The best AI visibility tools track whether ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, and Gemini mention your brand when people ask questions in your category. This is a different problem from traditional rank tracking: AI engines synthesize answers from trusted sources rather than returning a list of links, so your Google rankings and your AI visibility are two separate numbers that often don’t move together.
In 2026, AI search is a mainstream behaviour. ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews collectively handle hundreds of millions of queries every day. If your brand isn’t showing up in those answers, you’re invisible to a significant and growing share of your market, even if your Google rankings look healthy. The tools below are built specifically to close that gap.
A good AI visibility tool does three things: queries AI engines on your behalf at scale, parses responses to detect brand mentions, and tracks changes over time so you know whether your content and citation-building efforts are working. Several also layer in competitor benchmarking and content recommendations. Here is how the main options compare.
What to look for in an AI visibility tool
The right tool depends on which engines matter most to your audience, how many prompts you need to track, and whether you want monitoring alone or monitoring plus optimization guidance.
Engine coverage is the first filter. ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews are the three engines that drive the most referral traffic today. Google Gemini and Microsoft Copilot matter for enterprise audiences. Any tool that only covers one or two of these will give you a partial picture.
Prompt depth is the second filter. Broad “category query” tracking tells you whether you’re getting mentioned at all. Tracking specific comparison queries, use-case queries, and problem-solution queries tells you where you’re winning and where you’re losing to named competitors. Platforms that only allow a handful of prompts per month won’t give you enough resolution to act on.
Third: actionability. Monitoring is easy to build. Knowing what to do about a visibility gap is harder. Tools that pair monitoring with content audits, citation analysis, and specific optimization recommendations save significant research time.
Fokal: AI visibility monitoring plus content execution
Full disclosure: Fokal is our tool, so weigh this section with that in mind. We built it because monitoring on its own never closed the gap for us. Fokal checks whether ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Google AI Overviews cite your brand for the queries that matter in your category, then turns each gap into a content action, a drafted page targeting the query where a competitor is named and you are not. That takes you from “you are invisible for X” to a publishable draft without a separate workflow.
Where the platforms below are monitoring-first (and genuinely good at it), Fokal is built around the execution layer: it pairs the visibility checks with content drafting, technical fixes, and outreach so the number actually moves, not just gets reported. It tracks the Google side in parallel too, because AI engines retrieve from the same search indexes, so the two channels tend to rise together. If you want monitoring plus the work that improves the score, see how your brand shows up in AI search or read how to get cited by AI.
Otterly.AI: best entry point for small teams
Otterly.AI is an AI search monitoring and optimization platform that tracks brand mentions across ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity, and Microsoft Copilot on all plans, with Google AI Mode and Gemini available as add-ons. It’s earned a 4.8/5 on G2 and was named a 2025 Gartner Cool Vendor for AI in Marketing, and it’s used by more than 30,000 marketing professionals.
The Lite plan starts at $29/month ($25/month on annual billing) and covers 15 search prompts across four AI engines with daily tracking. The Standard plan at $189/month ($160/month annual) expands to 100 prompts, adds API access, and includes URL-level GEO audits that score how crawlable and AI-readable your pages are. The Premium plan at $489/month ($422/month annual) covers 400 prompts.
The GEO optimization feature is what sets Otterly apart at this price point. Rather than just telling you that you’re not mentioned, it audits specific URLs for AI readiness and generates actionable recommendations. That’s a meaningful step above tools that only show a mention/no-mention result.
One case study on their site cites Instant Commerce achieving a 2x increase in AI search visibility; another cites an 8x increase in citations for a medical device company over 12 months. These are self-reported but they align with what structured content improvements typically produce.
Peec AI: analytics-first for marketing teams
Peec AI describes itself as “AI search analytics for marketing teams” and is trusted by more than 2,000 marketing teams. All plans track visibility across ChatGPT, AI Mode, AI Overviews, Microsoft Copilot, Perplexity, Gemini, and Grok, with support for multi-country monitoring and competitive benchmarking.
Standout features include AI-suggested prompt recommendations (the tool surfaces prompts based on actual search volumes, not just the queries you thought to add), Looker Studio integration for embedding results into existing dashboards, and sentiment tracking that goes beyond a binary present/absent signal.
Pricing is structured across Starter, Pro, Advanced, and Enterprise tiers. The Starter plan covers one project and one country with three models tracked; the Pro plan adds two projects and three countries; the Advanced plan covers five projects. Enterprise customers get custom model access (including Claude Sonnet 4 and GPT-5 Search) and unlimited scale. Exact monthly prices are not published on the site, so you’ll need to contact their team.
Peec is a particularly good fit for agencies that need to manage multiple brands simultaneously, given the project-based structure and Looker Studio integration.
Scrunch: enterprise-grade AI brand intelligence
Scrunch (formerly Scrunch AI) positions itself as an AI Customer Experience Platform and is trusted by more than 500 companies and agencies including Lenovo, Skims, Crunchbase, and Penn State.
It covers ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini, and Microsoft Copilot. Beyond standard brand monitoring, it includes real-time AI bot crawl monitoring (so you can see when ChatGPT or Perplexity’s crawler visits your site and whether the crawl succeeds), competitive benchmarking by persona and geography, and an Agent Experience Platform that serves machine-readable, compressed pages directly to AI agents.
Pricing is at the enterprise end of the market. The Starter plan is $250/month (annual) or $300/month-to-month, covering 350 custom prompts and 3 user seats. The Growth plan is $417/month (annual) or $500/month-to-month, with 700 custom prompts and 5 seats. Enterprise is custom. All plans are SOC 2 Type II compliant; RBAC is available on Enterprise, which matters for larger teams handling customer brand data.
The crawler monitoring is a capability most tools don’t offer. Knowing that Perplexity crawled your /pricing page but failed to index it correctly is directly actionable, where most tools only tell you the downstream result (you’re not cited).
Profound: deepest AI engine coverage
Profound monitors nine AI platforms: Perplexity, ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Grok, Microsoft Copilot, Meta AI, DeepSeek, and Google AI Overviews. That breadth is unmatched among current platforms.
Key features include Prompt Volumes (analysis of what millions of people ask AI systems), Answer Engine Insights for monitoring how brands appear in AI conversations, Agent Analytics for tracking site crawling and interpretation by AI systems, and an AEO-Optimized FAQ Generator. Pricing is enterprise and requires a demo request, so it’s best suited to mid-market and enterprise brands that need the widest engine coverage and can justify the investment.
The prompt volumes feature is distinctive: rather than asking you to manually define every query to track, Profound surfaces the actual questions real users are asking AI engines in your category, which lets you prioritize tracking the queries that matter most.
How Google and AI visibility connect
These tools do different jobs, and understanding the relationship between them saves you from building a lopsided strategy.
Google still drives the majority of search traffic for most brands. Traditional SEO (ranking for keywords, earning backlinks, optimizing page structure) remains the foundation. But AI engines don’t work independently of Google. ChatGPT’s browsing feature and Perplexity both index the web. Google AI Overviews pull from Google’s own index. Bing’s index feeds Microsoft Copilot. This means your traditional SEO work directly improves your AI visibility, but with a lag and with some important differences.
AI engines weight trusted third-party coverage heavily. A brand mentioned on authoritative review sites, industry publications, and comparison pages gets cited far more reliably than a brand whose only strong signals are on its own website. A page that ranks #3 for a keyword may never appear in an AI Overview if it lacks the citation signals AI engines look for.
The brands winning on both surfaces are doing two things together: building the structural authority that helps them rank on Google (technical SEO, quality content, backlinks) and then ensuring that authority gets translated into citation signals (getting mentioned on trusted third-party sites, adding structured FAQ content that AI engines pull from directly, keeping their entity data consistent across the web). You can track both sides of this with AI visibility tracking and a standard rank tracker running in parallel.
For a full breakdown of how this fits into a broader strategy, the AI SEO hub covers the tactics in detail, and how to get cited by AI is the most direct guide to the citation-building side.
Choosing between tools: a decision framework
| Situation | Tool to start with |
|---|---|
| Solo or small team, limited budget | Otterly.AI Lite ($29/month) |
| Agency managing multiple brands | Peec AI (multi-project structure + Looker Studio) |
| Mid-size brand, needs content recommendations | Otterly.AI Standard or Fokal |
| Enterprise with wide engine coverage needs | Profound or Scrunch |
| Need crawler/bot monitoring specifically | Scrunch |
The tools are not mutually exclusive. Several teams use one platform for daily monitoring and a second for audit-style content recommendations, particularly when those use cases aren’t well covered by a single platform.
Fokal takes a different angle from pure monitoring platforms: it runs the AI visibility checks and then creates content actions based on the gaps it finds, so you move from “you’re not cited for X” to a draft article targeting that gap without a separate workflow step. If you want to see how the monitoring layer works alongside that execution layer, AI visibility tools compared has a side-by-side breakdown.
Tracking AI visibility alongside traditional SEO
Most brands tracking AI visibility are still in the measurement phase. Getting a consistent monitoring baseline is the right first step. Once you have two or three months of prompt-level data, the patterns become actionable.
The queries where competitors are consistently cited but you’re not are your highest-priority content gaps. The queries where you appear inconsistently suggest a structural issue (thin content, weak third-party coverage, or crawlability problems) rather than a missing topic. Tools like Otterly’s GEO audit function surface the crawlability issues; tools like Peec’s prompt recommendations surface the topic gaps.
Track AI citations alongside your standard keyword positions. Winning one without the other means you’re leaving traffic on the table from whichever surface you’re neglecting. The brands appearing on both Google’s page one and in AI answers for the same query are capturing the full demand stack, not just half of it.
Use AI visibility tracking to set up your monitoring baseline, then layer in the AI search optimization tactics to start moving the numbers.