Search for the best AI visibility tools and you will find a dozen ranked lists. Read the domains they sit on. Almost every one is published by a company selling an AI visibility tool, and in almost every case that company ranks itself first.
That is not a scandal, it is how a young category markets itself. But it leaves the buyer without a neutral reference point in a market where entry prices span $19 to $295 a month and the thing you are buying is not comparable between vendors.
We do not sell a GEO tool. Below is a scored ranking, the rubric behind it, and the arithmetic so you can disagree with us precisely.
How the scoring works
Each tool is scored out of 100: entry-tier cost efficiency (30), engine coverage at the entry tier (25), pricing transparency (15), capability depth (15), action layer (10), and free tier or trial (5).
Two decisions drive most of the results.
We score the entry tier, not the maximum tier. A platform may support ten engines while the plan you can afford tracks one. Scoring maximum coverage rewards exactly the practice that catches buyers out.
We keep quote-only vendors in and score them zero on transparency. Some published rankings drop them for having no public pricing, which conveniently removes competitors.
The full rubric, including what the score deliberately does not measure, is on our scoring methodology page.
The ranking
| # | Tool | Score | Entry | Engines at entry | Standout |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Rankshift | 85 | $92/mo | 9 | All nine models on every paid tier |
| 2 | Rankscale | 79 | ~$20/mo | Broad | Cheapest with real engine breadth |
| 3 | Rank Prompt | 74 | $49/mo | 6 | Six engines plus an API |
| 3 | PingMyBrand | 74 | $19/mo | 4 | Cheapest entry, generates fix content |
| 3 | geotoolbox | 74 | $79/yr | Mid | Reachability checks before tracking |
| 6 | Otterly.ai | 67 | $29/mo | 4 | 25-factor GEO audit per prompt |
| 6 | HubSpot AEO | 67 | Free grader, ~$50/mo | Mid | Free diagnostic, bundled |
| 8 | Semrush AI Toolkit | 61 | $99/mo per domain | Mid | Inside a contract you may already have |
| 9 | Scrunch AI | 60 | ~$250/mo | Broad | Diagnoses how AI agents read your site |
| 10 | Peec AI | 59 | ~€75-89/mo | 3 of your choosing | Cleanest share-of-voice analytics |
| 11 | AthenaHQ | 57 | ~$245-295/mo | Mid | Credit model, first-month credit |
| 12 | Nightwatch | 53 | Bundled | Mid | 50 monthly prompts at entry |
| 13 | AirOps | 45 | Free tier, paid unpublished | 1 | Strongest workflow and action layer |
| 14 | Profound | 43 | Free tier, then quote | 1 | Deepest analytics in the category |
| 14 | Brandlight | 43 | Quote only | Broadest | Action layer plus a strategy team |
| 16 | Ahrefs Brand Radar | 40 | $199/mo per platform, plus base plan | 1 per platform | Deep index, expensive all-in |
Figures cross-checked across multiple independent sources, July to September 2026.
Read this before you use the ranking
A low score means expensive, gated or opaque at the entry tier. It does not mean bad.
Profound scores 43 and is widely regarded as the deepest product in the category, with conversation-level analytics and agent traffic data nothing else matches. It scores low because its entry plan tracks ChatGPT only and enterprise pricing is quote-based. If you have real budget, the ranking is close to useless to you and the use-case section below is what you want.
Brandlight scores 43 for the same reason: it covers the broadest engine set in the category, and publishes no pricing.
The ranking answers one question well, which is what you get for what you pay at the point of entry. It does not answer whether a tool is accurate, well supported or pleasant to use.
The number no vendor publishes
Every vendor quotes a monthly price. Almost none quote cost per prompt, per engine, per refresh.
A prompt tracked against one engine is not the same product as a prompt tracked against five. Profound's entry works out around $1.98 per prompt for ChatGPT alone. Peec's entry works out around €1.70 per prompt across three engines of your choosing. Comparable headline prices, roughly three times the difference in what arrives.
Rankshift is the sharpest counterexample. At $92 it tracks all nine major models on every paid tier, including Claude, rather than reserving engines for enterprise. That single pricing decision is why it tops the ranking.
The engine coverage trap
Coverage is gated by plan, not by product, and this catches people repeatedly.
Profound's entry plan tracks ChatGPT only despite the platform supporting up to ten engines higher up. AirOps does the same, monitoring ChatGPT only on its entry paid plan with multi-engine coverage above it. Several others follow the same structure, advertising total coverage while the affordable tier delivers one or two.
Four to five engines is a reasonable working minimum: ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews and AI Mode, Perplexity, Gemini, and increasingly Claude and Copilot. Read the tier, not the homepage.
Picking by situation
Never measured before. Start with a free diagnostic rather than a subscription. HubSpot's AEO Grader is free, PingMyBrand offers a free instant report, and AirOps has a free Insights tier with 1,000 tasks a month. If your brand appears nowhere across your top twenty buying questions, you have a content and citation problem, not a measurement problem, and no dashboard fixes that.
Solo operator or small team. Rankscale for engine breadth at around $20, PingMyBrand at $19, or Otterly at $29 for the most proven cheap tracker.
You want every engine without enterprise pricing. Rankshift. Claude at the $92 tier rather than reserved for enterprise is genuinely unusual.
Mid-market with budget. Peec AI is the default, with clean share-of-voice analytics and competitor benchmarking. It raised $29M and reached reported ARR above $4M within ten months. The watch-out is that pricing scales on both prompt volume and geography, so model multi-country costs before committing.
Already paying for an SEO suite. Semrush AI Toolkit, Ahrefs Brand Radar, SE Ranking and Nightwatch are shallower than the specialists but arrive inside a contract and a workflow you already have. Worth checking before adding a vendor. Note that Surfer's cheapest plan contains no AI tracker at all.
Enterprise. Profound is the reference point. Brandlight, Scrunch AI, Evertune, AthenaHQ and Bluefish AI are all well funded and credible. Expect a demo rather than a pricing page, and ignore the ranking above.
Agency running many clients. Multi-client benchmarking matters more than per-prompt cost. Rankshift positions unlimited projects and users, and Rankability bundles tracking with content workflows.
High prompt volume. Gauge tracks 600 prompts daily across six platforms, the best cost per answer at that scale.
The measurement nobody runs prompts for
Cloudflare announced an AEO dashboard on 6 August 2026 that measures AI visibility from the network layer rather than by running prompts against engines.
It is structurally different from everything else here and cannot be priced per prompt because it does not run any. If it works as described, it sidesteps the biggest weakness of the whole category, which is that prompt-based sampling is an estimate built from a small number of runs. Worth watching rather than buying yet.
What none of these tools do
Monitoring is not optimisation. Almost every tool here tells you where you stand. Few change it.
The category is splitting. Passive monitors report share of voice and citations. A newer group including Goodie AI, Relixir, Superlines, AirOps and Brandlight positions around closing the gap rather than describing it. That distinction deserves more weight than engine counts.
It is also worth being honest about the underlying measurement. These tools run a fixed set of prompts on a schedule and record what came back. LLM outputs vary between runs with identical inputs, so a single-run difference is noise, not a trend. Sample size and refresh frequency matter more than dashboard design, and vendors rarely publish either clearly. No tool can guarantee citations.
How this guide was researched
Desk research, not hands-on evaluation. Pricing and positioning were cross-checked across multiple independent sources between July and September 2026, with conflicts named rather than smoothed over.
Sources disagree on Peec's entry price, quoted variously at €75, €89 and around $75. Check the vendor page before budgeting. Ahrefs Brand Radar is the entry where the headline most understates the commitment, since the add-on sits on top of an existing Ahrefs plan, putting full coverage in the four-figure range all-in.
Several tools were left unscored for insufficient public data: Conductor, AIclicks, Gauge, Cloudflare, seoClarity ArcAI, Quattr, Geneo, Siftly, Dageno, Wellows, Promptmonitor, Mentions.so, Evertune, Bluefish AI and Cognizo.
We do not accept payment for placement. Note that geotoolbox, scored above, publishes its own competing ranking placing itself first.
Capability claims here are reported rather than tested. Treat this as a shortlist to evaluate, not a verdict.
FAQ
What is an AI visibility tool? Software that runs a fixed set of buying questions against AI answer engines on a schedule, then records whether your brand was mentioned, which URLs were cited, and who was recommended instead of you.
What is the cheapest real option? PingMyBrand at $19 and Rankscale at around $20 are the cheapest tools doing continuous monitoring rather than a one-off scan. Free graders exist but they are spot checks, not tracking.
Which tracks the most engines at the entry tier? Rankshift, which covers all nine major models on every paid tier. Most competitors gate engines behind higher pricing.
Do I need a dedicated tool if I already pay for Semrush or Ahrefs? Often not. Their add-ons are shallower but adequate for establishing whether you have a problem. Move to a specialist when you need conversation-level depth or multi-client reporting.
Is GEO different from SEO? The measurement differs and the optimisation overlaps heavily. Being cited still depends on being crawlable, structured and quotable, which is mostly technical SEO with different success criteria.
How often should I measure? Weekly is enough for most brands. Daily generates noise you will misread as movement, because model outputs vary run to run.