AI Visibility Tools Compared
Profound, Peec AI, Otterly.AI, Ahrefs Brand Radar and Semrush's AI toolkit compared: what each one tracks, what it costs to run, and which to start with.
An AI visibility tool runs a fixed set of prompts against ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and similar assistants on a schedule, then records whether your brand was named and whether it was linked. Profound, Peec AI and Otterly.AI are built only for this; Ahrefs and Semrush have added a version inside the SEO suite you may already own.
That is the tooling half of a bigger question. The full method — which prompts to pick, how to read a citation rate, what to do about a bad one — is in our generative engine optimization playbook; this post stays narrowly on which product to run it with.
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What does an AI visibility tool actually do?
It runs the same questions a buyer would ask, over and over, and keeps score. Concretely: you give it a list of prompts ("best project management software for a small team"), it sends each one to the assistants you picked, and it logs whether your brand appeared, whether it was linked, and which competitors showed up instead.
That is the entire mechanism. There is no crawling of your own site involved, and no ranking algorithm to reverse-engineer — the tool is a scheduler and a scorer sitting in front of assistants that already exist. The value is in not doing that by hand every week across four different apps.
Most of these products also group your prompts by topic and let you filter results by competitor, which matters once the list grows past a handful of questions. A raw log of a hundred weekly answers is not useful on its own; being able to ask "how did we do on pricing questions specifically, against this one competitor, over the last quarter" is what turns the log into something a team can act on. That filtering layer, more than the underlying scraping, is what you are actually paying for once you move past a spreadsheet.
The dedicated trackers: Profound, Peec AI and Otterly.AI
These three exist for one job. Profound runs prompt sets across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Copilot, and reports a share-of-voice number alongside which URLs got cited [1]. Peec AI is built for smaller teams that want a lighter setup: fewer configuration steps, a narrower assistant list, a lower weekly prompt ceiling. Otterly.AI sits between the two on both price and depth, and is often the first stop for a team testing whether tracking is worth doing at all before committing to a heavier platform.
None of the three touches your website. They are read-only observers of assistant output, which means switching between them costs you nothing but the historical trend line — a reason to pick one and stay, rather than one to fear trying a second.
What do Ahrefs and Semrush add to tools you already run?
A view you did not have before, at no extra signup. Ahrefs Brand Radar sits alongside the rank tracker most SEO teams already check weekly, and reports brand mentions across a set of AI answers the same way it reports keyword rankings [4]. Semrush ships a comparable AI-visibility view inside its existing toolkit.
The advantage is not depth — dedicated trackers generally run more prompts across more assistants — it is that nobody has to ask for a new budget line or a new vendor contract. If your team already lives in one of these platforms daily, the AI-visibility tab is the cheapest way to find out whether the problem is worth solving before you buy something built only for it.
| Tool | Best for | Assistants covered | Setup effort |
|---|---|---|---|
| Profound | Teams running this as a standing programme | ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Copilot | Moderate |
| Peec AI | Small teams, first serious tracker | ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini | Low |
| Otterly.AI | Testing the idea before committing further | ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews | Low |
| Ahrefs Brand Radar | Teams already paying for Ahrefs | ChatGPT, Perplexity, AI Overviews | None — it's already there |
| Semrush AI toolkit | Teams already paying for Semrush | ChatGPT, Perplexity, AI Overviews | None — it's already there |
How does pricing generally work?
Not by traffic, which surprises teams used to SEO and analytics tools that scale with visitors. AI visibility products generally price on prompt volume and the number of assistants tracked — how many questions you monitor, run how often, across how many engines — because that is what actually drives their own cost of running the checks.
This has a practical consequence: a small brand tracking a tight, well-chosen set of twenty prompts across two assistants can run one of these tools for a modest, predictable cost, while a large enterprise tracking hundreds of prompts across every assistant will pay considerably more regardless of company size. Before comparing vendors on price, decide the prompt list first — it drives the bill more than which product you pick.
Do you need a tool, or can you check this by hand?
At low volume, by hand is genuinely fine. Pick fifteen to twenty-five prompts, paste each into ChatGPT and Perplexity on a Monday, and log whether you appear in a plain spreadsheet with the date, the prompt, and a yes-or-no for named and linked. It takes under an hour a week and costs nothing.
The manual version breaks down at scale for one reason: assistant answers vary run to run, so a single check per prompt per week is a small sample, and a small sample is noisy. A tool that can afford to run each prompt several times and average the result gives you a steadier number, which matters once you are making budget decisions off the trend rather than eyeballing one week.
Start with the spreadsheet
Twenty prompts, one assistant, one column for named and one for linked. Run it for a month before spending anything.
Check what you already own
If Ahrefs or Semrush is already on the invoice, open its AI-visibility view before signing up for anything new.
Only then pick a dedicated tracker
Move to Profound, Peec AI or Otterly.AI once the manual check has told you the problem is real and worth a recurring budget line.
How do the results connect to what your brand is missing?
A tool tells you the score. It does not tell you what to fix, and the fix is rarely on your own site. If the recurring gap is that competitors get named and you do not, the reason is almost always which third-party pages the assistant is reading — see why your brand is not in ChatGPT for the specific pages that tend to be doing that work, and listicles in AI answers for why so much of it traces back to a small set of formats.
Treat the weekly number as a symptom tracker, not a to-do list. The tool's job ends at telling you the trend moved; deciding what caused it is the part no dashboard does for you. For the fuller method behind reading that trend — which prompts to pick, how often to run them, what counts as a meaningful move — see measuring AI visibility.
Questions people also ask
Do I need a dedicated tool, or is a spreadsheet enough?
A spreadsheet is enough for the first month, while you are still deciding which twenty or thirty prompts actually matter. A tool earns its cost once you are checking more than about twenty prompts across more than one assistant every week, because that is where manual copy-pasting stops being realistic.
Do these tools replace measuring AI visibility by hand?
No. They automate the running of the prompts and the scoring of the answers, but you still choose which prompts matter and still read the answers that name a competitor instead of you.
Which tool is cheapest to start with?
The one you already pay for. If you run Ahrefs or Semrush for SEO, their AI-visibility add-ons cost nothing extra to try before you buy a dedicated tracker.
Do these tools track Reddit and forum mentions too?
Most track citations inside assistant answers, not the underlying forum threads those answers pull from. If you want to know which third-party pages are feeding the answer, that is a separate, more manual check.
How often should the prompts run?
Weekly, on a fixed schedule and a fixed prompt list. Daily runs mostly show you noise, because a single assistant's answer to the same question shifts from one day to the next.
Sources
- I tracked 13,184 AI citations across 4 LLMs: here's what I learned — Orbit Media Studios (checked 22 September 2026)
- AI features and your website — Google Search Central (checked 22 September 2026)
- Profound — track your brand across AI platforms — Profound (checked 22 September 2026)
- Ahrefs Brand Radar: AI visibility tracking — Ahrefs (checked 22 September 2026)
Not sure which prompts to even track yet?
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Who wrote this
Ibrahem HelalCo-founder
Leads strategy and delivery.
Works on: SEO, GEO
Reviewed before publishing by Jeremy Zava, Co-founder.
- Generative engine optimization: the playbookHow answer engines pick what to cite, what a quotable page looks like, which crawlers to allow, how to measure it, and a 90-day plan built on evidence.
- How to Measure AI VisibilityAI visibility means tracking whether assistants name and link your brand across a fixed set of buyer questions run weekly, not a single good screenshot.
- Why Your Brand Is Not in ChatGPT AnswersUsually a crawler block, a page nothing else links to, or simply no third party discussing you yet. Here is how to find which one it actually is.
- Listicles and Reddit in AI AnswersAI assistants lean on listicles and forum threads more than official pages when they answer buying questions. What that means for where you spend effort.