Which AI visibility tool should I buy in 2026?

Last updated October 14, 2026. Written by the Third Coast AI team.

Six platforms cover most of the market for tracking how often AI engines name and cite a brand: Profound, Peec AI, OtterlyAI, PromptWatch, the Semrush AI Visibility Toolkit and Ahrefs Brand Radar, and they differ mainly in which engines they run, how many prompts a plan includes, whether they show crawler visits and sentiment, and whether they publish a price at all. For a company between $5M and $100M in revenue that wants a monthly read, OtterlyAI, PromptWatch and the Semrush toolkit publish entry tiers under $100 a month; Ahrefs bundles a small number of tracked prompts into its SEO plans and sells Brand Radar as an add-on; Peec AI lists four tiers without prices on the page we checked; and Profound sells enterprise contracts behind a free trial.

Everything below comes from each vendor's own site, read in October 2026, and we have linked the page we read in each case. Prices change often in this category, so treat the figures as what was published that week rather than a quote. We use PromptWatch and Profound ourselves, which we mention so you can weigh our view accordingly; our own prompt miner does the retrieval-on runs and captures the hidden searches the engines run behind a question, which none of the six show.

Which engines and metrics does each tool cover?

Two things stand out in that table. The engine lists differ more than the marketing suggests, so a tool that does not run Google AI Mode or Gemini is blind to a large part of the market, and a tool that does not run ChatGPT is blind to the one most buyers name first. And the unit of pricing is almost always prompts, which means the real cost question is how many prompts you need, and the answer for most single-brand, single-market companies is 60 to 120, which puts you in the middle tier of whichever tool you choose.

Does any tool show first-party data?

One free source does, and it is not on the list above because it is not a product. Bing's February 2026 announcement opened AI Performance in Bing Webmaster Tools, which reports total citations, average cited pages, the grounding queries the AI used when it retrieved your content, and page-level citation activity in Copilot and Bing's AI answers. Bing's June 2026 update added intent and topic groupings and Citation Share, defined as the percentage of citations for a grounding query that went to your site out of all citations shown. It is the only place any engine tells you directly what it cited, and it costs nothing beyond verifying your site, so it belongs in every stack. Google's documentation on AI features says sites appearing in AI Overviews and AI Mode are included in overall Search Console traffic under the Web search type rather than reported separately, so Google offers no equivalent as of October 2026.

How should you read the vendors' own descriptions?

Each of the six describes itself well enough that the differences are visible on their sites, and we would start there rather than with review roundups, which are often written by competing tools. Profound's product page describes answer-engine insights, citation analytics, sentiment and agent analytics, and Profound's pricing page lists the trial and an enterprise plan with API access, SSO and all-time data history, which positions it for larger companies with several brands. Peec AI's site describes visibility, position and sentiment in ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini, and Peec AI's pricing page lists four tiers; when we read it in October 2026 no figures were shown, so we cannot say what it costs. PromptWatch's product page lists ChatGPT, Gemini, AI Overviews, Claude, Grok, Perplexity and DeepSeek and reports an Amsterdam base with a New York office. OtterlyAI's pricing page is the most explicit about limits, down to API requests per month. Semrush's AI Visibility Toolkit help page is a knowledge-base article rather than a sales page, which makes it unusually clear about what the $99 buys. Ahrefs' Brand Radar page leads with the size of its prompt database and Ahrefs' pricing page shows how tracked prompts are bundled into the $129 to $1,499 a month SEO plans.

Which tool fits which buyer?

• A single brand in one market wanting a monthly read is served by OtterlyAI Standard, PromptWatch Essential or Professional, or the Semrush toolkit if you already pay for Semrush, and any of the three gives you a baseline for roughly the cost of a software seat.
• An agency tracking several clients will want PromptWatch Business (five projects) or OtterlyAI Standard and above (unlimited workspaces on the plan page), with per-client prompt budgets of 50 to 100.
• An SEO team that lives in Ahrefs can start with the tracked prompts bundled into the existing plan and add Brand Radar when it needs competitor benchmarking or the YouTube, TikTok and Reddit layer.
• A multi-brand or regulated company is the buyer Profound is built for, with the engine count, API, SSO and history, and the budget conversation that enterprise pricing implies.
• Everyone should turn on Bing Webmaster Tools AI Performance, because it is free and first-party.

Can a tool replace the diagnosis?

No, and the vendors mostly say so themselves when you read past the headline. A tool tells you how often you are named and what was cited; it does not tell you which decision factors the engines weigh for your category, which of your pages fail to prove them, or what the cited pages share that yours lack. SparkToro and Gumshoe.ai found less than a 1 in 100 chance of the same brand list repeating for a single prompt across 2,961 runs, so the tools are valuable precisely because they run prompts many times and average, and misleading when a single run is read as a result. The agency versus tool guide covers where the boundary sits, and the measurement guide explains how to set up the prompt set so whichever tool you buy measures something real.

If you want help choosing, the audit includes a recommendation on which tool to hold afterward, and we are happy to set up Bing Webmaster Tools and a first prompt set in whichever one you pick.

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