Compares the main AI visibility tools (Otterly.ai, Knowatoa, Profound, Semrush, Ahrefs and more), what they do and cost as of July 2026, and how a business owner picks between a self-serve dashboard and a done-for-you audit.
By Heather Laskin · Published July 18, 2026
You keep hearing the same advice: find out how AI describes your business, because your customers now ask AI assistants who to hire before they ever see your website. A whole category of software sprang up to answer that question. Sold as AI visibility tools, AI visibility software, or an AI visibility platform, these products run prompts against the AI engines your customers use and report whether your business shows up in the answers. Some cost $20 a month. Some cost more than your rent. This guide surveys the whole category: what the tools do, what they cost as of July 2026, and when you need one (or don't).
An AI visibility tool is software that tracks how often, and how favorably, AI assistants mention your business when people ask the questions you want to win. Most of them are self-serve dashboards built for marketers, so if you run a local business the honest question is not which dashboard to buy, it is who will act on the findings.
Every product in this category, sometimes called an llm visibility tool, performs some version of four jobs:
All of that is measurement. Acting on the measurement (fixing your site, listings, reviews, and content) is a separate discipline. The measurement lane gets deeper treatment in our AEO tools guide, and the optimization lane in GEO tools.
Here are the tools that come up most in this category, with pricing pulled from each vendor's published pricing page.
| Tool | Best for | Pricing (as of July 2026) | Free option |
|---|---|---|---|
| Otterly.ai | Agencies and marketing teams on a budget | Lite $29/mo, Standard $189/mo, Premium $489/mo | 7-day free trial, no card |
| Rankscale | Teams that want pay-as-you-go credits | Essentials from $20/mo, Pro $99/mo, Growth $385/mo, Enterprise $780/mo | Free trial on Pro |
| Knowatoa | Small-to-mid-sized teams and SEO pros | Starter $59/mo, Growth $199/mo | Free 60-second audit, no card |
| Trakkr | Brand teams, with an agency-focused top tier | Growth $100/mo, Scale $500/mo | 14-day free trial, no card |
| Peec AI | Marketing teams and agencies | Pricing is published on their site | Free trial |
| Athena HQ | Marketers who want a free starting point | Essential free, Starter $295/mo | Free Essential plan plus a free audit |
| Scrunch AI | Mid-market and enterprise marketers | Starter $300/mo ($250/mo billed annually), Growth $500/mo ($417/mo annually) | 7-day trial of Starter, no card |
| Profound | Enterprise and agency marketing teams | Starter $99/mo, Growth $399/mo (shown billed yearly), Enterprise custom | Free trial on Growth, free AEO report |
| Semrush AI Visibility Toolkit | Marketers already in the Semrush suite | $99/mo per domain, billed annually | 7-day free trial |
| Ahrefs Brand Radar | Larger brands doing AEO at scale | Pricing published on its site (upper end of the market, sold in Select and All Platforms tiers) | Free AI Visibility Checker preview |
Budget self-serve. Otterly.ai ($29 entry), Rankscale ($20 credit-based entry), Knowatoa ($59), and Trakkr ($100) are the realistic starting points for small teams. All four are self-serve: you pick the prompts, read the dashboards, and interpret prompt-level results yourself. Knowatoa's free 60-second audit and Otterly's no-card trial are the cheapest ways to see real data about your own business.
Mid-market. Peec AI, Athena HQ, Scrunch AI, and Profound target marketing teams and agencies. Athena HQ's free Essential plan is a rare permanent free tier, but its first paid step is $295/mo. Scrunch AI starts at $300/mo on monthly billing. Profound's $99 Starter covers one answer engine and 50 prompts; its $399 Growth tier serves teams tracking several engines. These products assume an in-house operator who lives in the dashboard.
Enterprise and suite add-ons. Semrush's AI Visibility Toolkit ($99/mo per domain, billed annually) fits a marketer who already works inside Semrush. Ahrefs Brand Radar sits at the top of the market, with pricing published on its site in Select and All Platforms tiers, built for large brands tracking AI answers, citations, and content sources at scale.
Here is the honest split. Every tool above tells you where you stand, week after week. None of them fix anything. The dashboard shows your plumbing company absent from AI answers; someone still has to rewrite the site, clean up the listings, add the schema, and earn the citations.
That someone is the real cost. The subscriptions run $20 to several hundred a month, but the hidden line item is the marketer who runs them. If you have that person, a tool is a sound buy. If you are the owner, the office manager, and the marketing department at once, a dashboard is a subscription to bad news.
AIFindMyBusiness sits on the other side of the split. Instead of a dashboard, you get an AI visibility audit: a 0-100 scorecard of how AI engines describe and surface your business, a competitor appearance report, a website readiness review, and a list of the specific blockers holding you back. As of July 2026, a preview audit is free, the full audit is a one-time $400 (listed as the AI Visibility Snapshot on our pricing page), and the Growth Plan at $349/mo does the ongoing work for you instead of handing you charts.
A self-serve tool is the better choice when you have an in-house marketer, need frequent tracking across many prompts, or run an agency reporting to clients. A done-for-you audit is the better choice when you want the findings acted on and nobody on staff owns marketing.
Whatever you pick, start with measurement that costs nothing: run a free preview audit and see how the AI engines your customers use describe your business today. If the preview surfaces problems, the full AI visibility audit diagnoses them for $400 one-time. To go deeper on the category, read the measurement lane in AEO tools and the optimization lane in GEO tools, and if you are weighing outside help, read Do you need a GEO agency?
See also: What Is AEO? and What Is Generative Engine Optimization?