People now ask AI assistants what to buy. ChatGPT has 700 million weekly active users, and about half of all messages are people asking for advice or information. Monthly visits to generative AI platforms grew 70% year over year to 9.5 billion, and Claude's share of those visits grew from about 2% to about 9% in the same period.
AI visibility tools answer two questions about that traffic: do the models mention your brand, and which of your pages do they cite?
In this guide I want to compare 8 products on which AI they track, pricing, and how each one collects its data.
What are the best AI visibility tools for tracking brand mentions in ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Claude?
The best AI visibility tools in 2026 are ByDefault, Peec, Profound, Promptwatch, Otterly, Scrunch, Semrush AI Visibility, and Ahrefs Brand Radar. Choosing one depends on which AI providers (Gemini, Claude, etc.) you want to track and whether those providers are included with the plan you can afford.
What should you compare before choosing an AI visibility tool?
Compare which engines come with the exact plan you would buy, how many prompts you can track, how the tool collects answers, and whether it measures AI traffic to your own site. Most vendors gate engines and features by tier.
The checklist I would run against any vendor:
- AI models included at your tier. Profound's Starter plan tracks ChatGPT only, and Otterly sells Claude, Gemini, and Google AI Mode as paid add-ons.
- Prompt allowance and how often prompts run: daily, weekly, or monthly.
- What's the collection method? Is it real UI sessions, API calls, a pre-collected prompt index, or generated prompts? More on this below.
- Does it track citations and sources separately? Sources are URLs a model read while answering, and citations as the subset shown in the answer.
- Can it show your website's AI traffic?
Which AI visibility tools track ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini, Google AI Overviews, and Copilot?
ByDefault and Promptwatch include Claude on their standard plans, as one of the four models you pick. Peec adds Claude as a paid upgrade, Otterly sells it as an add-on, Ahrefs covers it through Custom Prompts, and Scrunch and Profound keep it for Enterprise.
ByDefault's list is ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Google AI Overviews, Cursor, Codex, Claude Code, and OpenCode, and you pick any four per plan. Promptwatch works the same way: four models per plan from a list that includes ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews and AI Mode, Claude, Gemini, Meta, DeepSeek, Grok, OpenCode, and Claude Code (but no Codex or Cursor).
Profound's enterprise plan goes up to nine answer engines including Grok and DeepSeek.
Which AI visibility tool is best for your team?
ByDefault
ByDefault tracks brand mentions and citations across ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Google AI Overviews, and the coding agents Cursor, Codex, Claude Code, and OpenCode. Each tracked prompt shows who the models recommend, who they cite, and the exact searches they ran to decide (this is what to optimize articles for!).
Those searches become your content plan: you see the web search queries the model sent to the web, and can then publish the page that answers it.
ByDefault analyzes over 1,000,000 AI crawler requests daily for companies like Upstash and Context7 (an open-source project with 62,000+ GitHub stars) and shows which pages the models cite, and which make it into training data.
Three plans, all with daily tracking, crawler and citation analytics, and unlimited team seats:
- Starter, $99 per month: 1 project, 50 prompts, 4 models, 6,000 AI answers a month.
- Growth, $249 per month: 150 prompts, plus 5 articles a month written to win the prompts you track.
- Scale, $599 per month: 350 prompts and 10 articles a month.
The articles on Growth and Scale are written with the newest models (currently Claude Fable 5.1) and come with editable diagrams, formatted screenshots and images, and comparison tables. Each one targets a prompt you already track, so you can watch it show up in the answers right after it goes live.
Peec
Peec tracks your visibility, position, sentiment, and share of voice daily against competitors. Its source gap view lists domains that name your competitors without naming you. The Starter plan is $95 per month for 50 prompts across three models of your choice, with a free trial. Claude Sonnet and Claude Haiku cost extra.
Profound
Profound runs structured prompts across AI platforms daily and tracks citations, sentiment, ranking, and competitive presence. The Starter plan is $99 per month billed yearly for 50 prompts on ChatGPT alone; Growth is $399 per month for three engines. Its Agent Analytics connects to Cloudflare, Vercel, AWS, and Google Analytics to measure AI bot traffic. The full engine list opens up on the custom enterprise plan.
Profound pricing as of September 2026
Promptwatch
Promptwatch's Essential plan is $95 per month for one project, four models of your choice from an eleven-model list, 50 prompts, and 6,000 responses. The Business tier adds state and city tracking, which helps local brands.
Otterly
Otterly has the cheapest entry: the Lite plan is $29 per month for 15 prompts across ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity, and Copilot. Claude is an add-on that costs $29 to $439 per month depending on your tier.
Scrunch
Scrunch's Core plan is $250 per month for 125 prompts on ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, and Copilot, with a 7-day trial. Claude, Gemini, AI Mode, Grok, and Meta AI are Enterprise only.
Agency Core is $500 per month. It structures the work as Observe, Understand, Act, Deliver, and aims at enterprise, mid-market, and agency teams.
Semrush AI Visibility
Semrush generates prompts from your domain and location, then tracks the answers weekly across Google AI Overviews, AI Mode, ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini.
The cheapest plan with AI Search is Starter at $199 per month, with 50 prompts tracked daily. A free Semrush account shows a high-level snapshot of any domain's AI mentions, citations, and visibility score, and paid plans come with a 7-day trial. It makes sense when your team already pays for Semrush.
Ahrefs Brand Radar
Ahrefs runs two modes. Custom Prompts starts at $50 per month and comes free in Ahrefs paid plans, covering Claude alongside the other engines. The AI Visibility Index is $199 per month and builds on real search queries expanded into 459M+ prompts, re-tested monthly. Like Semrush, it fits best when you already use the platform.
How do AI visibility tools measure brand mentions and citations?
AI visibility tools run a set of prompts against AI engines on a schedule, then parse each answer for brand mentions and cited URLs. One data point is one prompt, run on one model, from one location, on one day.
One thing thats different between the products is how they get these answers:
Native web search and UI scraping both give you the model's real answer for a prompt (but scraping depends on the web interface staying the same, while native search lets the model use it's own search tool directly).
By the way, as of September 2026, almost all large models read HTML only, so paywalled or JavaScript-dependent content is invisible to them.
Why might an AI visibility tool not match what you see in ChatGPT or Claude?
AI models can give different answers to the same prompt, so a dashboard will rarely match your own spot check word for word. Tracked prompts work as a trend line, and single answers work as examples.
One thing I find interesting is that even LLMs configured to be deterministic still showed accuracy variation of up to 15% across repeated runs. And on top of model variance, API answers can be different from what a signed-in person sees.
The same logic rules out comparing scores between tools. Visibility scores from two vendors use different prompt sets, engine coverage, and citation parsing, so a 40 in one tool and a 60 in another describe different measurements. The trend inside one tool, with the prompt set, models, and locations held steady, is the number that means something.
There are differences on parsing, too. ByDefault uses an LLM to read each answer and pull out the brand mentions, which costs more than regex matching but avoids two problems. Regex counts a word as a mention even when it means something else.
"Notion" the app and "notion" the idea look the same to a pattern match, and so do "Linear" the tracker and "linear" the adjective. And regex only finds the names you told it to look for. An LLM reads the whole answer and lists every product it names, so you also see competitors you did not know to add.
How much do AI visibility tools cost in 2026?
Entry prices run from $29 per month for Otterly Lite to $250 per month for Scrunch Core, and the four dedicated trackers (Peec, Promptwatch, ByDefault, Profound) start between $95 and $99 per month. Prices change often, so check the pricing page before you buy.
Note: Otterly's Claude add-on alone costs more than its whole Lite plan on higher tiers.
Can AI visibility tools help you become visible in ChatGPT?
Yes, as a guide for what to publish. The tools show which prompts you're not recommended for, which sources the models use to answer the prompt, and in ByDefault's case the exact searches the models ran before answering, which tells you what page to write next.
Getting cited comes down to:
- Tracking your prompts
- Finding content gaps and the highest leverage pieces to write
- Publishing new or refreshing old content
- Watching mentions and citations grow
ByDefault's Growth plan includes 5 ready-to-publish articles a month with diagrams, images, and tables.
Summary
- ByDefault for the most accurate tracking. It asks each model with its native web search on, counts only real brand mentions and finds competitors you never added, and shows what AI crawlers fetch from your own site.
- Peec for a $95 entry with Copilot and Perplexity among its six engines (you pick three).
- Promptwatch if you want to track Perplexity, Meta, DeepSeek, and Grok
- Otterly for the cheapest start at $29 per month.
- Profound or Scrunch for enterprise and agency budgets.
- Semrush or Ahrefs when you already pay for their SEO suite.