The best AI visibility tools in 2026: 11 tools compared for marketing teams

Pick an AI visibility tool by who does the work. If your team has no AI visibility specialist, choose a platform that finds the gaps and does the work, like 3RD.

Here is the direct answer. For marketing teams without a specialist, in one market or many, 3RD finds why AI picks a competitor, ranks the work, and drafts it for you to check and publish. Teams with dedicated specialists who want the deepest data tend to look at Profound (enterprise) or Peec AI and Otterly.AI (smaller budgets). If you already pay for Semrush or Ahrefs, their AI add-ons are a reasonable place to start. The table below covers all 11 tools.

Most "best AI visibility tools" lists rank features. That misses the decision a buyer actually makes. Every tool on this page can tell you how often ChatGPT names your brand. Far fewer tell you why a competitor gets picked instead. Fewer still help your team change it before next quarter.

One disclosure up front. I work at 3RD, and 3RD is on this list. To keep it fair, every competitor fact comes from the vendor's own website, dated, and linked at the end.

Updated October 23, 2026. Prices are in the vendor's own currency and exclude tax. They change often, so check before you buy.

The short answer: the best AI visibility tool for each job

If you only remember one line from this page: decide whether your bottleneck is data or time. If it's data, buy the deepest tracker you can afford. If it's time, buy the tool that does the most work for you.

How we judged the tools

We compared what a buyer can check before talking to sales, on the vendors' own pages, on October 23, 2026. Seven criteria:

1. Price you can see. Is the entry price published, and what does it include?
2. AI models. Which assistants are tracked on the plan you'd actually buy, not on Enterprise?
3. Markets. Can you track more than one country and language, and on which plan?
4. Monitor or do the work. Does the tool stop at a score, give a list of recommendations, draft the work for approval, or act on its own?
5. Recommended rate. Does it separate being mentioned from being recommended over the alternatives?
6. Traceability. Can you click from a number to the actual AI answers and cited sources?
7. Measured effect. After you ship a change, can the tool show whether it moved, compared with prompts you didn't touch?

What we didn't do. We didn't score data accuracy. That needs a controlled test, with the same prompts sent at the same time to every tool, and no public comparison has done it fairly, ours included. We also didn't rank tools by how often AI names them. A tool can be good and rarely named. And we didn't invent an overall score out of 100. A single score hides the trade-off you actually face.

The comparison table: 11 AI visibility tools, October 2026

"Not described on its public pages" means we didn't find it on the vendor's pricing or product pages. It doesn't prove the feature is missing. Ask in the demo.

Watch the unit, not the price. Vendors count usage differently. In 3RD, one prompt is one question on one model in one market. In Peec AI, every tracked prompt runs on every model in your plan. AthenaHQ counts credits, where one credit is one AI response. Ahrefs counts checks. Before you compare two quotes, ask each vendor the same question: does a prompt multiply by models, by markets, or by both? We'll cover the full cost arithmetic in a separate guide to what AI visibility tools cost.

Monitor or do the work: the split that matters most

Monitoring is now a commodity. Every tool above sends questions to AI assistants and counts brand mentions. The real differences start after the dashboard. The tools sort into four groups:

The groups blur at the edges. Profound's agents can also republish content they rewrite. Writesonic and AthenaHQ lock their deeper action features to higher plans. Read the plan page, not the homepage.

Rule of thumb: count the hours, not the features. If nobody on your team has four hours a week to turn findings into pages and outreach, a tracker will turn into a dashboard nobody opens. A Head of Marketing at a B2B company described the failure to us plainly: they liked the data and never put it into their week.

The 11 tools, on one template

Every tool gets the same five lines, so you can compare like for like.

Profound

• Best for: enterprise teams with in-house AI visibility specialists.
• Strengths: the broadest engine list among the dedicated platforms here (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Mode, Gemini, Microsoft Copilot, DeepSeek, Claude, Google AI Overviews and Exa Search on Enterprise). Agents go from insight to brief to finished content, stage pages in your CMS and ping you for approval. ChatGPT Shopping tracking, ad creative for sponsored answers, an API, SSO/SAML and SOC 2 on Enterprise.
• Limits: no public price. The trial tracks 50 preset prompts in one region and one language, and you can't edit them.
• Pricing (October 2026): free trial; Enterprise at a custom price; an Agency Growth plan for agencies.
• Models and markets: 3 on the trial, up to 9 on Enterprise; regions and languages agreed in the contract.

More detail: Profound alternatives.

Peec AI

• Best for: analytics-first teams with someone who turns data into work.
• Strengths: deep views of sources, brand perception and recurring objections AI raises against you, plus fact-checking. Prioritized actions and suggested rewrites to a draft. Unlimited users on every plan.
• Limits: someone still turns the list into a plan and writes the pages. Multi-country starts on Pro. On October 23 its pricing page showed plan names but no amounts, so confirm the price for your region.
• Pricing (October 2026): €85, €205 and €425 a month (€70, €180 and €360 billed annually), at our October 18 check. Enterprise on request.
• Models and markets: 3 models per plan; 1 country on Starter, 3 on Pro and Advanced, unlimited on Enterprise.

More detail: Peec AI alternatives.

Otterly.AI

• Best for: small teams and solo marketers who want the lowest entry price and will act on the data themselves.
• Strengths: four engines on every plan, "Unlimited Countries & Languages" on every plan, and GEO URL audits and a crawlability audit included.
• Limits: Lite tracks 15 prompts with three recommendations a week. Gemini, AI Mode and Claude are add-ons, so the real bill grows fast: on Standard, adding all three costs $227 a month on top of $189.
• Pricing (October 2026): Lite $29, Standard $189 (100 prompts), Premium $489 (400 prompts) a month.
• Models and markets: ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity and Microsoft Copilot included.

More detail: Otterly.AI alternatives.

Semrush AI Visibility Toolkit

• Best for: SEO teams that own AI visibility and want it in the tool they already use.
• Strengths: daily AI tracking next to your keyword data, AI competitor analysis, prompt research and a site audit for AI readiness.
• Limits: 25 prompts is small for a full buyer journey. It reports; your team acts. Countries aren't stated on the pricing page.
• Pricing (October 2026): $99 a month per domain, billed annually. Extra users from $45 a month.
• Models and markets: mentions from ChatGPT, Google AI, Gemini and Perplexity.

Ahrefs Brand Radar

• Best for: Ahrefs customers, and anyone who wants to look up any brand's AI visibility without setting up prompts first.
• Strengths: an AI Visibility Index built from 496 million+ prompts drawn from Ahrefs' keyword database, so you can research competitors and whole categories instantly. Custom prompts on top, with fan-out queries shown for content gaps. Web Analytics shows pages that get AI traffic, and Bot Analytics shows AI crawler visits.
• Limits: an add-on on top of an Ahrefs plan, so the entry cost is two bills. The index reflects Ahrefs' prompts, not necessarily your buyers' questions. It finds gaps; your team closes them.
• Pricing (October 2026): Brand Radar AI from $199 a month on top of Ahrefs Lite ($129). Custom prompt packages from $50 a month.
• Models and markets: AI Overviews, AI Mode, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Copilot and Claude. Countries weren't stated on the pages we checked.

See also 3RD vs Ahrefs.

AthenaHQ

• Best for: teams where engine breadth matters more than markets.
• Strengths: 11 models on Starter, including Grok, DeepSeek, Meta AI and Mistral. A content optimization agent, brand-voice enforcement, robots.txt and llms.txt management, and on-page and off-page actions.
• Limits: Starter is single language and region. API access is a paid add-on.
• Pricing (October 2026): free Essential plan with 300 credits; Starter $295 a month with 3,600 credits (one credit is one AI response); Enterprise custom.
• Models and markets: 5 models on the free plan, 11 on Starter; multi-region and multi-language on Enterprise.

Scrunch

• Best for: enterprise brands with a web team ready to manage a machine-facing version of their site.
• Strengths: generous prompt volume (350 custom prompts and 1,000 industry prompts on Starter), seven platforms including Meta, page audits, and AXP, which generates an AI-friendly version of your site for AI agents.
• Limits: markets and languages aren't stated on the pricing page. AXP is positioned at Enterprise level. SAML SSO is Enterprise-only.
• Pricing (October 2026): Starter $300 a month ($250 billed annually), Growth $500 ($417); 7-day trial, no card.
• Models and markets: ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, Google AI Mode and AI Overviews, and Meta.

Writesonic

• Best for: content teams that want an AI article writer and basic AI visibility tracking on one bill.
• Strengths: every plan includes an AI article writer, site audits with automatic fixes and a WordPress integration. Growth adds sentiment, prompt diversification and a limited Action Center.
• Limits: three models and one market on all self-serve plans. The full Action Center and agentic workflows are Enterprise.
• Pricing (October 2026): Starter $79, Basic $199, Growth $399 a month, billed annually; free trial, no card.
• Models and markets: ChatGPT, Gemini and Google AI Overviews on self-serve; nine on Enterprise.

Conductor

• Best for: enterprise SEO and content teams already on Conductor.
• Strengths: AI Search Performance tracks brand mentions and website citations, sentiment and competitive share by topic, with AI bot crawling reports. Recommendations connect to Conductor Creator, its writing workflow.
• Limits: no published prices. The public pages name ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews "and more", without a full list.
• Pricing (October 2026): usage-based and not published. A free Essentials tier exists; AI search credits are listed from Growth.
• Models and markets: not fully published.

BrightEdge

• Best for: enterprise SEO teams already on BrightEdge.
• Strengths: AI Catalyst tracks mentions and citations separately, rates the sentiment of each response, maps prompts to buying stages, and compares the page that earns a citation with yours before producing a content brief.
• Limits: no published price or trial; demo only.
• Pricing (October 2026): not published.
• Models and markets: ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, AI Mode and Gemini "and other AI platforms"; markets not stated.

3RD

• Best for: marketing, content and brand teams without an AI visibility specialist that want the work done, in one market or several.
• Strengths: it explains why AI picks a competitor across five drivers (content coverage, content quality, agent readiness, authority and outreach), then builds a Playbook toward your goal with tasks ranked by estimated impact. You ask 3RD Agent what to focus on and ask it to draft the page. Content Agent writes in your brand voice, and nothing goes live without you. It reports Recommended rate next to visibility, measures each completed task against a control group of your other prompts, and Ads Recommendations shows where a ChatGPT ad is worth paying for and where to earn the answer organically. Each country–language pair is tracked as its own market.
• Good to know: prices are in euros. 3RD Agent drafts the work and your team checks and publishes it; the HubSpot push is in beta. SAML single sign-on is available on Enterprise, by agreement (see security).
• Pricing (October 2026): Starter €99 a month (€84 billed annually), Pro €299 (€254), Growth €499 (€424); 7-day trial, no card.
• Models and markets: 2, 3 or 4 models by plan, up to 13 on Enterprise, chosen from ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity, Copilot, Google AI Overviews, AI Mode and more, swappable at any time. Any market from Pro.

What is the best generative engine optimization (GEO) software?

The best GEO software helps you change the answer, not only measure it. Generative engine optimization is the work of getting AI assistants to cite and recommend you. Software that only counts mentions is AI visibility tracking. GEO software adds the diagnosis and the work.

By that test, our picks:

• For teams without a specialist: 3RD. It finds the gap, ranks it, and drafts the fix for approval.
• For enterprise teams with specialists: Profound. Its agents go from brief to staged content, with the deepest engine coverage.
• For breadth of engines plus an optimization agent: AthenaHQ.
• For content teams that mainly need articles written: Writesonic.

If GEO is new to you, start with what generative engine optimization is.

What are the best answer engine optimization (AEO) tools?

AEO and GEO describe the same job under two names. Answer engine optimization tends to be used by SEO teams and focuses on page-level fixes: structure, extractable answers, schema and crawler access. So the best AEO tools are the ones that check your pages as well as your mentions:

• Scrunch for page audits and an AI-facing version of your site.
• Otterly.AI for GEO URL audits on a small budget.
• Semrush AI Visibility Toolkit and Ahrefs Brand Radar if your SEO team already lives there.
• 3RD for agent readiness checks (can AI agents reach, read and act on your pages?) tied to tasks, next to content and authority work.

What are the best LLM tracking tools for marketing teams?

If you only need tracking, buy for three things: the models your buyers use, enough prompts to read a trend, and a link from every number to the real answers.

• Cheapest start: Otterly.AI at $29 a month with four engines.
• Best analytics per dollar: Peec AI, with unlimited users.
• Inside your SEO suite: Semrush or Ahrefs Brand Radar.
• Most engines: AthenaHQ.
• Tracking with mentioned and recommended split out: 3RD.

Two rules of thumb for tracking:

• Track at least 20–40 buyer questions per market. Small prompt sets are noisy. Brands in our data with fewer than about 100 answers a day swung roughly twice as much day to day as brands with 230 or more (median standard deviation 4.5 vs 2.1 points, 111 brands).
• Read the week, not the day. The median brand's visibility moved 12.5 points between its best and worst day in a month, with no change to its prompts.

Which GEO platforms should we shortlist for ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini?

Shortlist three, not eleven: one that fits your team's capacity, one that fits your budget, and one that fits your existing stack. Then check that each covers all three assistants on the plan you'd buy.

Why all three matter: assistants pick different winners. Across 60 brands tracked in 3RD, the most visible competitor was a different brand on different assistants for 37 of them (62%), on the same prompt set. Inside one brand, the gap between its best and worst assistant was a median 16 points (83 brands). A tool that tracks one assistant can tell you you're winning while a competitor owns the one your buyers use.

For the full buyer's checklist, demo questions and a scoring template, see how to choose an AI visibility platform.

Mentioned isn't recommended: the column most lists leave out

Being named in a list and being picked are different outcomes. Across 60 brands and 494,000 checked AI answers in 3RD, the median brand was mentioned in 19.8% of answers but recommended over the alternatives in just 0.2%. That's about one recommendation for every 65 mentions. A quarter of those brands (15 of 60) were never recommended at all in the month, even though AI mentioned them.

3RD's definition is strict. An answer recommends a brand when it clearly prefers it: it calls it the best option or tells the reader to go with it. Showing up in a list doesn't count, coming first doesn't count, and "the market leader" doesn't count. Branded prompts are left out, because a question that names you inflates the rate.

So a tool that only reports mentions can tell a brand it's doing well while AI sends every buyer to a competitor. Ask every vendor two questions: do you report recommendations separately, and how do you define one?

Worked example: from tracking to the work, in a demo workspace

Here is what the full loop looks like in 3RD, in a demo workspace: a sportswear brand tracked against six competitors in Denmark, Sweden, the UK and the US, across seven AI models and 207 prompts. Brand names are blurred, and the numbers are not customer results.

1. Where you stand, with the recommended rate next to visibility. Over the past week, the brand was second of seven at 45% visibility. The leader was at 51%. The bigger gap is in recommendations: 2.1% for the brand against the leader's 5.4%.

Enlarge

Competitor rank for the past week: second of seven on visibility, and further behind on recommendations. Demo workspace; brand names blurred.

2. The split by assistant. On the same questions, ChatGPT named the brand in about 60% of answers. Google AI Mode and AI Overviews named it in about 20%. A blended score would hide that.

Enlarge

Visibility by model: about 60% on ChatGPT, about 20% on Google AI Mode and AI Overviews. Demo workspace; brand names blurred.

3. Ask what to fix first. The team asks 3RD Agent: "What should we focus on first to get chosen more often when buyers ask AI which running shoes to buy?" The answer starts with the numbers: mentioned in 50% of answers, but recommended in 1.8%, second behind a leader at 5.4%. Claude and DeepSeek recommend the brand most (3.8% and 3.7%); Gemini and AI Mode almost never (0.3%). Its read: "a content and positioning problem, not a reach problem". Then three things in order: get shoe specs and claims in front of buyers, close the gap on Gemini and AI Mode, and test more specific prompts.

Enlarge

3RD Agent reads the numbers, names the problem and ranks three things to do first. Demo workspace; brand names blurred.

4. Turn it into a task and draft it. Each task comes with a checklist. For a page answering "What are the best stability running shoes for marathon training right now?", the steps are: draft against the brief's structure, cover the fan-out keywords, add a unique data point or expert quote, apply the patterns from the top cited pages, and publish at the target URL. "Create with agent" hands the draft to Content Agent. Publishing is still your move.

Enlarge

Every content task has a checklist, and "Create with agent" starts the draft. Demo workspace; brand names blurred.

5. Check what moved, against a control. When a task is done, 3RD compares the prompts it targeted with the brand's other prompts over the same weeks. That shows whether a change actually moved AI answers or only rode normal week-to-week movement, so the team stops spending time on work that doesn't pay off.

Enlarge

3RD spots when a change has gone live on the page and checks the result against the brand's other prompts. Demo workspace; brand names blurred.

Without a control, a before-and-after reading can't tell a real lift from normal variance. More on that in how to prove a GEO change moved AI visibility.

Rules of thumb for picking an AI visibility tool

• Buy for the plan you'd actually use. Price the models, prompts and markets you need, not the entry plan.
• One market is not "the US". A market is a country plus a language. If you sell in the US and Canada, or to Spanish-speaking US buyers, check that each is tracked separately.
• Three assistants minimum. ChatGPT, plus Google's AI surfaces or Gemini, plus whichever of Perplexity, Claude or Copilot your buyers use.
• Every number should open into answers. If you can't click from a score to the AI answers and cited sources behind it, you can't explain it to your CMO.
• Two weeks before you judge. A few days of data can point either way.
• Ask who publishes. Drafts with approval and autonomous publishing are different risk profiles. Decide which you want before the demo.

Failure modes we see when teams pick a tool

The dashboard graveyard. The team buys a tracker, checks it for a month, and stops. The cause is capacity, not the tool. Fix it by naming one owner and a weekly hour before you buy, or by buying a tool that drafts the work.

The one-assistant blind spot. The team tracks ChatGPT only and celebrates a rising score while a competitor owns Gemini. Track at least three assistants and read them separately.

The mention trap. Visibility goes up, pipeline doesn't. The brand is being listed, not picked. Track recommended rate next to visibility.

The add-on surprise. The entry price looked cheap until Gemini, Claude and a second market were added. Price the plan with every add-on before you compare.

The before-and-after illusion. A page ships, visibility rises a week later, and the team credits the page. Our task data says that reading goes up about as often as it goes down. Compare against prompts you didn't touch.

The list-of-lists bias. The team picks the tool AI names most often. AI names tools that appear in the most third-party lists, including lists written by vendors about themselves. That measures reach, not fit. Run a trial on your own questions.

About the data

The screenshots and worked example come from a demo workspace for a sportswear brand (six competitors; Denmark, Sweden, the UK and the US; seven AI models; 207 prompts), with brand names blurred. They are not customer results. The customer findings come from aggregated, anonymised 3RD data between September 19 and October 18, 2026: daily variance from 111 brands and 732,000 AI answers; model disagreement, recommended versus mentioned and driver scores from up to 60 brands, capped at three per customer organization. The sample leans toward Nordic brands. No brand, domain or prompt is named. These are observational data, not a controlled experiment. Competitor facts come from the vendors' own pages, checked October 23, 2026, except Peec AI's amounts (October 18).

FAQ

What are the best AI visibility tools in 2026? It depends on who does the work. Profound for enterprise teams with specialists. Peec AI for analyst-led teams on a budget. Otterly.AI for the lowest price. Semrush or Ahrefs Brand Radar if you already pay for them. AthenaHQ for the most engines. 3RD for marketing teams without a specialist that want the gaps found and the work drafted.

What is the best generative engine optimization (GEO) software? GEO software should help you change AI answers, not only measure them. 3RD fits teams without a specialist, because it diagnoses why AI picks a competitor and drafts the fix for approval. Profound fits enterprise teams with specialists. AthenaHQ and Writesonic add optimization agents and article writing.

What are the best answer engine optimization (AEO) tools? AEO tools check your pages as well as your mentions. Scrunch offers page audits and an AI-friendly site version. Otterly.AI includes GEO URL audits from $29 a month. Semrush and Ahrefs add AI tracking to SEO suites. 3RD ties agent-readiness checks to tasks, alongside content and authority work.

What are the best LLM tracking tools for marketing teams? For tracking alone: Otterly.AI for price, Peec AI for analytics per dollar, Semrush or Ahrefs inside an SEO suite, and AthenaHQ for engine breadth. 3RD tracks recommended rate next to visibility. Track at least 20–40 buyer questions per market, and read weekly trends, not daily numbers.

Which GEO platforms should we shortlist to improve visibility across ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini? Shortlist three: one for your team's capacity, one for your budget, one for your stack. Check that ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini are all on the plan you'd buy. Otterly charges extra for Gemini, and Writesonic keeps Perplexity on Enterprise. Then run all three on the same questions for two weeks.

Sources

Checked October 23, 2026, unless noted. We update this page when a product changes.

• Profound: tryprofound.com/pricing, tryprofound.com
• Peec AI: peec.ai/pricing (amounts from our October 18 check)
• Otterly.AI: otterly.ai/pricing
• Semrush: semrush.com/pricing/ai
• Ahrefs: ahrefs.com/brand-radar, ahrefs.com/pricing
• AthenaHQ: athenahq.ai/pricing
• Scrunch: scrunch.com/pricing
• Writesonic: writesonic.com/pricing
• Conductor: conductor.com/pricing, AI Search Performance
• BrightEdge: brightedge.com/ai-catalyst
• 3RD: docs.get3rd.com (Recommended rate, markets, AI models, 3RD Agent, Content Agent, HubSpot, Ads) and pricing

Next step

Write down 20 questions your buyers ask AI, pick three tools from the table, and run them side by side for two weeks. If your bottleneck is time, start a 3RD trial with those questions, or see all 3RD comparisons.

Written by

Magnus Windeløv

Head of Marketing

Magnus leads marketing at 3RD. He has spent his career in demand generation, growth and SEO for B2B software companies and consumer brands.

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Reviewed by

Isabella Willumsen

Solution Architect, AI/GEO Specialist

Isabella is a senior SEO specialist and Solution Architect at 3RD. She has worked in SEO and digital marketing since 2015, across travel, healthcare and multi-market brands.

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