AI visibility tools compared
AI visibility tools fall into four groups: prompt monitors that track mentions across assistants, readiness auditors that score how machine-readable your site is, published indexes that measure and rank brands openly, and agencies that do the work for you. Most buyers need one of the first two, and confusing them is the most common mistake.
Updated 19 July 2026
A note on what this page is
We publish an index in this category, so we are not a disinterested party and it would be silly to pretend otherwise. What follows groups the market by what the products do, not by who we think is best, and includes a plain section on where we are the wrong choice.
We deliberately do not publish competitors' prices or feature lists. This category changes monthly, and a stale comparison table presented as current is exactly the kind of confidently-wrong artefact we spend our time arguing against. Check current details with each vendor.
The four groups
1. Prompt monitors
What they do: ask AI assistants a set of questions on a schedule and record which brands get named, usually presented as a dashboard with alerts and trends.
Buy one when: you want ongoing operational awareness — did our mentions drop this week, which prompts are we losing, what changed after the campaign.
Watch for: how many assistants are covered, how many times each prompt is sampled, and whether the questions are ones your buyers would actually ask.
Examples as of mid-2026: Profound, Peec AI, Scrunch AI, Otterly.AI, Rankscale, Brandlight, Evertune. The large SEO suites have added monitoring features too — Semrush and Ahrefs both ship something in this space.
2. Readiness auditors
What they do: crawl your site the way an AI agent would and score how readable, parseable and citable it is — rendering, structured data, entity clarity, crawler access.
Buy one when: you suspect something technical is blocking you, or you want a concrete engineering to-do list.
Watch for: whether it fetches as an AI crawler or just runs a normal SEO audit with new labels. Many "AI readiness" tools are a re-badged technical crawl.
Note: this half is cheap to check and we give it away — our free scan is exactly this, no signup.
3. Published indexes
What they do: measure brands across a category and publish the results as a standing, citable ranking rather than a private dashboard.
Buy one when: you want a defensible external number — for a board, a pitch, or a claim you need to stand behind publicly — and you care how you compare with named competitors rather than only tracking yourself.
Watch for: whether the methodology is published, whether the cohort you are compared against is stated, and whether readings carry confidence intervals.
This is what we do. The index, and the methodology behind it.
4. Agencies and done-for-you services
What they do: run the strategy and produce the content and digital PR, usually on a retainer.
Buy one when: you have budget and no capacity, and you want outcomes rather than instrumentation.
Watch for: anyone guaranteeing mentions or placements. There is no placement to buy in a generated answer, so a guarantee is a promise about something outside the seller's control.
What actually distinguishes them
Once you know the group, these are the questions that separate a real measurement from a dashboard of vibes:
| Question | Why it matters |
|---|---|
| How many assistants? | Being named by ChatGPT says little about Gemini. Single-provider readings are a partial picture presented as a whole one. |
| How many samples per question? | Answers are non-deterministic. Ask once and you have an anecdote, not a rate. |
| Are the questions buyer-phrased? | "Tell me about Acme" always returns something. "Best supplier of X" is the question that matters. |
| Is there a confidence interval? | A rate without one cannot tell you whether a change is real or noise. |
| Who are you compared against? | Share of voice divides by a cohort. If the cohort omits real rivals, your share is overstated — and few vendors publish theirs. |
| What happens when the method changes? | If the question set changes and the number moves, that is the tool moving, not your brand. Ask how they version it. |
We wrote a fuller guide to those questions, including the ones that are uncomfortable for us to answer.
Where we are the wrong choice
Plainly, because a survey that concludes "buy ours" is not a survey:
- You want daily alerts and an operational dashboard. We publish periodic readings, not a live monitoring feed. A prompt monitor fits better.
- You want someone to do the work. We measure and prescribe; we do not write your content or run your digital PR.
- You want to track hundreds of prompts across dozens of markets. Our corpora are deliberately small, curated and versioned, which is a different trade-off.
- You are not in a category we cover yet. We can add one, but if you need an answer this week, we may not be it.
Where we do fit: you want an external, published, methodologically explicit number you can point at — and you want to know how you stand against a stated field rather than only against your own past.