AI visibility tools: the three worth checking

Three tools to keep running into

Dozens of products are marketed for this and three come up almost everywhere: Profound, Peec AI and Semrush. That makes them the sensible place to start, not the three most likely to fit your brand. The surface they sample is set out in the AI visibility definition.

Each does the same broad job and sells it on different terms.

What each of the three publishes about itself

The three publish very different amounts about themselves.

Being widely recommended tells you a product is known. It is not a performance result, and none of the three vendors compared here publishes a test that would make it one.

What each of the three publishes about itself differs, and that is most of what a buyer can compare. Semrush’s AI Visibility Toolkit prints $99 a month per domain billed annually, 25 custom prompts and daily rankings on one page. Profound prints a Starter plan at $99 a month and a Growth plan at $399, both billed yearly. At $99 it tracks ChatGPT only, and 50 prompts. Semrush charges the same $99 and names four engines.

The harder half of the verdict is what to do with the number once you have it. Whether it is worth paying for at all starts one step back, with what changed on the page these tools are watching.

Seven points is the gap between two groups of visits on the same surface these tools grew up next to, not a change tracked over time. Pew took it from the browsing data of 900 people instead of asking them, and it sells nothing in this category.

What coverage and sampling decide

Starting with three tools is not the same as choosing between them, and feature lists barely help. They compare what each product does, not what each product can see. Two things decide whether a reading means anything at all.

The first is coverage: which answer engines a tool queries. The second is how often it runs them.

Why those two and not the feature grid

Both decide what your number means, because the thing being measured does not hold still. Orbit Media Studios logged 13,184 citations across 1,765 answers, running 72 prompts for three business brands against four models weekly for about three months. Two things came out of it. The four models cited the same domain as each other 1.7 percent of the time. How much of a model’s citation set survived to the next week depended heavily on which model it was.

Both criteria rest on that. If two models agree on a domain 1.7 percent of the time, a tool watching one model is not watching a smaller version of the same thing. It is watching a different thing. And if a third of one model’s citations survive to the next week, a weekly reading carries movement inside it. The study cannot tell you how much to expect for your own brand. How much, for your own brand, is not something this set can tell you: it covers three brands and its author calls it directional. The metric most of them put on the front screen is covered in AI share of voice.

These three watch answer engines. None of them writes for you. Tools that do the writing are a separate purchase, compared in best AI SEO tools.

How a tool collects its readings matters for the same reason, and none of the three says. The clearest statement comes from a fourth, SE Ranking, whose product page says it sends queries to the platforms and captures the responses as a real user would see them. That one sentence on a vendor’s own page tells you more than any feature grid, and takes the same time to find.

1. Find who published the roundup

   Most tool roundups in this category are written by companies that sell one of the tools. That does not make them wrong, and an insider often knows the field best. It changes how you weigh the order.

2. Find where their own product sits

   All but one put their own product first. The exception puts itself sixth. The position is a fact about the document, and you can check it yourself.

3. Check one price against the pricing page itself

   Quoted prices drift. Profound turns up at four different figures across the articles that name it. Some match its page. One divides an annual discount back into a monthly figure the vendor never prints, and one carries a plan name the vendor no longer lists.

4. Check the date, then check the plan names

   The article that disagrees most about price is also the oldest one carrying a date, and some carry no date at all. A price in a roundup is a date stamp before it is a price.

Profound and Peec AI and Semrush compared

Every cell below comes from the vendor’s own page. Where a vendor publishes nothing, the cell says so. The three differ most on what one prompt costs you and how often it is re-run, so read those two rows first.

The same $99 buys one engine or four, depending on whose page you are on.

Read that table down each column: price, engines, prompts and refresh rate appear together in a single column.

Who each of the three is wrong for

Each of these three is a poor fit for somebody. This is drawn from what each vendor publishes and from how widely each is recommended, not from testing them side by side.

Profound

Recommended almost everywhere, and placed first by three publishers, one of which is itself: its own blog ranks 18 tools with itself at the top. Several articles quote figures its pricing page does not contain, so the plan below is read from the vendor’s own page. It is the wrong choice if you want more than one engine at the entry price, because $99 buys ChatGPT tracking and nothing else.

Peec AI

Also widely recommended, and the one column in the comparison table with no price in it. Its site names three surfaces, ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini. A homepage is marketing, not an inventory, so that is not proof it watches only three. If Google AI Overviews are what you care about, ask before you buy, because nobody states it either way.

A product view with no price attached to it

1. 1The three metrics are named on the page: visibility, position and sentiment. That is the shape of the reading you are buying.
2. 2The competitor table arrives with the product. You are not only measuring yourself, which is the same pattern every tool in this category follows.
3. 3A pricing link sits in the navigation and no figure appears anywhere on the page. That is the whole reason this tool cannot be placed in the table above.

Semrush AI Visibility

Semrush is alone among the three in publishing its surfaces, its prompt allowance and its refresh rate on the same page as the price: $99 a month per domain billed annually, 25 custom prompts, daily rankings. Skip it if 25 prompts is small for your catalogue. It is also the one whose placement in tool roundups needs the most care, for a reason that comes down to who wrote them.

What these tools still cannot do

Everything above compares what these companies publish. The harder question is what none of them can do, and the clearest answer comes from a company selling in the category, on the page where it sells.

SE Ranking’s product page names the engines it covers and puts a competitor field on the same screen. You choose the comparison set; the tool does not discover it.

What the seller puts on its own selling page

1. 1The engines are named in the page copy, not buried in a feature grid: Google AI Overviews, AI Mode, ChatGPT and Gemini.
2. 2The competitor field is the part that matters for sampling. You enter up to five, so you chose the comparison set and the tool did not discover it.
3. 3A free check sits above the paid plan, which means the first reading costs nothing and you can see the shape of the output before you price anything.

The independent side sets the same limit. Writing in Search Engine Land, Paul DeMott, chief technology officer at Helium SEO, puts it as advice: be wary of any vendor or consultant promising complete visibility, because it is not possible yet, and treat current tracking data as directional, not definitive.

Citations across ten models

The academic work points at the same gap from a different angle. CITETRACE, published in May 2026 by Yongsik Seo and four co-authors, traced 761,495 citation pairs from 11,200 queries through 112,000 responses across ten models and five providers. Its finding is not that models cite badly at random but that the pattern is structural.

That paper measures citation quality, not brand visibility, so it does not say what a tool would score. What it does establish is that most of the difference traces to the provider, not the model. Whose system answered mattered more than which model sat inside it, between 88 and 96 percent of the variance. Read that next to the Orbit figures above, where four models named the same domain 1.7 percent of the time. Both point the same way. The provider a tool queries is a condition on the number it returns, not a line in its feature list. Neither source measures one tool against another. Ask each vendor how it validates accuracy before you treat its scores as comparable.

Who writes the tool roundups

With no benchmark to check against, published recommendations are most of what a buyer has, so who wrote them is part of the evidence. Most of them come from companies selling a tool in the category, and Addition sells work in it.

What that means for the recommendations

One search-side pattern has been reported alongside this, and the headline carrying it claims more than the article under it does. Writing in Search Engine Land in February 2026, Danny Goodwin reported analysis by Lily Ray, vice president of SEO strategy at Amsive, showing visibility drops of 30 to 50 percent for sites publishing self-promotional best-of listicles after the December 2025 core update, with no sample published beside the figure. Google has confirmed nothing and announced no update aimed at them. What stands is a pattern a named researcher observed, not a rule a platform declared.

Read two rows of that table together. One publisher discloses that it is owned by the company whose product it ranks first, and that company’s own blog ranks the same product first and discloses nothing. The subsidiary discloses; the parent does not.

The pattern is documented, so you can weigh it, not take our word for it. Maher El Ouahabi read 27 comparison articles for EchoWi on 6 August 2026 and found 22 of them published by a company selling a tool in its own list.

One check costs nothing. Take whichever list you were about to buy from, find the publisher, and find where their own product sits in it. For the wider picture these tools are sampling, the AI visibility guide covers the surfaces themselves. Measuring AI visibility covers what can be counted without a tool, and the AI visibility audit covers a one-off reading against an ongoing one.

Suppose the answer sends you away from the list: the work behind the number is our AI visibility service.