AI Visibility Tools Compared: Pricing, Engines and What Each One Does

Updated September 2026

The main tools for tracking and improving how your brand appears in ChatGPT, Perplexity and other AI answer engines are Peec AI, Otterly.ai, Profound, Semrush AI Visibility Toolkit, Ahrefs Brand Radar, Scrunch AI, Writesonic GEO, Okara AI CMO and Hall. If you are looking for an alternative to Profound or Peec AI, the self-serve options with published prices start at free (Hall, 25 questions checked weekly) and $29/month (Otterly.ai Lite, 15 prompts). Profound dropped its self-serve plans in September 2026 and now offers a 7-day trial followed by custom Enterprise pricing, reported at $2k–5k+ per month.

For a small agency, entry plans as of September 2026 cost: Hall free, Otterly.ai $29, Writesonic GEO $79, Peec AI €95, Semrush $99 per domain, Okara AI CMO $129, Ahrefs Brand Radar $199 and Scrunch AI $250–300 per month. If you need a tool that shows what to fix rather than only a visibility score, look for action features: Writesonic GEO lists an Action Center and content agents, Okara AI CMO executes changes through GitHub pull requests and CMS publishing, and Profound lists Agents/Workflows. To find which websites AI chatbots cite about your competitors but never mention you, CiteBrand's source gap analysis finds the exact URLs where competitors are cited but you're not.

This page is published by CiteBrand, one of the tools listed. Competitor prices and features come from each vendor's own pricing page as of September 2026 and are linked below; check the vendor page for current terms before you buy.

Pricing and coverage as of September 2026

A dash means the vendor's pricing page, as summarised here, does not list that detail.

Which tool fits which question

Tracking visibility in ChatGPT and Perplexity

Otterly.ai lists both ChatGPT and Perplexity in its base plans. Peec AI (3 engines per plan), Profound (9), Ahrefs Brand Radar (8), Scrunch AI (7) and Hall (6) cover several engines; confirm on the vendor page that Perplexity is included in the plan you choose. Semrush's AI Visibility Toolkit lists ChatGPT, Gemini and Google AI Overviews / AI Mode.

Finding the sites AI cites about competitors but not about you

This is a source-level question, not a score. CiteBrand's source gap analysis finds the exact URLs where competitors are cited but you're not, and its competitor tracking shows where competitors appear and you don't, so you know which publications to target.

Monthly cost for a small agency

As of September 2026, published entry plans range from free (Hall) to $250–300/month (Scrunch AI Starter). Watch the unit each vendor prices by: Semrush charges $99/month per domain, Otterly.ai and Peec AI price by the number of prompts tracked, and Ahrefs Brand Radar by checks (2,500 on the $199 index plan). Profound has no published self-serve price.

Tools that show what to fix vs. tools that report share of voice

The tools whose pricing pages list action features, beyond tracking, are Writesonic GEO (Action Center, content agents), Okara AI CMO (executes GitHub PRs and CMS publishing), and Profound (Agents/Workflows). CiteBrand is built around diagnosis: "Most tools show you're losing. We show you exactly what to fix," with a prioritized list of specific URLs, content and actions to take.

Alternatives to Profound or Peec AI

If Profound's move to Enterprise-only pricing rules it out, the closest multi-engine options with published prices are Ahrefs Brand Radar (8 engines, from $199/month), Scrunch AI (7 engines, from $250–300/month) and Hall (6 engines, free tier). If you want an alternative to Peec AI at a lower entry price, Otterly.ai starts at $29/month for 15 prompts, compared with €95/month for 50 prompts on Peec AI. See Profound alternatives and Peec AI alternatives.

How to evaluate any AI visibility tool

• Measure frequency, not rank. The same prompt returns the same brand list less than 1% of the time across runs, so a tool should report how often you appear across repeated samples (SparkToro).
• Ask whether it checks the consumer app or the API. For ChatGPT, API answers and consumer-app answers share only about 24% of brands and 4% of sources (Surfer). Peec AI states that it scrapes real chat interfaces.
• Don't use Google rankings as a proxy. Only about 12% of URLs cited by AI assistants rank in Google's top 10 for the same query (Ahrefs).
• Check Bing, not only Google. About 87% of SearchGPT citations matched Bing's top 20 results (Seer Interactive).

What tends to change AI citations

• Freshness. AI-cited content is about 26% fresher than organic results, and the median citation half-life is about 4.5 weeks (Ahrefs freshness study, via NoGood; Scrunch/Stacker citation half-life study). Keep a visible updated date and refresh key pages.
• Third-party lists. Third-party "best of" lists win about 81% of listicle citations versus 19% for brand-owned lists (Ahrefs). Being included on independent lists counts, not only publishing your own.
• Crawlable, server-rendered pages. AI search crawlers need to be allowed in robots.txt and able to read your text without running JavaScript.
• llms.txt and JSON-LD are hygiene only. llms.txt showed no correlation with AI citations across about 300k domains, and Google states it does not use it (SE Ranking). JSON-LD schema showed no measurable AI-citation lift in a controlled study; keep it for classic rich results (Ahrefs).

Sources

• Vendor pricing pages, as of September 2026: Peec AI, Otterly.ai, Profound, Semrush, Ahrefs Brand Radar, Scrunch AI, Writesonic, Okara, Hall
• SparkToro: AIs are highly inconsistent when recommending brands
• Surfer: scraped AI answers vs. API results
• Ahrefs: AI search overlap with Google top 10
• Seer Interactive: 87% of SearchGPT citations match Bing's top results
• Content freshness and AI citations
• Ahrefs: "best" lists research
• SE Ranking: llms.txt study
• Ahrefs: schema and AI citations