deciding. If a figure here is out of date, write to support@tonecast.io and it will be corrected.

• AthenaHQ pricing
• Ahrefs Brand Radar and pricing
• Otterly.AI pricing
• Peec AI pricing
• Profound pricing
• Rankscale pricing
• Scrunch pricing
• Semrush AI Visibility Toolkit pricing and knowledge base
• Evertune methodology and pricing; Gumshoe methodology; Promptwatch pricing
• Tonecast pricing and features