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.
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.