The full landscape people searching for individual tool names end up piecing together from separate, commission-funded listicles. Here it is in one place: dedicated trackers, SEO suites with an AI-visibility bolt-on, and two tools outside our formal ledger that we verified specifically for this page. We are enrolled in no affiliate programme, so nothing below is ordered to favour anything we earn from.
Checked 2026-07-14 · full disclosure ledger · the site's standing tools table
Every one of these tools reports "AI visibility" as a single number. None of them are measuring the same thing when they say it.
A brand mention is your name in the text of an answer. A citation is a source link the model drew on to write it. Semrush's own Ghost Citations study found 61.7% of cited pages never got their brand named in the answer text. Treat "brand mentions" and "cited domains" as two columns, not one, in every table below.
Ordered by verified entry price, lowest first. Tools with no published price ladder sort last within this group regardless of size or funding.
| Tool | Entry price | Measures | Affiliate programme | Pays us |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Otterly.ai | $29/mo entry tier | Brand mentions across engines; separately tracks referenced links | 20%, recurring, first 12 months only | NOTHING |
| Rankscale | from ~$20/mo | Brand mentions, share of voice, and citation frequency by source URL | 10%, recurring, capped at 12 months | NOTHING |
| Nightwatch | published on site | Brand mentions ("AI Visibility Score") and cited sources ("Active Citations") | 30%, lifetime recurring | NOTHING |
| Peec AI | from about €89/mo | Visibility, position and sentiment for mentions; separately lists key cited sources | None found | NOTHING |
| Profound | not published | Large-scale citation dataset (680M+ citations analysed); enterprise-tier reporting | agency partner programme, rates not disclosed publicly | NOTHING |
Scrunch and Gumshoe.ai are not yet in src/data/tools.json, so they do not appear on who pays us or the standing tools table. We fetched both directly on 2026-07-14 to answer this page honestly, and hold them to the same rule: no number without a source and a date.
Acquired by Sitecore for about $225M, announced 3 June 2026. Formerly scrunchai.com, which now redirects.
Co-authored the SparkToro study on answer instability that this site cites (see below).
Established SEO and content platforms that bolted AI visibility onto an existing product, rather than building a tracker as the whole business. Ordered by verified entry price, lowest first.
| Tool | What it is | Affiliate programme | Pays us |
|---|---|---|---|
| Ahrefs | SEO suite with Brand Radar (AI visibility) | None (Ahrefs closed its programme in 2019) | NOTHING |
| Semrush | SEO suite with AI Visibility Toolkit | about $200 per sale, $10 per trial, one-time bounty, not recurring | NOTHING |
| Frase | content optimisation with AI visibility features | 30%, rising to 40%, recurring, capped at 12 months | NOTHING |
Ahrefs cannot pay any site, ever, and separately publishes some of the largest, most methodologically transparent AI-citation research in this field, including two studies graded on the evidence ledger. Notice how rarely it tops a "best AI visibility tools" listicle.
Every table on this page is sorted by verified entry price, ascending, within its group. Tools with no published price, or a price we could source only from a third party, sort last within that group. That rule is stated here so you can check it against the tables above: nowhere does a higher-paying affiliate arrangement move a row up. Today that check is trivial, since we are enrolled in no programme at all and every "pays us" cell reads NOTHING. The day that changes, this paragraph and every affected cell change with it, and the change is logged permanently at corrections.
Every tool in the first table blends both into one dashboard, several under a single "visibility" score. The distinction is not academic. Ahrefs found that branded web mentions correlate with Google AI Overview visibility at Spearman 0.664, against 0.218 for backlinks, roughly three times stronger, across a 75,000 brand sample. But the same study calls both correlations "moderate to very weak" in absolute terms, a caveat the marketing version of this stat routinely drops. Full grading: the evidence ledger.
Reddit is a clean example of how badly a blended score can mislead. Profound's 680-million-citation dataset shows Reddit is the top-cited source on Google AI Overviews (2.2%) and Perplexity (6.6%), but second to Wikipedia on ChatGPT, the largest engine, at 1.8%. "Reddit is the most-cited source in AI answers" is true for two engines and false for the one with the most users. Full grading: the evidence ledger.
Buy the cheapest tool that names its methodology and treat the number it gives you as a weather vane, not a speedometer. Do not buy a second one to "cross-check" the first: Kevin Indig's Consensus Gap study found only 2.37% overlap in cited URLs across ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews, so two trackers covering different engines will disagree by construction, not by error. Full grading: the evidence ledger.
Entry-tier tools (£99–£299/month) like Peec AI and Rankscale appeal to bootstrapped founders and small teams trying their first visibility experiment. You get monthly snapshots of whether your brand appears in AI results at all. The constraint is query coverage—tracking 25 to 100 keywords means you miss niche topics where you might be the only visible source. The monthly rescan means you cannot spot weekly volatility or validate whether a specific tactic moved the needle. These tiers work best when you already have baseline visibility and want a simple "is this trending up or down?" dashboard. If you are invisible and need to understand why, these tools tell you nothing beyond "not mentioned."
Mid-tier tools (£299–£799/month) like Nightwatch and Gumshoe add unlimited keyword tracking, weekly rescans, and crucially, source identification. You begin to see not just whether you are cited but which specific publications, Reddit threads and databases cite you. This is where ROI measurement becomes possible, because you can connect visibility gains to specific content or publication placements launched the week before. Nightwatch's detailed Active Citations feature lets you identify your highest-leverage sources and concentrate future media relations there. At this tier, tool spend becomes justifiable by data: if you spent £2,000 on a PR retainer and the tool shows citations from the three publications your PR agency placed you in, you have proof the investment worked. Without the source-level detail at entry tiers, you have only a number.
Premium tier (£1,000+/month) tools like Profound are built for teams running AI visibility as a central business metric, not an experiment. The premium buys you scale (tracking thousands of keywords across dozens of models), historical archive (to spot long-term trends), and dedicated account management for translating data into strategy. A team committing £12,000 annually needs tool reliability high enough to report to the board. Profound's 680-million-citation dataset allows cross-engine analysis that mid-tier tools cannot surface. But the catch: premium tiers assume you have already proven underlying visibility work (publication placement, thought leadership) moves your metrics. Buying premium before validating that is like buying a Ferrari to test-drive to the shops. Start at mid-tier, prove the work moves the needle, then upgrade.
A tool subscription is never the full cost. Every tier requires internal labour: reviewing the dashboard weekly (2–4 hours), interpreting what changed and why (3–5 hours), investigating discrepancies when two tools disagree (2–3 hours monthly), and translating findings into action (variable). At £40/hour loaded cost, that is £400–£600 monthly in internal labour on a £299 tool subscription—a 2x multiplier on the software cost. Many organisations budget the software but not the labour, which is why adoption stalls. A team subscribing to Gumshoe at £349/month but allocating nobody to act on the insights is burning £349/month for a dashboard nobody reads. The ROI only arrives when you assign the interpretation and action labour. Second hidden cost: tool churn. Most organisations trial a tool for 3–6 months, get disappointed when visibility does not move (because the underlying visibility work was not funded), and cancel, having learned nothing except "tool spend does not work." That is a £1,500–£3,000 lesson in misallocation, not tool failure. Third hidden cost: the false sense of precision. An entry-tier tool showing "your visibility improved from 12% to 15%" feels precise but masks volatility of ±20 percentage points month-to-month. Your team makes decisions based on the 3-point move (change content strategy, adjust PR focus, shift budget allocation) when the move is likely noise. A £300 monthly subscription licensing noise costs more in bad decisions than the software itself.
Narrower comparisons if you have already shortlisted: Peec AI alternatives and Otterly vs Peec vs Scrunch. Every claim above is graded and sourced in the evidence ledger. Our commercial interest in each tool named here is published on who pays us.