Best AI visibility tools in 2026 — independent comparison

Two years ago, "AI brand visibility" wasn't a category. Today it's a venture-funded one, with at least 30 tools claiming to track how ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini, and Google's AI Overviews describe your brand. We've used most of them — some as customers, some as competitive research — and a few are genuinely good. Most aren't.

This is an opinionated round-up of the eight that are worth knowing about in 2026, with what each one nails, what it misses, and who should actually buy it. We build one of these tools ourselves (Brandswarm), so we put ourselves at the bottom and tried to be fair to everyone else. Treat the comparison table at the end as the TL;DR if you're skimming.

What "AI visibility tracking" actually means

Every tool in this list does roughly the same thing: it sends prompts ("best CRM for startups", "what does Figma do?") to ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini, and sometimes AI Overviews and Google's AI Mode, then parses the answer to see if your brand was mentioned, how prominently, and in what tone. The good ones add competitor benchmarking, sentiment analysis, citation tracking (which URLs the AI cited as sources), and recommendations for how to improve.

That's the surface area. The differences are in pricing, the breadth of surfaces tracked, how often the data refreshes, and whether the tool is built for an enterprise CMO, a solo founder, or an SEO agency. Let's go through them.

1. Profound

profound.fyi — the highest-profile name in the space. Profound raised a Series C in 2025 at a reported $1B valuation and serves 10%+ of the Fortune 500. If you're a CMO at a Fortune-500 brand and you want the AI-search equivalent of a Bloomberg terminal, this is where you go.

What it nails: "Agent Analytics" (tracking how your brand performs inside multi-step AI workflows, not just single answers), prompt-volume estimates (how often real users ask the queries you're tracking), and very deep integrations with the existing martech stack. The data quality is excellent.

What it misses: Pricing. The Standard plan starts at $99/mo for weekly data; daily monitoring and the genuinely interesting features (Agent Analytics, Conversation Explorer) sit behind annual Enterprise contracts that start around $25K. There's no free trial. For a Series-B-and-up team, this is fine. For everyone else, it's a non-starter.

Pick Profound if: You have an annual budget and you want the Cadillac. Skip if you want to start with a free scan and a sub-$200 monthly bill.

2. Otterly.ai

otterly.ai — the indie-hacker favourite, with 20K+ users and a $29/mo entry tier. Otterly went to market early and has done a great job of building an active community around its category.

What it nails: Price, simplicity, and the "GEO Experiments" feature, which lets you test how a copy change on your site affects your AI visibility over the next few days. The dashboard is uncluttered. Onboarding takes about three minutes.

What it misses: The data refreshes weekly, not daily, even on paid plans. For a category that moves as fast as AI search (where a model update can reshuffle rankings overnight), weekly is too slow if you're actively optimizing. The surface coverage is also narrower — ChatGPT and Perplexity are solid; Claude, Gemini, and AI Overviews are best-effort.

Pick Otterly if: You want to dip a toe in cheaply, weekly data is enough, and you're mostly interested in ChatGPT + Perplexity.

3. AthenaHQ

athenahq.ai — built by an ex-Google / ex-DeepMind team, AthenaHQ uses a credit-based pricing model ($295/mo for the entry tier) and pitches itself squarely at growth-stage SaaS companies. The team's pedigree shows up in the data quality.

What it nails: Credit-based flexibility (a slow month doesn't cost you the same as a heavy month), competitor heatmaps that make benchmarking visceral, and a recommendations engine that gives genuinely useful "do X to lift your score by Y" advice. Sentiment analysis is the best we've seen.

What it misses: The entry tier ($295) is twice what a small team wants to spend on a single tool. The UI takes a few sessions to learn — Athena is built for power users, and it shows in subtle complexity that takes a while to internalize.

Pick AthenaHQ if: You're a Series A/B B2B SaaS, you take this seriously, and you'd rather pay more for higher-fidelity data than save $150/mo.

4. Peec.ai

peec.ai — the fastest-growing entrant of 2025-2026. Peec reported 300%+ year-over-year growth in early 2026 and has built a reputation for slick visualizations and a particularly good prompt-suggestion engine.

What it nails: The "suggested prompts" feature, which proposes competitive queries you didn't think to track but that your buyers are probably asking. The trend visualizations are some of the best in the category. Strong multi-brand support if you're running an agency.

What it misses: Pricing is opaque — you have to book a demo for anything beyond the limited free tier. The free tier feels designed to make you schedule a sales call, which is annoying if you just want to evaluate the product. Limited support for non-English queries.

Pick Peec.ai if: Your team is running multiple brands and you don't mind a sales call.

5. Goodie AI

goodie.ai — tracks the broadest engine set we've seen (11+ AI surfaces, including some niche ones like Phind and You.com). Priced at $399/mo for the entry tier.

What it nails: Surface coverage. If you're worried about showing up in the long tail of AI search engines (Phind for developers, You.com for power users, Brave Leo for privacy buyers), Goodie is the only tool that treats them as first-class. Competitive heatmaps are sharp.

What it misses: $399/mo is steep for a tool you might already be paying for elsewhere (Profound, AthenaHQ, etc.). The extra engines beyond the big-five (ChatGPT/Claude/Perplexity/Gemini/AI Overviews) are mostly noise unless you're in a category where those niches matter (dev tools, privacy software).

Pick Goodie AI if: You sell to developer or privacy-buyer audiences and need to track Phind, You.com, Brave Leo, and similar.

6. BrandLuminary

brandluminary.ai — the agency-friendly tool. BrandLuminary built its early traction by selling to SEO and PR agencies who needed an AI-visibility module to add to their client services. White-label is a first-class concept, not an afterthought.

What it nails: White-label dashboards your agency can ship to clients with your own logo. Multi-client billing, role-based access, and an API that's well-documented enough to actually integrate. Sub-account creation is one-click.

What it misses: If you're not an agency, the product feels over-engineered. Some of the dashboard widgets you'd want as a direct buyer (a clean single-brand overview, a "what changed since last week" digest) are buried under multi-tenant configuration screens.

Pick BrandLuminary if: You're an SEO or marketing agency adding an AI-visibility offering to your portfolio.

7. HubSpot AI Search Grader (free)

hubspot.com/products/ai-search-grader — not a full tracker, but a free one-shot grader from HubSpot. You give it a domain, it runs a small set of prompts, and it returns a "Brand Sentiment" + "Brand Mention" score plus a few recommendations. HubSpot launched it as a lead magnet for their broader marketing hub, which is exactly what it is.

What it nails: It's free, it takes 30 seconds, and the output is well-designed enough to share around the office. As a first taste of "what does AI say about us?" it's the easiest entry point in the market.

What it misses: It's a one-shot grade, not a tracker. There's no monitoring, no trends, no alerts, no recommendations engine. You can't add competitors. The prompts are HubSpot's, not yours. Useful for the first 5 minutes of curiosity; useless beyond that.

Pick HubSpot's grader if: You want to know whether to care about this category at all. (Then come back here and pick a real tool.)

8. Brandswarm

brandswarm.io — that's us. We'll keep this brief and try to be honest about where we win and where we lose.

What we nail: Pricing and onboarding. The Starter tier is $49/mo (lowest in the category with daily monitoring), the free instant scan requires no credit card and takes 60 seconds, and we cover all five major AI surfaces (ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini, AI Overviews) on every tier. The trial is 14 days, also without a credit card. We auto-detect competitors from your scans and surface specific content recommendations.

What we miss: We don't have Profound's enterprise depth (Agent Analytics, Conversation Explorer) — if you need those, buy Profound. We don't yet have BrandLuminary's white-label features for agencies (it's on our roadmap for Q3 2026). And we don't track the niche engines Goodie AI covers (Phind, You.com, etc.).

Pick Brandswarm if: You want daily monitoring across the five AI surfaces that matter, you don't want to spend more than $50–$150/mo to start, and you want to begin with a free scan rather than a sales demo.

The comparison table

Which one should you pick?

The honest decision tree:

• If you're a Fortune-500 CMO with a budget → Profound. The Agent Analytics and Conversation Explorer aren't fluff and the data depth is worth the spend.
• If you're an SEO/marketing agency → BrandLuminary for the white-label, or Brandswarm if you want to wait for our Q3 white-label tier and pay roughly half.
• If you sell to developers (and Phind/You.com matter) → Goodie AI.
• If you're a Series A/B B2B SaaS with $300/mo to spend → AthenaHQ for sentiment depth, or Brandswarm at one-sixth the price if the sentiment depth isn't critical.
• If you're starting out and want to test the category before committing → run HubSpot's free grader and our free instant scan side-by-side, then pick whichever paid tool you trust most. We obviously have a stake in this answer; the truth is that any of the daily-monitoring tools (AthenaHQ, Peec, Goodie, Brandswarm) will move your dial if you actually act on the recommendations.

What we're not recommending

There are at least 20 more tools we evaluated that didn't make this list, mostly for one of three reasons: (1) they're rebranded SEO tools with a "GEO" wrapper but no real LLM-querying engine underneath; (2) they're early-stage products with data quality issues we couldn't get past; or (3) they've stopped shipping — several 2024 entrants have already wound down. Treat any tool that promises to improve your "GEO score" without telling you which engines they actually query with skepticism.

FAQ

How is "AI brand visibility" different from regular SEO?

Regular SEO ranks pages by how Google's index thinks they answer a query. AI visibility ranks brands by how often a language model mentions them inside a generated answer — and how favourably. The signals are different (it's more about citation-worthy content and structured data than backlinks alone), the engines are different (ChatGPT/Claude/Perplexity/Gemini, not Google), and the playbook is different. Same goal (be the answer when a buyer asks), different surface.

Is this category just a fad?

The category is fewer than two years old, and yes, half of the tools that launched in 2024 are already gone. But the underlying behaviour is real: Gartner has called for 50%+ of B2B discovery to flow through AI assistants by 2027, and Google's own AI Overviews already serve a significant share of informational queries. The pricing tiers and surface areas will keep shifting; the question of "does an AI mention me when my buyer asks?" won't.

Do these tools actually move my AI visibility, or do they just measure it?

All of them measure. The good ones (AthenaHQ, Profound, Brandswarm) also recommend specific content changes. Whether your score moves depends on whether you act on the recommendations — published a comparison page, fixed your schema markup, picked up a few high-quality citations from sites the AI retrieval layer actually trusts. The measurement is necessary; it's not sufficient.

What's the single highest-leverage change I can make?

Make sure your site isn't blocking the AI crawlers. Cloudflare's default "AI Audit" settings (and similar features at other CDNs) have started blocking GPTBot, ClaudeBot, Google-Extended, and Bytespider in 2025. A lot of brands who can't figure out why they're invisible in AI search are blocking the retrieval layer at their CDN without realizing it. Check your robots.txt and your CDN's bot-management dashboard before anything else.

Bottom line

In 2026, AI brand visibility is a real category with real revenue impact, and there are at least six tools (seven if you count HubSpot's free grader) worth evaluating. Pick one that matches your budget, your engine coverage needs, and your role (CMO, founder, agency). If you want a 60-second taste before any of this becomes a real conversation in your team, run a free scan below. We won't ask for a credit card and we won't put you in a sales loop.