AI Visibility Tools Compared (2026): 14 Trackers on Price, Engines, Claude, MCP, Reviews and What the Engines Actually Say

01The short answer

There is no best AI visibility tool; there is a best one for the shape of your programme, and the shape is four numbers: how many prompts, on which engines, how often, and whether Claude is one of them. Once you know those, the matrix below answers the price question in a minute. If you have not decided, the fastest way to decide is to ask which engines your buyers actually use and whether you want a dashboard or a fix. Dashboard buyers with a big budget go to Profound; dashboard buyers on a small one go to Peec, Otterly or AthenaHQ’s free tier; teams who want seventeen engines go to Rankscale; teams who already pay Semrush, Ahrefs, SE Ranking, HubSpot or Brand24 should price the add-on against a dedicated tool before assuming the bundle is cheaper; and teams who want the measurement to end in a sourced fix and a re-measurement are the ones we built for, and we say so.

02The matrix

Every price is the vendor’s own, read on 4 September 2026, with the review that holds the full table linked in the vendor column. Annual figures are the monthly equivalent when billed yearly. Where a vendor prints only yearly prices, we say so.

The last column is the one we care about and the one to read sceptically, because it is ours. Every other row stops at a dashboard, a recommendation, a task list or, in BrandPeek’s case, a page rewrite with no check that the rewrite cites anything the engines actually returned. Our row drafts a fix skeleton only from the citations the run recorded, rejects any draft that cites a source the run never saw, saves it for a person to approve, and re-measures after an indexing delay as an observed delta. The methodology page defines each step.

03What six programme shapes cost on each

Headline prices mislead because the fourteen sell different units: prompts, checks, credits, responses, add-ons. Here is what six real programme shapes cost, using each vendor’s printed figures and unit definitions, with a month taken as 30 days. Where a shape is not offered at any printed price we say so.

Two readings. The bundles are only cheap when you already own the bundle: Semrush’s $99 and HubSpot’s $50 are the lowest lines on the table for a ChatGPT-first programme, and neither covers Claude or scales past a few dozen prompts without more money. And the indexes are a different product: Ahrefs and Semrush tell you what people search and whether you appear; every dedicated tracker tells you what the engines say to your prompts. Buy the index if you do not know your prompts yet, and the tracker when you do.

04Engine coverage, and where Claude is

Claude is the dividing line in this category. It is the engine most often missing, the most expensive to add where it is sold separately, and in our own runs the one whose answers cite the most distinct sources. Here is who covers what, from each vendor’s own pages.

Read the Copilot and Others columns before you read ours: Otterly, Ahrefs, Rankscale and Searchable cover engines we do not, and if your buyers are on Copilot or Grok that decides it. Read the Claude column before you read anyone’s headline price.

05MCP and API

If you or your agents work from Claude, Cursor or ChatGPT, the tracker’s data has to reach them, and this is where the fourteen separate fastest. SE Ranking ships the broadest MCP we reviewed, 180 or more tools including AI visibility, included in every plan on API credits. Peec’s is documented with OAuth, read and write tools, and setup guides for Claude, Cursor, VS Code and Windsurf. Rankscale’s is read-only on your normal login and cannot change settings by design. Otterly’s runs over streamable HTTP and is metered at 2,000 requests on Standard. Searchable lists MCP on its pricing table. Ahrefs lists an MCP server among features without saying whether Brand Radar data is in it. Scrunch’s custom MCP is Enterprise only. Semrush’s and HubSpot’s MCPs exist but cover SEO and CRM data respectively, not AI visibility. Profound’s self-serve plans have no API and its pages showed no MCP. AthenaHQ lists an API as a paid add-on and no MCP. BrandPeek has neither; its API is marked coming soon. Brand24’s API is a $149 extra on the listening product with no MCP. Linkeddit ships every capability as an MCP tool on the $99 plan, and it is the only one of the fourteen whose write actions, drafting a fix, saving it for approval and starting a verification, are tools too; the playbooks are recorded transcripts.

06Review record, with the platform named

Two cautions. Suite scores rate the suite, not the AI tool inside it; Semrush’s 4,035 and SE Ranking’s 1,602 tell you almost nothing about the AI add-on. And a small count with a high score is a young product with happy early users, not a verdict; Peec’s 4.8 on 20 and AthenaHQ’s 4.9 on 48 are both that, and both are consistent with what we found on their pages.

07Ahrefs Brand Radar vs HubSpot AEO vs Rankscale vs Profound vs Semrush AI Toolkit, for competitor analysis in answer engines

This five-way question arrives at this site in several languages asking for a forced ranking, so here is one, with the criteria stated so you can reject them: engines covered including Claude, prompts per dollar, competitor benchmarking depth, and review record. Prices as printed on 4 September 2026.

Where we would sit in this list if you added us: below Rankscale and Profound on engine count and data depth, above Semrush and HubSpot on Claude and prompts per dollar, and alone on ending in a fix. That is a vendor talking; the pairwise pages linked below show the arithmetic.

08Peec AI vs HubSpot AEO vs Rankscale vs AthenaHQ vs Semrush AI Toolkit, for brand visibility across several engines

The other five-way question that lands here. Same method: engines at entry, Claude, prompts, reviews.

09Measured: which of the fourteen the AI engines actually name

This section is ours and labelled as such, and one of the fourteen is us. On 4 September 2026 we ran our own Answer Radar project for linkeddit.com, 21 approved buying questions about AI visibility and competitive intelligence tools, through ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity via their official APIs with grounded search. Linkeddit is the tracked brand; every other vendor is a volunteered mention. Counts are answers in which the vendor was named, with the number recommended in brackets, per engine, from the run’s mention table. Admissible samples per engine were 10 Claude, 15 Gemini, 7 ChatGPT and 3 Perplexity, per the methodology; a vendor named in a sample later graded thin still appears here, so read the counts as mentions, not rates.

The pattern is the one every page in this series reports: the engines name the SEO suites first, because the roundups they read are written by and about the SEO suites, then the well-reviewed specialists. The three vendors with the least third-party coverage, Rankscale, Searchable and BrandPeek, are not named at all, which is a statement about coverage, not about their products. Our own recommendation rate on our own prompts is 0 of 10 on Claude and 1 of 15 on Gemini, which is why this series exists.

Citations are a separate count. Across our full population of 220 completed answers, counted on the resolved citation domain: linkeddit.com in 55 answers as the tracked brand; hubspot.com in 11 and blog.hubspot.com in 7, almost all for CRM pages and marketing roundups rather than for AEO; tryprofound.com in 3; otterly.ai in 3; semrush.com in 2; ahrefs.com, seranking.com, searchable.com and brand24.com in 1 each; peec.ai, scrunch.ai, athenahq.ai, rankscale.ai and brandpeek.ai in none. Being named and being cited are different things, and most of the fourteen are named from other people’s pages.

10Every pairwise comparison and review on this site

Each of these reads the vendors’ pages on the day named on the page, quotes reviews with the platform attributed, and carries its own measured section.

Direct links to each, plus the fourteen reviews and the Linkeddit compare pages, are in the related guides at the foot of this page.

11Frequently asked questions