The one question to ask any vendor
Every tool in this category will show you a score. Very few will tell you how it was produced.
Ask this: how many times do you ask each prompt before reporting a position? If the answer is once per day — which is the industry norm — then the average position on the dashboard is an average of single samples of a process that returns different answers each run. The number will move whether or not anything about your brand changed, and no one will be able to tell you which.
This is not a gotcha. It is the difference between a metric you can act on and a metric that generates meetings.
The established tools
These are real products with real customers, and if you have budget they are reasonable choices. We are not going to pretend otherwise — a roundup that only recommends its author is not a roundup.
- Profound — the enterprise end. Broad engine coverage and agency-grade reporting. Priced accordingly.
- Peec AI — strong on competitor comparison, popular with European agencies.
- Otterly — among the earlier entrants; straightforward prompt tracking and link monitoring.
- Semrush and Ahrefs — AI visibility bolted onto an existing SEO suite. Sensible if you already pay for the suite; the AI-specific depth is shallower than the specialists.
- Similarweb, Scrunch, ZipTie — also in the category, with varying focus on share-of-voice versus prompt-level detail.
Where we fit, and where we don't
Unmentioned does one thing the list above mostly doesn't: the audit and every recommended fix are free, permanently, with no account. You can check where you stand without talking to anyone or entering a card.
It also states its methodology on every report — how many questions, how many runs per engine, and the exact scoring formula — and refuses to report an average position, because with these sample sizes that number would be dishonest.
What it does not do yet is continuous tracking. If you need daily monitoring across many brands with alerting and API access today, one of the established tools is the right answer and we would rather say so.
How to choose in practice
If you have never checked: run something free first. You may find you are already well covered, in which case none of these tools is worth paying for yet.
If you are actively working on it: you need repeated measurement over time, from any vendor that will tell you its sampling method.
If you manage many brands: you need multi-workspace support and API access, which currently means the enterprise end.
Check your own domain
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Common questions
Is a free AI visibility tool good enough?
For finding out where you stand, yes. For knowing whether a change worked, no — that needs the same questions asked repeatedly over time, which is what paid tracking is for.
Why do these tools disagree with each other?
Mostly sampling. AI answers vary between identical runs, so two tools asking the same prompt at different moments legitimately get different results. Differences in prompt wording and in whether a tool counts mentions or citations account for the rest.
Do I need a tool at all?
Not necessarily. You can ask the engines yourself, repeat each question a few times, and keep a spreadsheet. Tools are worth paying for when you want that done consistently, on a schedule, without you remembering to.
Related questions
Last updated 24 August 2026