Best AI Visibility Tools in 2026, Prices Verified

An AI visibility tool runs a fixed set of prompts against ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews and other assistants on a schedule, then records whether your brand was named, in what position, in what tone, and which sources the answer leaned on. Some also tell you what to change. That second part is where these products differ most, and where the price gap comes from.

We rechecked this market between 6 and 8 August 2026 by reading each vendor’s own pricing page. What we found is why this article was rewritten rather than updated: one of the tools we previously recommended had shut down nine months earlier, and another had been acquired for $225 million.

Disclosure: EchoWi is our product. It is in the table below, and there is a section on when EchoWi is the wrong choice. That matters more than it used to: on four category buying questions we counted the ranked lists on page one, and seventeen of them are published by a company selling one of the tools, sitting at position one. This table is sorted by entry price, so its ordering carries no claim, which is the only defence a list like this has.

The short version

1. Entry pricing spans 125 times, from $20 a month to seoClarity’s $2,500 platform floor, with 3 free tiers below that, for products that describe themselves in nearly identical language.
2. The cheap tier is rarely the whole product. Surfer’s least expensive plan contains no AI tracker at all. Writesonic’s entry plan covers 3 engines out of the 10 its top plan reaches.
3. Vendor stability is now a real buying criterion. Lorelight shut down on 31 October 2025. XFunnel was acquired by HubSpot, announced the same day. Scrunch was acquired by Sitecore on 3 June 2026.
4. Monitoring and optimization are different products sold under one category name. Knowing which you are buying matters more than the price.
5. A single check proves nothing. Answers vary run to run, so any tool reporting one measurement without repetition is selling you noise with a chart on top.

How we checked, and what we did not check

Comparison articles in this category tend to open by claiming hands-on testing of everything. We are going to be precise instead, because the value of this page is that its numbers are true.

What we verified, between 6 and 8 August 2026, with each entry carrying its own date:

• Every price was read from the vendor’s own pricing page on that date, not from a press mention or another comparison article.
• We recorded the entry price for the cheapest plan that tracks AI visibility at all, which is not always the cheapest plan the vendor advertises.
• We recorded how many engines that entry plan covers, rather than the number in the pricing page’s headline.
• We checked that each domain still resolves and still serves a product, which is how we found that one of them no longer does.

What we did not do: run a controlled, side-by-side accuracy test of every tool you can still buy, on the same brand and the same prompt set. Nobody has published that, ourselves included.

Every tool, with prices verified in August 2026

Prices read from each vendor’s pricing page between 6 and 8 August 2026, each row on the date recorded in our catalogue. Vendors change pricing without notice, so verify before buying.

Three things this table makes visible that a feature list hides:

The entry price is often not the entry price. Surfer’s Discovery plan at €49 a month includes no AI tracker. The cheapest Surfer plan that tracks prompts is Standard at €99 a month, and it tracks ChatGPT only. Its standalone AI Search Analytics product is €158 a month.

Annual billing is doing work in two of these numbers. Writesonic’s $79 and Surfer’s €99 both require a yearly commitment. Writesonic states the annual saving, so its monthly rate works out at $99. Surfer publishes no monthly rate at all, for any plan.

Engine count on the entry tier ranges from 1 to 10. Rankscale’s $20 plan names ten engines and Promptmonitor’s $29 plan covers six. Our own €29 plan covers one. That is a real point against us at the bottom of the range, and it is in the table for the same reason everything else is. Read the cheap wide plans carefully all the same: Rankscale publishes $20 as a floor with no prompt or answer allowance attached to it, so ten engines there is a coverage list rather than a measurement budget.

What changed in this market since January

This is the section that made the rewrite necessary, and the part no feature comparison will tell you.

Lorelight shut down, and its founder said the category was fake

Lorelight appeared in the previous version of this article as the recommendation for PR teams, at $99 a month. It shut down on 31 October 2025, and its domain now redirects to the founder’s shutdown post.

The reason he gave deserves quoting rather than paraphrasing, because it is the strongest argument against buying any tool in this category, ours included:

“Customers were churning because the product didn’t change what they needed to do.”

He went further, concluding that brands with high AI visibility all shared the characteristics of brands that did well in ordinary search and ordinary marketing: quality content, authoritative mentions, expertise. His verdict was that “there’s no such thing as ‘GEO strategy’ or ‘AI optimization’ separate from brand building.”

We think he is half right, and the half he is right about matters. There is a section below on why.

Scrunch was acquired by Sitecore for $225 million

Scrunch, previously ScrunchAI, was acquired by Sitecore on 3 June 2026, in a deal reported at around $225 million. It also changed domain: scrunch.ai no longer resolves, which is why older comparison articles link to a dead address. The current one is scrunch.com.

For a buyer this is neither good nor bad on its own, but it is information you should have:

• Its pricing is now public, at $300 a month billed monthly, or $250 a month billed annually, where it used to be quote-only.
• It now sits inside a much larger digital experience platform, which over time tends to mean enterprise-first roadmaps and enterprise-first pricing.
• If you already run Sitecore, this is the path of least resistance. If you do not, you are buying into a suite.

The general lesson: this category already has one shutdown and one nine-figure exit behind it. Ask any vendor how long they have been running, who funds them, and what happens to your historical data if they stop. Your measurement is only as long-lived as the company doing it.

Three shapes, and the one question that reveals which you are buying

Cataloguing this market makes a split visible that no vendor describes, and it predicts the pricing better than any feature table.

Built for AI visibility, from nothing. Profound, Peec AI, Otterly, Scrunch, Rankscale, Superlines, Athena HQ, Siftly, Cognizo, Dageno, Rank Prompt, Evertune, Brandlight, Bluefish, Wellows, Quattr, AirOps, Promptmonitor, Mentions.so and EchoWi. They price by prompts or credits, and the engine list is the product.

Sold something else first, then added AI. Semrush, Ahrefs Brand Radar, Surfer, Writesonic, Nightwatch, Serpstat and Conductor. They price by the old unit, keywords or documents or articles, and the AI half arrives inside a plan you were buying anyway. It shows: Surfer’s cheapest plan contains no AI tracker at all, and Nightwatch’s entry tier puts 500 daily keywords beside 50 monthly prompts.

Infrastructure. Cloudflare announced an AEO dashboard on 6 August 2026 that measures from the network layer rather than by running prompts, which is neither of the above and cannot be priced by prompt because it does not run any.

Conductor makes the point sharpest. Its pricing page publishes no price at all, and its AI allowance is annual rather than monthly: 2,500 AI Search Credits a year on the middle tier, about 208 a month, sitting beside 5,000 tracked keywords and 25,000 pages analysed. The entry tier lists no AI credits at any number. Whatever that product is, it is not sold by the prompt.

So the useful question before comparing prices is: what was this vendor selling before? A tool that priced by keywords will give you a generous keyword allowance and a thin prompt allowance whatever its marketing says, and a tool that priced by prompts will sell you coverage it cannot always afford to give. The pricing is still shaped around the old product in both cases.

Monitoring, optimization, and the gap between them

Every tool here describes itself as helping with AI visibility. They are doing one of three different jobs, and the price map above makes far more sense once you separate them.

1. Monitoring. Run prompts, record whether you appear, chart it over time. Promptmonitor and Mentions.so are primarily this, which is why they are the cheapest. If you have no plan for what to do about a bad number, this is all you need and all you should pay for.

2. Optimization. Tell you what to change, then measure whether the change worked. This is harder, because it requires a defensible link between an edit and a result. It is what we build EchoWi for, and where Writesonic and Surfer sit, arriving from the content side.

3. Suite integration. Fold AI visibility into an existing SEO or experience platform. Semrush, and since June, Scrunch. The pitch is one login and one dataset, not a better measurement.

The distinction matters because of a finding in the research. In Ahrefs’ controlled study of 1,885 pages against roughly 4,000 controls, adding schema markup produced no significant increase in AI citations, and a 4.6% decrease in AI Overviews. Plenty of tools will still tell you to add schema and then show you a green checkmark. A tool that recommends an action nobody has shown to work is a monitoring tool with opinions, not an optimization tool.

Does any of this actually work?

The honest answer is the one the Lorelight founder pointed at, and the one a July 2026 review of 45 GEO studies reached: no technique has yet demonstrated a causal, stable, longitudinal, cross-platform effect on AI visibility.

Here is where we think that conclusion is right, and where it stops.

Where he is right: there is no separate discipline where you tick GEO boxes and rise. The signals that predict citation are the ones that predict everything else. Be genuinely relevant to the question. Be quotable. Be credible. A tool promising a shortcut around that is selling you the shortcut, not the outcome.

Where it stops: “the levers are the ordinary ones” does not mean “do not measure.” Two facts sit awkwardly with the do-nothing conclusion:

• 51% of B2B software buyers now begin a purchase inside an AI chatbot rather than a search engine, up from 29% a year earlier (G2, 2026, surveying 1,076 buyers).
• 64% of those buyers say they meet inaccurate AI recommendations often or very often (same study).

That second number is the real case for a tool, and it is not a ranking problem. If an assistant tells buyers your product does something it does not, or quotes a price you retired two years ago, no amount of brand building tells you it is happening. You cannot fix what you cannot see, and you cannot see it by asking ChatGPT once.

So the defensible position is narrow, and worth stating plainly: buy a tool to find out what is being said, and to check whether a change you made moved anything. Do not buy one expecting it to contain a growth lever that content and credibility do not already contain.

How to choose: five questions

1. Do you need to know, or do you need to act? If you only need to know whether you appear, the $20 to $49 tier does that. Paying $300 for the same answer with a better dashboard is a real risk in this market.

2. How many engines actually matter to you? Coverage on the entry tier ranges from 1 to 10. Before paying for twelve, check which assistants your buyers use. In a Spanish or French market this changes the answer, because engine share is not uniform by country.

3. Can it tell a change from noise? This is the question that separates these tools, and almost nobody asks it. AI answers vary between identical runs. If a tool reports one measurement per prompt per period, its week-over-week chart is partly measuring randomness. Ask how many runs sit behind a single reported number.

4. Will the vendor be here in two years, and what happens to your history? One death and one acquisition in eight months is the base rate for this category right now. Ask where the data lives and whether you can export it.

5. What does their stability number do when you ask for more runs? This is the follow-up to question three, and it is the one no vendor has rehearsed. If a stability figure is built on “cited in every run”, extra runs make it worse rather than firmer, because unanimity gets harder as the sample grows. Reading one buying question eight times, twelve sources came back in seven runs each and one odd run cited nothing but Google, which makes the strict bar return zero about a third of the time at three runs and three quarters of the time at ten. The measurement is here. A number that falls as the vendor runs more prompts is reporting unanimity, not stability.

What to test during a free trial

Where a trial is offered, and several of these run seven days, it is enough time if you know what to look for.

1. Run the same prompt five times and compare. If you get materially different brand lists while the tool reports a single confident number, you have learned the most important thing about it.
2. Check a fact it reports about you. Open the cited source. Tools that surface a citation you can click are checkable. Tools that assert a score are not.
3. Ask it to explain one recommendation. If the answer is “add schema” or “write more FAQs,” compare it against the controlled evidence above.
4. Change one page, then measure it against a page you did not touch. Without a control you are measuring the platform’s own drift, not your work.
5. Export your data on day six. Find out now whether you can.

Where EchoWi fits, and where it does not

We built EchoWi to close the loop between changing something and seeing whether it worked, across 12 engines including Doubao and Qwen. Prompts run on a schedule, repeatedly, so a reported number is an aggregate rather than a single sample, and every change is measured against its own before and after.

EchoWi is the wrong choice if:

• You only need monitoring at the lowest possible price. Rankscale names ten engines from $20 a month, and Promptmonitor covers six at $29. Our €29 plan covers one. If a chart is all you need, they are the better buy, and we would rather say so here than have you find out in month two.
• You already live inside Semrush. A second login for a number you could read in a tab you already have open is a hard sell, and we are not going to pretend otherwise.
• You need a procurement-grade enterprise suite today. Scrunch inside Sitecore will clear a security review faster than we will.

EchoWi is worth a look if you have already decided a number is not enough, you want the measurement to survive the fact that AI answers vary, or your market is not English. That last one is why we track engines most of this list does not.

Common Questions About GEO Tools

What are the best GEO tools in 2026?

There is no single best GEO tool, and any page that names one without saying what it measured is guessing. What this page does instead is verify what each one costs and how many engines it actually watches at that price, read from the vendor’s own pricing page on the date shown. The useful way to choose is by the shape you need: a monitor that tells you where you stand, an optimizer that tells you what to change, or a platform that does both and charges for it. The table above lists every tool we could verify with its entry price and engine count, and the three questions further down separate the shapes.

A note on the name. This category is sold under at least three of them, GEO, AEO and AI visibility, and they mostly describe the same product. We use AI visibility in headings because that is what most buyers search, and GEO tools where that is the phrase you arrived with. If a vendor tells you these are different disciplines, ask which measurement changes.

What is the cheapest AI visibility tool?

Rankscale’s Essentials plan at $20 a month is the lowest published entry price we verified, and it names ten engines at that price. It is also the least specified: the page says “from $20” and attaches no prompt or answer allowance to it. The cheapest fully specified plan is Promptmonitor’s Starter at $29 a month, covering 25 prompts across 6 engines with a twice-weekly refresh. EchoWi also starts at €29 a month, but covers one engine at that tier. Note that Surfer’s cheapest plan, at €49 a month, includes no AI tracking at all.

How much should I budget for a GEO tool?

Verified entry pricing in August 2026 runs from free to a $2,500 platform floor, with the cheapest paid plan at $20. A small brand monitoring one market can work at the bottom of that range. At the bottom of the range, check whether the plan only watches or also tells you what to change, because both are sold at similar prices.

Can I track AI visibility manually instead?

You can ask an assistant about your brand for free, and you should do it once to see the problem. It does not scale as measurement for one reason: answers vary between identical runs. A single manual check cannot distinguish a real change from normal variation, which is the entire job. Doing it properly by hand means running each prompt several times, across engines, on a schedule, recording sources. That is a tool, just one you are operating yourself.

Do GEO tools replace SEO tools?

No, and the relationship runs one way. Retrieval sits on top of a search index, so a page that cannot be crawled, or that ranks for nothing, is not a candidate for citation in the first place. GEO tools measure a layer above SEO. They do not remove the layer beneath.

Which AI engines should a tool cover?

Cover the engines your buyers use, which is a measurable question rather than a matter of opinion. Start by checking ChatGPT and Google AI Overviews, then match the coverage to what your buyers actually use. If your market is French, Spanish or Chinese, the answer changes, and engines like Doubao and Qwen become relevant in ways no English-market comparison will tell you.

Which tools in this comparison have been acquired or shut down?

Three, and all three matter when you read an older list. Scrunch was acquired by Sitecore on 3 June 2026 and still operates, now at $300 a month; its old scrunch.ai domain no longer resolves, so links to it in older articles are dead. Lorelight shut down on 31 October 2025. XFunnel was acquired by HubSpot, announced on 31 October 2025, and its standalone site still sells while HubSpot now sells the successor at $50 a month. Everything else in the table above was verified as active on the date shown. The acquisition and what it changed for buyers is covered in our Scrunch review.

What happened to Lorelight?

It shut down on 31 October 2025. Its founder wrote publicly that customers were churning because the product did not change what they needed to do, and that he did not believe GEO existed as a discipline separate from brand building. Any comparison article still recommending it has not been checked since then.

How often should these tools run my prompts?

Often enough to average out the variation, which matters more than frequency for its own sake. A daily refresh appears on Promptmonitor’s Growth plan at $39 a month and above, while entry tiers are typically weekly or twice weekly. A weekly number built from several runs is more useful than a daily number built from one.

How do I know whether the tool is working?

Measure one change against a control. Pick a page, improve it, leave a comparable page alone, and compare both against a frozen prompt set over several weeks. If a tool cannot support that shape of test, it can report movement but it cannot attribute it, and attribution is what you are paying for.

Where this leaves you

The most useful finding from rechecking this market was not a feature. It was that two of the tools listed in the January version of this article no longer exist in the form we described, one because it shut down and one because it was acquired, and that neither fact appears in most comparison articles still ranking for this query.

Verify the price before you buy. Ask how many runs sit behind a number. And be suspicious of anyone in this category, us included, who promises a lever that content and credibility do not already contain.

Next: what GEO is and what the research actually supports, and how brands get positioned inside LLMs.