Best AI visibility tools in 2026: what each one measures

An AI visibility tool tells you how often ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Google AI Overviews and AI Mode, Copilot or Claude name your brand, which sources they cite and which competitors appear instead. Many tools sample answers to a defined prompt set on a schedule. Others also use large prompt indexes built from search data. The first-party reports from Google and Microsoft measure a different set of observations: links to your site, not brand names. Prompt sampling estimates how often your brand appears in the answers tested.

This guide compares eight paid tools on their own pricing pages and documentation as of September 2026, plus the two free first-party reports. Some teams call the work generative engine optimization (GEO), others answer engine optimization (AEO); the measurement problem is the same either way.

At a glance (AI engines · entry price and billing term · German and DACH coverage · one limit):

Google Search Console: AI Overviews, AI Mode · free · report breaks down by country · counts links shown, not brand mentions
Bing Webmaster Tools: Copilot, Bing, partner AI experiences · free · country coverage not stated in the source checked · counts citations, not brand mentions
Profound: up to nine engines on Enterprise · free seven-day trial, then custom Enterprise pricing · 30+ languages, 150+ regions · no paid plan with a listed price
Peec AI: three of ChatGPT, AI Mode, AI Overviews, Copilot, Gemini, Naver AI · €85 a month, monthly billing · FAQ says countries and languages cost nothing extra · "multi country" listed only from Advanced
Otterly.AI: ChatGPT, AI Overviews, Perplexity, Copilot, others as paid add-ons · $29 a month, monthly billing · Germany, Austria, Switzerland in its country list · 15 prompts
Semrush AI Visibility Toolkit: ChatGPT and Google AI Mode named for prompt tracking · $99 a month · Germany among 41 countries, interface available in German · 25 tracked prompts, no free trial
Ahrefs Brand Radar: AI Overviews, AI Mode, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Copilot, Grok, Claude · $199 a month per AI index, custom prompts from $50 a month · index questions asked from each keyword's location · custom tracking is priced in checks, not prompts
Scrunch: ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, AI Mode, AI Overviews, Meta AI · $250 a month billed annually, $300 month to month · prompts in any language and country · highest self-serve entry price here
Rankscale: nine engines · Pro at €99 a month, monthly billing (currency shown varied) · 240+ regions and languages · Essentials' included credits unclear
Knowatoa: seven services, no Copilot · $59 a month · "every language and market" · prompt allowance not stated
Sokosumi SEO & GEO Researcher: ChatGPT, AI Overviews · 900 credits per run · country and language chosen per run · one snapshot per run, not ongoing tracking

What the sources say

Every fact below comes from the vendor's own site. Prices are the lowest listed entry point, in the currency the page showed us, with the billing term, as of September 2026.

Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools (free). Start here, because this is the only data that comes from the engines themselves. Search Console is a free Google service; its generative AI performance report counts impressions of links to your site in AI Overviews and AI Mode, broken down by page, country, date and device. Google's help page says the report was rolled out to all websites worldwide as of 31 August 2026, but a site with few impressions in these features may still see no data, so availability can differ by property. Bing Webmaster Tools' AI Performance reports citations in Copilot, Bing and partner AI experiences, with grounding queries and a Citation Share metric. Limitation: both count links to your site rather than whether a model names your brand, and neither covers ChatGPT, Perplexity or Claude. Our AI brand monitoring guide explains what each number means.
Profound. Reports visibility scores, share of voice, the sites cited in answers about you, and sentiment (how AI describes your brand). The Enterprise plan tracks up to nine engines: ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Mode, Gemini, Microsoft Copilot, DeepSeek, Claude, Google AI Overviews and Exa Search, in 30+ languages and 150+ regions. Profound lists no paid plan with a public price: there's a free seven-day trial with 50 prompts on ChatGPT, Gemini and AI Overviews in one language and one region, and paid use is custom Enterprise pricing after a demo. Suits enterprise marketing teams that want a managed platform and don't mind a sales process. Limitation: you won't see a price before you talk to sales.
Peec AI. Peec AI GmbH is based in Berlin. It measures visibility (how often your brand is mentioned), your position against other brands, sentiment, and the sources models cite. Starter costs €85 a month on monthly billing for 50 prompts tracked daily on three models you pick from ChatGPT, AI Mode, AI Overviews, Microsoft Copilot, Gemini and Naver AI; further models are a paid add-on. Pro costs €205 for 150 prompts and Advanced €425 for 350. Suits SEO and content teams in DACH that want a European vendor, euro pricing and a self-serve start. Limitation: Peec's FAQ says extra countries and languages cost nothing because price follows prompts, yet its plan list names "multi country" only from Advanced, so ask which applies before you buy Starter for Germany, Austria and Switzerland.
Otterly.AI. OtterlyAI GmbH is registered in Persenbeug, Austria. It counts brand mentions and citations, shows your share of citations against competitors, and adds a GEO audit with crawlability checks and content briefs. Lite costs $29 a month on monthly billing for 15 prompts on ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity and Microsoft Copilot, with Claude, Google AI Mode and Gemini as paid add-ons; Standard costs $189 for 100 prompts. Every plan includes 50+ countries, and Germany, Austria and Switzerland are in its country list. Suits small teams that want a low-cost first baseline. Limitation: Lite fits only if your prompt count (see step 1 below) stays at 15 or fewer, and three of the seven engines cost extra.
Semrush AI Visibility Toolkit. Costs $99 a month on its own, including 25 prompts for prompt tracking, or comes bundled with SEO in the Semrush One plans. It covers a visibility overview, competitor and prompt research, brand performance and sentiment, daily prompt tracking and an AI search site audit. The knowledge base names ChatGPT and Google AI Mode for prompt tracking; the suite-wide pricing page lists "Google Search, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini & more", so check which engines each report uses. Visibility Overview covers 41 countries including Germany, prompt tracking covers 220+ countries and territories, and the interface is available in German. Suits teams already paying for Semrush. Limitation: 25 tracked prompts, and Semrush's own documentation says the toolkit has no free trial.
Ahrefs Brand Radar. Works in two modes. The AI index runs questions taken from Ahrefs' keyword database (People Also Ask questions, asked from the keyword's location) through Google AI Overviews and AI Mode, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Copilot, Grok and Claude, then reports mentions and citations for any brand, including competitors; one index costs $199 a month and all of them $699. Custom prompt tracking runs your own questions and starts at $50 a month for 2,500 checks; the $699 bundle includes 2,500 of those checks. Suits teams that want to benchmark a whole category before writing a prompt set, then track their own wording. Limitation: custom tracking is priced in checks, not prompts, so ask Ahrefs how many checks one prompt uses across engines and runs before you estimate coverage.
Scrunch. Tracks prompts, topics and entities with citations, competitors and rankings, plus a live feed of AI bots crawling your site. Its Agent Experience Platform serves machine-readable versions of your pages to AI agents. Starter costs $250 a month on annual billing, or $300 on monthly billing, for 350 prompts on ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, Google AI Mode and AI Overviews, and Meta AI. Scrunch says it records responses for prompts written in any language in every country, and you can set up personas per region. Suits brands that want tracking and changes for AI crawlers from one vendor. Limitation: on either billing term, it's the highest self-serve entry price in this list.
Rankscale. Rankscale GmbH is based in Vienna. It reports an AI visibility score, rankings, sentiment and citations, and runs an AI-readiness audit against 94+ checkpoints, across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Mode, Gemini, DeepSeek, Mistral, Claude, Grok and Copilot, in 240+ regions and languages. Billing runs on credits, typically 0.25 credits per engine per prompt. The Pro card lists 1,200 credits and 10 brand dashboards at €99 a month on monthly billing in the rendered pricing page we checked; a text copy of the same page showed dollar amounts, so the currency may depend on where you open it. Essentials starts at €20, but the comparison table is inconsistent about its included credits; confirm its allowance before buying. Suits agencies running several client brands. Limitation: your real prompt count depends on how many engines you switch on, so do the arithmetic before you pick a plan.
Knowatoa. Checks seven services (ChatGPT, AI Overviews, AI Mode, Claude, Gemini, Meta AI and Perplexity) and reports competitor visibility gaps, citations and brand sentiment alerts. Starter costs $59 a month; Growth costs $199 and adds API, MCP and Looker Studio. It says you can track every language and market. Suits small marketing teams and SaaS founders. Limitation: the pricing table doesn't say how many questions each plan includes, and Copilot isn't on its list.
Sokosumi's SEO & GEO Researcher. This is an audit you run when you need one, not a tracker. The SEO & GEO Researcher, built by Serviceplan Group, takes a domain with 3 to 6 keyword stems (or a file of up to 100 URLs), a country and a language, and returns an Excel workbook of keyword clusters, content gaps against competitors and opportunities, plus a written report that sorts recommendations by effort. On the AI side it checks ChatGPT and Google AI Overviews: brand mention counts in LLM responses, the top citing sources, AI Overview presence and live ChatGPT spot-checks. A run costs 900 credits, shown before it starts. Limitation: it only surfaces pages that already rank for a relevant keyword, and it gives you a snapshot per run; for a daily trend line, use one of the trackers above.

How to run it

Answer these questions in order before you compare prices. Check German-language results and the countries you need before choosing a plan.

Write the prompt set before you open a single tool, then count it. List the questions a buyer would type into an assistant about each product or service, in the buyer's language, weighted towards unbranded ones ("best CRM for a 20-person agency"), because branded prompts mostly return your own site. Then multiply: products × questions per product × languages × countries, if the vendor counts each language and country as its own prompt (Peec's FAQ says it doesn't; ask the others). A narrow second product with five questions can fit in a small plan; one product with ten questions asked in German and English across Germany, Austria and Switzerland is already 60. Compare the total with the plan: Otterly Lite 15, Semrush 25, Peec Starter 50, Scrunch Starter 350.
Pick the engines your buyers use, then check that the plan you'd actually buy covers them, not the Enterprise plan. Knowatoa has no Copilot, Peec's Starter lets you choose three models, and Otterly charges extra for Claude, AI Mode and Gemini.
Check what "German support" means for you. It can mean four things: prompts written in German, Germany, Austria or Switzerland as the query location, a German-language interface, and customer support in German. A country list proves only the second. In our check, Semrush offers its interface in German and Ahrefs publishes its Brand Radar page in German; the other vendors' websites are in English, and we didn't verify German-language customer support for any of them. During the trial, run your German prompts with the location set and check whether the answers look like what a buyer in Munich or Vienna would see.
Decide what you're counting: mentions or citations. A mention is your brand named in the answer text; a citation is a link to your site as a source. Google's and Microsoft's reports only count links, and most paid tools report both, so find out which one sits behind the headline "visibility score".
Compare price last, per prompt and per engine, and compare like with like on billing terms (Scrunch's Starter is $250 a month on annual billing and $300 on monthly billing; most other prices here are monthly).

How to measure it

Once a tool is running, report numbers you can explain to someone who has never logged into it.

Mention rate: the share of your prompts where an engine named your brand, per engine, with prompt count and date stated.
Citation rate: the share of prompts where your domain appeared as a source.
Which competitors appear in the same answers, and how often.
Google AI-feature impressions and Bing citations, kept separate and labelled as first-party data.
Branded search volume and direct traffic as secondary indicators only. Other channels move them too, so they can't show that an AI answer caused a visit.

Where teams get this wrong

Comparing visibility scores across tools. Each vendor builds its score from its own prompts and its own formula, so a 40 in one tool and a 40 in another measure different things.
Changing the prompt set every month, which turns the trend line into a record of your edits.
Buying on the Enterprise feature list. Profound lists its nine engines on the custom plan, while its trial covers three.
Tracking English prompts for a German market. A US-English prompt set tells you nothing verified about what a buyer asking in German sees.
Treating measurement as improvement. Tracking shows where you're missing and who gets cited instead; on its own it doesn't change the answers. Some products include action features (Otterly's GEO audit and content briefs, Scrunch's Agent Experience Platform, Rankscale's readiness audit), so check whether those are in the plan you're buying or sold separately.

Sources

AI visibility tools: common questions

What does an AI visibility tool actually do?

It estimates how often assistants such as ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Google AI Overviews name your brand, which sources they cite and which competitors appear. Many tools do this by sampling answers to a defined prompt set on a schedule; some also use large prompt indexes. The result is an estimate from the answers tested, not platform data.

Which AI visibility tool is best?

It depends on your team. A DACH team that wants a European vendor and a self-serve start should look at Peec AI (Berlin) or Otterly.AI (Austria). Teams already on Semrush or Ahrefs can add those vendors' AI modules. For larger programmes, compare enterprise coverage, exports and contract terms against your requirements.

Is there a free AI visibility tool?

Google Search Console's generative AI performance report and Bing Webmaster Tools' AI Performance cost nothing, but they count links to your site, not brand mentions, and cover only Google's and Microsoft's own surfaces. Profound and Rankscale (Pro) offer free seven-day trials; Semrush's toolkit has no free trial.

How do I rank in ChatGPT?

Tracking alone won't make ChatGPT mention you; it shows whether it does. Use a tool to find the prompts where you're missing and the sources cited instead, then work on those pages and sources. Our answer engine optimization guide covers what Google documents about its own AI features.

Which tools track German prompts?

For prompts and markets: Profound supports 30+ languages, Scrunch says it records prompts in any language, Rankscale lists 240+ regions and languages, Knowatoa says every language and market, and Otterly and Semrush both list Germany as a country. Peec includes countries and languages at no extra cost per its FAQ, but lists multi-country only from its Advanced plan. A German interface we could confirm only for Semrush, and we didn't verify German-language support for any vendor. Test with your own German prompts during a trial.

Is AI visibility the same as generative engine optimization?

No. Generative engine optimization (GEO) is the work of changing how AI answers describe and cite you; AI visibility is the measurement that tells you whether that work moved anything.