What are the best tools to track brand visibility in AI search?
Profound, Peec AI and Otterly are the three that AI assistants name most often, and their published prices span roughly $29 to $499 a month. Before you pick one, check whether you need one: four browser tabs answer the same question for free.
We asked five engines which tools track AI visibility. Otterly, Peec AI and Profound were named in almost every answer; the sources cited were largely the vendors' own sites. The category's answer is currently written by the category's vendors.
Our own measurement: 15 buyer questions across five engines, September 2026.
Which tools do the assistants actually name?
Three, consistently: Otterly, Peec AI and Profound. Scrunch appeared once. In the answers we recorded, the sources behind them were mostly the vendors' own pages — peec.ai, tryprofound.com, otterly.ai.
That last detail is worth sitting with. When an assistant is asked which tool to use, it is often repeating what the tools say about themselves. That does not make the answer wrong, and it does mean the ranking is not independent.
What do they cost?
Published entry prices run from roughly $29 to $499 a month. All three publish pricing, which is worth noting in a category where agencies mostly do not.
Check the current figure on each vendor's pricing page before deciding. Prices in this category have moved fast, and a number in an article is only as good as the day it was written.
| Tool | Entry price | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Otterly | from ~$29/mo | the lowest published entry point of the three |
| Peec AI | from ~€89/mo | mid-market positioning |
| Profound | from ~$499/mo | enterprise; the largest funding in the category |
What does a tool add over checking by hand?
Repetition and history. Checking by hand tells you today's Mention Rate. A tool asks hundreds of questions on a schedule and keeps the series, which is what separates a change from noise.
These systems are stochastic: the same question returns different companies on different runs. One manual check is a snapshot, and a snapshot cannot tell you whether last month's work did anything. That is the real purchase.
What a tool does not do is change the answer. Monitoring tells you your position; it does not move it. Those are separate jobs and separate budgets, and conflating them is the most common mistake we see in proposals.
When should you not buy one?
When you have not yet checked by hand. Ten minutes across four assistants tells you whether you have a problem worth tracking, and a large share of companies find their answer there.
- 01
Ask your category's buying question. In a fresh chat, without your company name. 'Best X for Y'.
- 02
Do it in all four. ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity. We call that overlap Model Agreement, and in our S&P 100 study it was 67% — so one assistant is not a sample.
- 03
Count the names. Three or four companies and none of them yours is a finding. Your name appearing consistently is also a finding, and it means you do not need to spend yet.
- 04
Then decide. Buy the tool when you have something to track, not to find out whether you do.
Questions people ask next
- Do these tools change your visibility?
- No. They measure it. Changing it means getting into the sources the assistants read, which is work on pages you do not own. Read any proposal carefully for which of the two it is selling — the prices are very different.
- Is a free check as good as a paid tool?
- For one moment in time, yes, and that is usually enough to decide whether you have a problem. What you cannot do by hand is the repetition: hundreds of questions, on a schedule, kept as a series you can compare.
- Why does UPAI not sell a dashboard?
- Because a dashboard was not the part our own clients were missing. They could see the number; they could not change it. We run the check by hand and then do the source work, and we say plainly that a tool does the monitoring more cheaply than we would.
Sources
Last updated 2026-09-25.