The short answer
The best AI visibility tool is the one that both tracks enough engines to be accurate and hands you the fixes to improve. For enterprises, Profound leads on depth (~$499/mo). For small businesses, the value picks are Otterly ($29/mo) and AIRanQ (£29.99/mo) — AIRanQ is the only one at that price that tracks 16 engines and generates done-for-you assets (a page outline, llms.txt, target sources) rather than just a dashboard.
Why this matters now
Buyers have moved. ChatGPT reached roughly 900 million weekly active users in early 2026 and handles about 2.5 billion prompts a day, and 39% of consumers (over half of Gen Z) now use AI for product discovery. Yet an estimated 84% of brands don't track their AI-search visibility at all — they're making decisions blind at the exact moment a buyer asks an assistant "what's the best X?"
That gap is why AI visibility tools exist. But they are not equal. The single biggest difference isn't the dashboard — it's whether the tool stops at measuring the problem or actually fixes it.
Measure
score & coverage
Diagnose
why you're missing
Fix
pages, schema, llms.txt
Re-measure
did it move?
Almost every tool on the market covers only the first box — a dashboard that measures. The ones worth paying for close the loop: they tell you why you're missing and hand you the assets to fix it, then re-measure. That single distinction matters more than any feature checklist.
How we compared them
We scored each tool on four things that actually decide value:
- Engine coverage — how many AI engines it checks. Because ChatGPT and Perplexity overlap on only ~11% of cited sources, tracking one engine tells you almost nothing about the others.
- Price — real entry price for a small team, not the enterprise sticker.
- Remediation — does it generate the assets to improve (pages, schema, llms.txt), or just report a score?
- Free trial — can you evaluate before paying?
The comparison table
| Tool | Engines | Entry price | Fixes / assets | Free trial |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| AIRanQ | 16 | £29.99/mo | Yes — page outline, llms.txt, sources | £1 for 24h |
| Profound | ~4 | $79–499/mo | Analytics only | Demo gate |
| Peec AI | Multi | €89/mo | Reporting only | Limited |
| Otterly | ~4 | $29/mo | GEO audit | Yes |
| AthenaHQ | 8+ | $295/mo (credits) | GEO analysis | No |
Reading the table
Enterprise tools (Profound, AthenaHQ) go deep on analytics and governance but cost 8–16× more and stop at measurement. Budget tools (Otterly) are accessible but track few engines. The sweet spot for an SMB is broad engine coverage + real fixes at a low flat price.
The tools, briefly
Profound
The enterprise leader. Deep analytics, governance, and integrations. Strongest if you're a large brand with a team and budget — but it measures rather than remediates, and pricing climbs toward ~$499/mo.
Peec AI
A clean, fast-growing mid-market analytics tool (~€89/mo) with unlimited seats and strong citation reporting. Great for agencies that want reporting; light on done-for-you fixes.
Otterly
The most accessible monitor at $29/mo, with GEO audits and agency-friendly workflows. The trade-off is narrower engine coverage.
AthenaHQ
A premium GEO platform (from $295/mo, credit-based) covering 8+ LLMs with proprietary metrics. Powerful, but credit pricing can be opaque and it's expensive for a small business.
AIRanQ
Our tool. A flat £29.99/mo (£1 for the first 24h), tracking 16 engines weekly. Its edge is that it infers your specific niche from your site and asks real buyer questions — then hands you the exact assets to win: an answer-first page outline, a ready llms.txt, and the sources to get listed on. It's newer and smaller than the enterprise players, and it's built for SMBs that want fixes, not just a chart.
So which should you pick?
- Enterprise brand with a team: Profound for depth.
- Agency needing clean reporting: Peec AI.
- Small business on a budget who wants the problem fixed: AIRanQ (16 engines + done-for-you assets at £29.99) or Otterly if you only need monitoring.
A five-question buyer's checklist
Cut through the marketing with these five questions. If a tool can't answer them clearly, it's probably charging you for a dashboard:
- How many engines does it actually query — and are the buyer-facing ones (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude) included?
- Does it just measure, or does it generate the fixes (pages, schema, llms.txt)?
- Is the pricing flat, or credit-based? Credit pricing gets expensive and opaque fast.
- Can you try it before committing (a real free scan or trial)?
- How honest is the score? One lucky mention on one engine isn't visibility — you want a multi-engine average.
Our honest bias
AIRanQ is our tool, so weigh this accordingly. But the checklist above is the one we'd give a friend — and it's the reason we built AIRanQ the way we did: broad coverage, flat price, and fixes, not just a chart.
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