Best AI visibility tools: what each one costs and who it fits

By Vladimir Boldyrev · LLMBrandScan · Published October 2, 2026 · Reviewed October 2, 2026

We make one of the tools below, so read this as a buyer's map with that bias stated up front. Every competitor price is from the vendor's own pricing page, read on 2026-10-02; the source is in the table. We compare price and shape, not accuracy — we have not benchmarked any of these tools against each other.

Live engine status (2026-10-18): ChatGPT (API with web search), Gemini (grounded), Claude (API with web search) and Google AI answers (AI Overviews) are answering. Perplexity Sonar is temporarily unavailable at the provider — scans run on the engines that answer, and an engine that does not answer is not charged. This note updates by itself when an engine comes back.

Most AI visibility tools sell monitoring: a fixed set of prompts re-run every day, billed monthly. On each vendor's public pricing page on 2026-10-02, Otterly.AI started at $29 per month for 15 prompts, Peec AI at $95 for 50 prompts, Ahrefs Brand Radar at $199, and Semrush's SEO plus AI Search bundle at $199, while Profound listed a free seven-day trial and custom enterprise quotes. LLMBrandScan is the one-off alternative: a $19 Quick check collects 90 sampled answers once, and a $149 Audit collects 625, with nothing renewing afterwards. Choose a subscription when you need a trend line and alerts. Choose a one-time scan when the question is a single one: does AI name us today, and who does it name instead. Competitor figures here are entry prices only, taken from public pages and not benchmarked for accuracy, so read the table for what each plan covers before comparing monthly cost against a single payment.

The comparison.

Prices are the monthly figures shown on each page on 2026-10-02, in US dollars. They change without notice.

Not shown because the page text did not give us a number: Semrush's separate AI Visibility plan tab, and Profound's self-serve agency plan. Profound's page no longer lists the $99 and $399 plans our July comparison recorded.

One-off or subscription?

Four of these tools are subscriptions that re-run a fixed prompt list every day. That is the right shape when AI visibility is a number somebody reports on every month, because the value is the trend, the alerts and the history. It is the wrong shape for a question that has an end: whether AI engines name your brand today, which competitor takes the slot when they do not, and which sources they cite. Paying a monthly fee for that means paying for tracking you do not use.

A one-time scan answers that question once, on a dated sample, and you can run the same scan again after you change your site or content to see the difference. If it turns out you need continuous tracking, the scan has told you what to track and you choose a subscription knowing which prompts matter. The method behind a sampled scan is in how AI visibility is measured.

Where the others are stronger.

Every subscription above gives you something a one-time scan cannot: history. Peec and Otterly track the same prompts daily, so you can see whether a content change moved anything. Ahrefs and Semrush put AI data beside the SEO data many teams already pay for, which is real value if you use that suite daily. Profound has the enterprise sales process, integrations and support that a procurement team asks for. LLMBrandScan has none of that: it has a report you read once and a price you pay once.

Try before you pay.

Before comparing plans, you can run the free AI visibility checker on this site: one brand, three unaided questions, one run a day. It will not replace a tracking tool, but it shows within a minute whether any of these tools has something to find. The sample report shows what the paid version looks like.

Questions.