Every AI search visibility tool we could find, and what they cost

How did we rank them?

Ranking tools that do different jobs on one ladder is partly nonsense, so here is the criterion in the open: evidence quality per pound spent. Each tool was assessed on seven things.

1. Methodology disclosure. Is there a published page stating collection method, corpus, refresh rate and limitations?
2. Collection method. Scraped live interface, API, or consumer panel. Disclosed or not.
3. Repetition. Runs per prompt, per engine, per cycle.
4. Data provenance. Prompts you invented, prompts derived from search behaviour, or observed AI conversations from a panel.
5. Denominator clarity. Does the vendor define what its headline score divides by?
6. Price transparency. Published, or sales-gated.
7. Action layer. Does it only report, or does it help you fix what it found?

A tool can be excellent and still score badly here. Enterprise platforms lose points for sales-gated pricing even when the product is strong. Take the ranking as a starting argument, not a verdict.

Which trackers are honest about what they do?

Tier two. Good products, doing roughly one run a day, mostly not pretending otherwise.

04 Peec AI

Price: $95 / $245 / $495 a month for 50 / 150 / 350 prompts on 3 models. 15% off annual. Agency credit plans $245 to $1,195. Extra models $30 to $140.

Unlimited seats on every tier, daily collection, a native MCP server, source-level citation reporting and Looker Studio from Advanced. Berlin-based, reporting $29m raised and $10m and up in ARR (vendor-published). The credit definition in their own documentation, one prompt times one model times one day equals one credit, is the clearest public admission of the one-run problem anywhere in this market. They deserve credit for publishing it.

Where it pinches. Three-model cap on self-serve. Report-only by design.

05 Promptwatch

Price: $95 entry. $199 a month for 10,000 checks on agency pricing, or $245 on brand pricing. $399 for 20,000. $579 for 200 prompts on 4 models.

Scrapes the live interface rather than the APIs and argues the case for it publicly. Adds crawler logs, AI traffic attribution and content agents that publish fixes, which puts it in the small group doing monitoring plus execution. Second cheapest per check at roughly $0.020.

06 Semrush AI Visibility / AIO

Price: $99 a month per domain for 25 custom prompts and four engines, or inside Semrush One at $199 / $299 / $549. Classic suite separately at $139.95 to $499.95.

Documentation states that prompt responses are captured from real requests rather than LLM APIs, that reports can run up to 300 times a day, that there are roughly 14 regional databases, and that the AI Visibility Score is a composite of topic coverage and mention consistency. Prompt data comes from AI search clickstream plus Google's keyword dataset, with Datos as the clickstream arm. Now an Adobe company following the $1.9bn acquisition announced 19 November 2025 and completed 28 April 2026.

Where it pinches. Twenty-five prompts is small. Add-ons stack at roughly $60 per 50 extra prompts and $99 per extra domain or seat. Independent reviews disagree with Semrush's own documentation on engine coverage.

07 Scrunch AI

Price: Published tiers around $250 to $500. Core includes five user licences. Higher volumes sales-gated.

Persona-based analysis is a real differentiator. Co-authored the Stacker distribution study, one of the better pieces of primary research in the category.

Where it pinches. Does not publicly disclose prompts executed per brand, or make any statement on statistical significance.

08 Surfer AI Tracker

Price: Roughly $95 a month as an add-on, or $219 to $359 in the Detailed scenarios, on top of Surfer from around $89.

Tracks ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Google AI Mode, Perplexity and Gemini. Does not track Claude. Reads answers from each engine's own interface rather than the APIs, and published the study showing roughly 24% brand overlap and 4% source overlap between scraped and API results, which quietly undermines a chunk of its competitors. The optimise-from-tracker button into the content editor is the tightest monitoring-to-action loop in the mid market.

09 Searchable

Price: $125 a month up to 100 prompts on 3 models. $150 for 100 on 4. $400 to $525 at higher volumes.

Cheapest option in two of the six Detailed scenarios. Flat pricing that does not punish you for adding prompts early.

10 AthenaHQ

Price: $295 a month self-serve, with a free tier.

Positioned for brands rather than agencies. No published run count.

11 Writesonic (GEO suite)

Price: Tiered, published.

A content platform that grew an AI visibility layer. Reasonable if content production is your bottleneck rather than measurement.

12 AirOps

Price: Enterprise, sales-gated.

Content workflow first, visibility second. Publishes the State of AI Search report, which found roughly 85% of brand mentions in AI answers originate from external domains.

Which SEO suites have bolted an AI module on?

Buy these if you already live in them. The data will be shallower than a dedicated tool, and the integration will save you more time than the depth costs you.

Where does PR measurement fit into this?

Earned media accounts for a large share of AI citations, so if the lever you are pulling is coverage rather than pages, the measurement may belong in a media intelligence platform rather than a prompt tracker.

Are the free visibility checkers worth anything?

As a conversation starter, yes. As a baseline, no, and you should never put one in a report.

Semrush AI Search Visibility Checker, Frase AI Visibility Checker, HubSpot AI Search Grader, the Dageno free GEO report, the Athena, LLMrefs and Trakkr free tiers, Inspeccia, Surchee, geotoolbox and a dozen others all offer a score in under two minutes. Every one of them runs a handful of prompts once.

Inspeccia's own data makes the case against its own product better than we could. Across 2,324 audits between May and July 2026, of the domains visible at least once, 56.9% produced a different answer on a repeat run, with an average swing of 30.8 points.

What is the honest case against everything above?

Let us be fair, because a page like this can read as if the whole category is a con, and it is not.

These are young products solving a genuinely hard engineering problem. Querying five engines, repeatedly, from multiple locations, and parsing unstructured answers into a consistent brand mention count is expensive and fiddly. One run a day at $95 a month is a defensible trade-off, not a fraud. Most of the vendors here are not hiding the run count. They are just never asked for it.

A cheap tool you actually open every Monday beats a rigorous one nobody logs into. If Rankscale at $20 a month is what gets a client to take the channel seriously, that is $20 well spent.

The repetition floor we use, seven runs per prompt per engine per day, comes from a University of St Gallen paper on the statistical instability of LLM outputs. It is one paper. It is good, and we lean on it, but it is not a settled industry standard and nobody should pretend otherwise.

And the honest size of the channel: AI referrals remain around 1% of total website traffic, growing roughly a point a month. This is a fast-growing, high-quality, still-small channel. Anyone telling you otherwise is selling urgency.

Which of the tools on your stack has ever told you its cost per check?

Ask them. If the answer is vague, or it arrives as a feature list instead of a number, you have learned something useful for free.

If you would rather start from a measured baseline than a dashboard, that is what our audit does: the same prompts every cycle, screenshots rather than descriptions, and a stated margin of error on every figure.

Book the £495 AI Visibility Audit

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