Search “AI SEO tools” and you get a wall of near-identical pages, each promising to get you cited by ChatGPT. Strip away the matching screenshots and most of them are the same category: software that tracks how AI assistants mention, cite, and compare your brand, filed under AI visibility, GEO, or AEO. The question that matters is not which dashboard looks best, it is which job you are buying. One disclosure up front: we make one of these, SurfacedBy, so we start with it below and then cover the rest. We will also say where the others beat us, because a comparison that has us winning every row would not help you choose.
What actually separates them
Under the feature lists, these tools differ on a handful of things. We wrote the fuller checklist for evaluating any of them in what to look for in an AI visibility tool; here are the questions that do the real sorting.
- Does it only monitor, or does it also help you fix what it finds and check whether the fix worked?
- How many engines, and does it keep them apart? They cite very different sources, so a single blended score hides where the work is.
- How far past “were we mentioned” does it go, into the actual sources and pages behind an answer.
- Can you see the competitors cited in your place, and how the answer describes you.
- How it fits your money and your stack: what the cheapest real plan actually covers, and whether it is standalone or an add-on to a suite you already pay for.
The tools, one by one
Prices and packaging in this category change fast, so treat the numbers below as current public-plan signals checked at the end of June 2026, not permanent quotes. Confirm the live page before you commit, and watch what the cheapest tier actually includes, because that is where most of these tools quietly differ.
SurfacedBy, the one we make, is built on a bet most of the others do not take: watching the number is the easy part, and moving it is the hard part. It keeps the engines apart instead of blending them into one score, and it treats Google as three separate surfaces, since AI Overviews, Google AI Mode, and Gemini cite different things and a single Google number hides that. Tracking starts at 25 dollars a month for ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity, which is about the cheapest real multi-engine start in this list. The part we actually built it for sits on the 179-dollar Professional plan: all five engines including Claude and Google AI Mode, AI Overview detection, competitor profiles, the themes and sentiment AI attaches to your brand, and then the step most of the others skip, turning each gap into a routed action, a content draft, a community reply, or an outreach pitch, and re-measuring afterward whether the citation actually moved. That plan also connects Search Console and Analytics and opens an MCP server and a data API. The honest catch is two parts: we are a newer and smaller name than Ahrefs, Semrush, and Profound, so if brand-name reassurance is part of what you are buying, that is theirs; and at the 25-dollar entry we are a monitor like everyone else here, the act-on-it layer is the step up you pay for.
Profound is the enterprise category leader, recently funded at a billion-dollar valuation, and it shows in the product and the price. Its standout is Prompt Volumes: panel data on what real people actually ask AI, broken down by demographics, which is the closest thing in this whole category to keyword research for the AI era, and genuinely no one else has it. It adds shopping visibility, agent analytics, and deep citation analytics on top. The catch is access. Profound lists a 99-dollar Starter that tracks only ChatGPT and a 399-dollar Growth tier that adds Perplexity and Google AI Overviews, with everything deeper quoted as custom enterprise and real deployments running into the thousands a month. It is sales-led rather than self-serve. For a large brand that needs AI demand data and procurement-grade everything, it is the obvious call; for a small team, the cheapest useful tier climbs quickly.
Ahrefs Brand Radar is the right answer if you already live in Ahrefs. It tracks six engines (Google AI Overviews, Google AI Mode, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Copilot), leans on a very large prompt set, and reports AI mentions, citations, and share of voice, plus brand mentions it picks up in YouTube, TikTok, and Reddit. It is now available as a standalone product, but the pricing is per engine: roughly 199 dollars a month for each AI engine you turn on, or about 699 dollars for all six, and around 828 dollars a month and up once you add the Ahrefs base plan most teams run it on. It is built for SEO teams stretching into AI, not as a dedicated AEO workbench, and the per-engine cost is the thing buyers push back on.
Semrush tells the same story from the other big SEO suite. Its AI Visibility Toolkit covers the major engines with prompt research, sentiment, competitive comparison, and an AI-readiness audit, and runs about 99 dollars a month. It is sold inside the Semrush ecosystem, with the fuller AI-plus-SEO bundle (Semrush One) starting around 199 dollars a month. Like Ahrefs, the pull is integration: one login for classic SEO and AI visibility. If you do not already work in Semrush, you are buying into the suite to get the feature.
Peec AI is the clean mid-market monitor. From roughly 89 euros a month (about 95 dollars) with unlimited seats, it does daily tracking of visibility, sentiment, share of voice, competitors, and the sources behind answers, and it has agency plans for multi-brand work. Two catches: every tier includes three engines and the rest are paid add-ons that stack up (Claude sits on the top tier), and it is monitoring-first. It tells you where you stand; the acting is on you.
Otterly is the cheapest serious entry, starting around 29 dollars a month, and as a platform it reaches further than the price suggests, with a public API, an MCP server, a Looker Studio connector, GEO URL audits, and prompt research on its higher tiers. The Lite plan itself is lean: 15 prompts and four engines (ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity, and Copilot), with Gemini and Google AI Mode as paid add-ons. It is still the best low-risk way to start tracking at all. The catch is the same as Peec’s: it is a monitor, lighter on turning findings into work, and the cheaper the tier the more sits gated above you.
Knowatoa and Scrunch sit at opposite ends of the field. Knowatoa is the value pick: 59 dollars a month for ChatGPT, Google AI Mode, and AI Overviews, stepping up to 199 dollars for seven engines with API and Looker access, plus a free no-signup audit and a recommendation-logic framework aimed at commercial queries. It started as a budget tracker and is now pushing into drafting and improvement workflows, so do not write it off as only cheap. Scrunch is the enterprise end, from around 250 to 300 dollars a month, tracking the major engines plus Google AI Mode, AI Overviews, and Meta AI, with AI bot traffic feeds and a separate product that serves AI-optimized versions of your pages to crawlers, a tactic that is powerful and also its own debate.
That is not the whole field. AI also leans on roundups and tools we have not profiled here: SE Ranking, Frase, Conductor, and Nightwatch from the SEO and analytics world, social-listening incumbents like Meltwater and BrandMentions, and a fast-moving set of newcomers (Dageno, Siftly, LLMpulse, and more) that launch and merge faster than any list keeps up with. We picked the eight that come up most in real buying conversations. If your shortlist has a name that is not here, the questions above still sort it.
The short version
| Tool | Best for | Rough entry (mid-2026) | The honest catch |
|---|---|---|---|
| SurfacedBy | Tracking and acting in one place | $25/mo to track, $179/mo to act | Newer name; the action layer is the $179 plan |
| Profound | Enterprise + AI demand data | $99/mo (ChatGPT only) to custom | Sales-led; real depth is enterprise |
| Ahrefs Brand Radar | Existing Ahrefs users | ~$199/mo per engine, ~$828/mo all-in | Per-engine cost stacks |
| Semrush AI Visibility | Existing Semrush users | ~$99/mo | Sold inside the Semrush suite |
| Peec AI | Affordable daily monitoring | ~$95/mo (89 euro) | Engines are paid add-ons; monitor-only |
| Otterly | Cheapest serious start | ~$29/mo | Lite plan is lean; monitor-only |
| Knowatoa | Value + commercial queries | $59/mo, $199 for 7 engines | Younger; just moving into action |
| Scrunch | Bot traffic + agent delivery | ~$250-300/mo | Enterprise-leaning |
Picking by the job
Pick by the job in front of you, not the longest feature list.
- Already paying for Ahrefs or Semrush? Start with their add-on. It sits right next to your rankings, and for a lot of teams that convenience beats standing up a separate tool.
- Running many client brands at an agency? You need multi-client workspaces and white-label reports. Peec’s agency plans and Otterly’s partner tier are built for that, and our own command center groups every brand in one view. This is the use case where a single-brand monitor falls apart fastest.
- On a tight budget? Several tools, ours included, give you a free audit to start, and ongoing tracking runs from about 25 dollars with us or 29 with Otterly. You can grow into depth later.
- A large brand that needs to know what people actually ask AI in your category? That demand data is Profound’s, and the reason to take the enterprise call.
- Done watching, and now you need to move the number? Turning a finding into the content, reply, or outreach that changes the citation, then checking whether it worked, is the part most of these stop short of, and the one we built SurfacedBy’s Professional plan around.
A few questions that keep coming up
How do you measure share of voice in AI?
Run the same set of category questions across the engines on a fixed schedule, then count how often your brand shows up in the answers against how often your competitors do. The number only means something if the prompts are the ones your buyers actually ask and you run them repeatedly. A single answer is a clue, not a measurement, which is the trap our tool checklist spends the most time on.
What is the cheapest way to start?
A free audit, then a low monthly plan. Several tools, ours and Knowatoa among them, give you a one-off read for nothing, and ongoing tracking starts around 25 dollars a month with us or 29 with Otterly. Start small, find out whether AI is even talking about your category yet, then pay for depth once you know there is something there to track.
Do you need a dedicated tool if you already pay for Ahrefs or Semrush?
Often not, to begin with. Their add-ons cover the basics next to your existing SEO data, which is enough to tell whether you have a problem. You outgrow them when you need the parts they treat as secondary: deep per-engine source analysis, the themes and sentiment AI attaches to you, agency-grade reporting, or actually acting on the gaps instead of charting them.
Whatever you pick, the rule underneath them all is the same: there is no single “AI” to optimize for, so measure each engine on its own, then act on what the data points at. Choosing the tool is the quick decision. The months after it are where the visibility actually moves.
