1. Prompt trackers
Run a fixed prompt set through AI engines on a schedule and report mentions, cited URLs and competitor share. This is what most people mean by an AI visibility tool.
Updated
Updated What changed on
- Added the UK zero-click rate. 69.5% of UK Google searches now end without a click on anything, the highest of the six countries SparkToro and Similarweb measured in early 2026.
- Added the Seer Interactive finding that a brand cited inside an AI Overview gets 35% more organic clicks than one that is not.
AI visibility tools UK buyer guide
AI visibility tools: the headline price is rarely the price you pay.
Every tool on this page advertises an entry tier. Almost none of those tiers do the job you are buying the tool for. Otterly starts at $29 but charges extra for Gemini, Google AI Mode and Claude. Profound starts at $99 and tracks ChatGPT only. Surfer's $49 plan tracks zero AI prompts.
So this comparison lists two numbers for each tool: the price on the pricing page, and what it actually costs to track a working prompt set across four or more engines. Every figure was checked against the live vendor page on 20 July 2026.
real_cost_check.json
"cheapest_headline""Otterly $29"
"cheapest_usable""AIClicks $59"
"biggest_gap""Profound 4x"
"most_prompts""SE Ranking 200"
"gated_engines"[
"Claude",
"Google AI Mode",
"Gemini"
]
The 30-second answer
Start free. Run the free AI visibility checker to find out whether your pages are structurally citable, and sample prompts by hand.
When you need a trend line, AIClicks at $59/mo is the cheapest tool whose entry tier genuinely works. Otterly at $29/mo is cheaper on paper but excludes three major engines. SE Ranking gives the most prompts per pound if you already pay for it. Scrunch and Profound are for teams with a named AI visibility owner and a reporting cadence.
Key takeaways
- Entry tiers are engine-limited, not prompt-limited. Coverage is what costs money.
- Claude, Google AI Mode and Gemini are the three most commonly gated engines.
- Refresh frequency matters as much as engine count. Weekly sampling misses most movement.
- Three products changed materially in 2026: Semrush retired its standalone AI Toolkit, HubSpot renamed its grader, and Surfer became Positive Surfer.
- Ahrefs publishes two contradictory Brand Radar prices on two live pages. Get a quote in writing.
- Every tool here prices in US dollars. UK buyers carry the exchange rate on top.
// the number that matters
Headline price against working price.
Working price is the cheapest tier that tracks roughly 50 prompts across four or more AI engines, including any add-ons needed to get there. Verified 20 July 2026.
Advertised entry price
Working price for 50 prompts and 4+ engines
Prices are as published by each vendor on 20 July 2026 and are quoted in US dollars because that is how every vendor lists them. The method, the full 18-tool dataset and the vendors whose own pages contradict themselves are in the pricing audit. Billing periods differ: Profound, Positive Surfer and Rankability publish annual-billed figures only. Where a vendor did not state something, this page says so rather than guessing.
// coverage map
Which tool covers which AI engine.
The question every pricing page avoids answering directly. Compiled from live vendor pages on 20 July 2026.
| Tool | ChatGPT | AI Overviews | AI Mode | Perplexity | Gemini | Claude | Copilot | Grok | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| AIClicks | Nine engines in the pool, but you only select three at entry | ||||||||
| Peec AI | Choose 3 of 6; extra models are charged per engine | ||||||||
| Profound | Starter is ChatGPT only; three engines at Growth, ten at Enterprise | ||||||||
| Scrunch AI | Four at Core, nine at Enterprise | ||||||||
| Otterly.AI | Four included on every tier; three sold as add-ons | ||||||||
| SE Ranking | Five engines, no per-tier gating | ||||||||
| Semrush | Includes Claude and Grok in plan pricing, which is rare | ||||||||
| Ahrefs | Seven engines, but no Claude at any price | ||||||||
| Positive Surfer | Standard is ChatGPT only; five engines from Pro | ||||||||
| Rankability | ChatGPT is the only engine named on the pricing page |
Scroll the table sideways to see every engine.
Included at entry tier
Needs a higher tier
Chargeable add-on
Not offered
Not published
Claude is the most gated engine in the category. Ahrefs does not offer it at any price, Peec reserves it for Enterprise, Otterly charges for it, and Profound and Scrunch put it behind their top tiers. Semrush is the outlier that includes it in plan pricing. If your buyers use Claude, that single column narrows the market to about three realistic options.
What these tools are actually measuring against
69.5%
of UK Google searches end without a click on anything, the highest rate of the six countries measured and above the United States at 68.0%.
How it was measured: Similarweb mobile and desktop clickstream panel, January to April 2026. Zero-click means no click to anywhere, including to Google's own properties and to paid results. Germany was lowest at 62.1%.
35%
more organic clicks go to a brand cited inside an AI Overview than to one that is not cited on the same query.
How it was measured: 3,119 search terms across 42 client organisations, 25.1M organic and 1.1M paid impressions, June 2024 to September 2025. Informational and educational queries only, which are the ones most exposed to AI Overviews, so this is not a whole-market figure. In absolute terms it is 0.70% against 0.52%. Paid click-through was 91% higher when cited.
it went back up
is what click-through did in early 2026, against every forecast. Organic click-through on queries showing an AI Overview rose from a floor of 1.3% in December 2025 to 2.4% in February 2026.
How it was measured: 53 brands, 5.47 million tracked queries, 2.43 billion organic impressions and 296.9 million paid impressions, January 2025 to February 2026. Wider than the earlier studies, which covered informational queries only. Seer's own regression model had forecast continued decline and the actuals beat it in both January and February. One dataset and one agency's client base, so treat it as a signal to watch rather than a settled reversal.
"AI visibility tool" covers three different jobs
Most comparison pages rank these tools against each other as if they do the same thing. They do not, and buying the wrong category is the most expensive mistake in this market.
2. Suites with AI bolted on
Existing SEO or content platforms that added AI tracking. Cheaper if you already pay for the suite, weaker on citation depth, and easier to fit into reporting you already send.
3. Free graders
One-off scores. Some measure page structure, some measure what models already believe about your brand. Neither is monitoring. Both are useful before you spend anything.
// category one
5 dedicated prompt trackers, cheapest first.
Built for AI visibility as the primary job. Ordered by entry price, with the catch on each one stated plainly.
| Tool | Entry price | Prompts | Engines at entry | Trial |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| AIClicks | $59/mo | 30 prompts | 3 of 9 | 3-day trial, no card |
| Peec AI | $95/mo | 50 prompts | 3 selectable | Free trial, terms not stated |
| Profound | $99/mo | 50 prompts | 1 | Partial, terms not stated |
| Scrunch AI | $250/mo | 125 prompts | 4 | 7-day trial, self-serve |
| Otterly.AI | $29/mo | 15 prompts | 4 included | Free trial, terms not stated |
1AIClicks
$59/moStarter, billed monthlyBest for: The cheapest honest starting point. Lowest entry price in the category where the entry tier actually tracks AI prompts. Starter gives 30 prompts and you pick 3 engines from 9. Pro at $189 moves you to 150 prompts and 4 engines. Daily refresh on every self-serve tier, which several pricier tools do not do.
Watch for: Engine count is capped per tier, so a broad engine set means Business at $499.
2Peec AI
$95/moStarter, billed monthlyBest for: Teams that want clean reporting at a mid price. Priced purely on prompt volume. Countries and languages cost nothing extra, which is unusual and useful if you sell into several markets. Unlimited users on every tier.
Watch for: Each additional model beyond your three is a separate charge: +$35/mo on Starter, +$85 on Pro, +$165 on Advanced. One extra engine, one extra fee.
3Profound
$99/moStarter, billed yearly onlyBest for: Enterprise reporting with a named owner. Strong platform for source-level citation analysis and board reporting. Growth at $399 gets you 100 prompts, 9,000 responses a month and three engines.
Watch for: Starter tracks ChatGPT and nothing else. At $99 that is the narrowest coverage of any paid tool here. The real entry point for multi-engine work is $399.
4Scrunch AI
$250/moCore, billing period not statedBest for: Citation-source analysis. Built around which URLs get cited rather than whether the brand appears. Core includes 5 site audits a month, 3 personas, 5 competitors and 2 languages. The persona modelling is the differentiator.
Watch for: API, Looker Studio and MCP access are Enterprise only. The site is running a "next chapter" announcement, so check the roadmap before signing an annual deal.
5Otterly.AI
$29/moLite, monthly; $25 on annualBest for: A first paid step on a small prompt set. Cheapest headline price in the category and a genuine four-engine set at the entry tier, which beats Profound Starter. 1,000 GEO URL audits a month on Lite. 50+ countries on all tiers.
Watch for: The $29 does not include Gemini, AI Mode or Claude. Adding all three on Lite costs $47/mo on top, so real coverage is about $76/mo. Add-on prices scale hard: Claude alone is $439/mo on Premium.
// category two
5 suites with AI visibility bolted on.
Worth it when the suite is already in your stack. Rarely worth buying the suite to get the AI module.
| Tool | Entry price | Prompts | Engines | Trial |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| SE Ranking AI Search Toolkit | $89/mo add-on | 200 prompts | 5 | 14-day trial, no card |
| Semrush (AI features in Semrush One) | $165.17/mo | 50 prompts daily | 6 named | 7-day trial plus a free tier |
| Ahrefs Brand Radar | $199 to $699/mo | Metered in checks | 7 | No trial |
| Positive Surfer AI Tracker | $99/mo | 25 prompts weekly | 1 | Free signup, terms not stated |
| Rankability | $99/mo | Credit-based | Not stated | Not stated |
1SE Ranking AI Search Toolkit
$89/mo add-onOn top of Core at $129/mo monthlyBest for: Teams already paying for SE Ranking. Best prompt volume per pound in this table once you are already a customer: 200 prompts across 5 engines. Also gives 5 free AI visibility checks a day on the public tool without an account.
Watch for: Standalone cost is the add-on plus a base plan, so about $218/mo monthly-billed, not $89. Renamed from AI Visibility Tracker to AI Search Toolkit, and there is now a separate product called SE Visible.
2Semrush (AI features in Semrush One)
$165.17/moStarter, billed annuallyBest for: Teams already committed to Semrush. Broad engine list including Claude and Grok, which most dedicated trackers reserve for enterprise. Free AI visibility checker available without a subscription.
Watch for: The standalone AI Toolkit add-on no longer exists. AI visibility is now bundled into plans under Semrush One and the old add-on URL is a hard 404. Semrush now sits under Adobe. If a comparison page still quotes an AI Toolkit price, it is out of date.
3Ahrefs Brand Radar
$199 to $699/moTwo official pages disagreeBest for: Upstream brand mention intelligence. Different job from the trackers. Its strength is the 403M prompt index and finding where your brand is mentioned across the web, which is the signal AI engines often learn from. Grok tracking is live.
Watch for: Pricing is genuinely contradictory. The main pricing page says from $199/mo as an add-on to a paid plan; the Brand Radar page says $398/mo for select platforms and $699/mo for all. Both pages were live on 20 July 2026. Get it in writing before you buy. No Claude, Meta AI or DeepSeek coverage.
4Positive Surfer AI Tracker
$99/moStandard, billed yearly onlyBest for: Content teams already using Surfer. Sits next to the content optimisation workflow, which is the reason to pick it. Pro at $182 gets 50 prompts and daily refresh across five engines.
Watch for: The $49 Discovery tier tracks zero AI prompts. Standard at $99 tracks ChatGPT only and refreshes weekly, which is too slow to catch anything. Surfer is now Positive Surfer under Positive Group.
5Rankability
$99/moStarter, billed annuallyBest for: Agencies wanting classic SEO plus AI in one bill. Unlimited clients and unlimited users on every plan, with tiers separated only by credit volume rather than locked features. That is unusually agency-friendly.
Watch for: The pricing page does not say which AI engines are tracked beyond ChatGPT, and does not publish a prompt-to-credit conversion. You cannot work out what 10,000 credits buys you in AI visibility terms before you pay.
// category three
4 free checks worth running first.
None of these are monitoring. All of them will tell you whether paid monitoring is worth opening.
AI Search Visibility Tool
Free, no accountScores a URL on entity footprint, schema, extractability, freshness, authorship and citation hooks, then gives you the prompts to test manually.
Limit: Structural readiness, not live engine polling. It tells you why you are not being cited, not whether you were cited yesterday.
HubSpot AEO Grader
Free, form fill requiredScores brand perception out of 100 across five weighted dimensions: sentiment 40, presence quality 20, brand recognition 20, share of voice 10, market competition 10. Covers ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini.
Limit: Measures what models already believe about your brand, largely from training data. It is not citation tracking and it is not a competitor to the paid trackers. Renamed from AI Search Grader, so old links redirect.
SE Ranking free AI check
Free, 5 checks a dayPublic checker on the product page, no signup needed, covers AI Overviews, AI Mode, ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity.
Limit: Five a day is enough to sample, not to monitor. No history, no competitor set.
Ahrefs AI Visibility Checker
Free previewPreview of the Brand Radar dataset for a single brand.
Limit: A shop window for the paid product. Useful as a second opinion, not as a baseline you can repeat.
What these tools actually measure
Engine count is the number vendors compete on because it is easy to print on a pricing page. It is not the number that decides whether the tool is useful. These are the signals that change what you do next.
Signals worth paying for
- Cited URLs, not just mentions. Knowing you were named tells you nothing actionable. Knowing which page was cited tells you what to write more of.
- Competitor citation, at source level. The gap between their cited page and yours is the brief.
- Refresh frequency. Daily catches movement. Weekly, as on Positive Surfer Standard, mostly catches noise.
- AI Overviews separated from AI Mode. They retrieve differently and cite differently. One combined Google score hides the difference.
- Answer text stored. Without it you cannot work out why a competitor was chosen.
Signals that sound useful and are not
- A single visibility score out of 100. Fine for a slide, useless for deciding what to change.
- Sentiment as a headline metric. Interesting for brand teams. It rarely changes a content decision.
- Total engine count. Six engines at 15 prompts is worse than three engines at 100.
- Prompt volume you will never use. Most teams have 20 to 40 prompts that genuinely matter. Paying for 350 is paying for comfort.
How to choose without wasting budget
Write your prompt list before you look at any pricing page. Not keywords, prompts: the questions a buyer would actually type into ChatGPT before they know your name. Most businesses land between 20 and 40. That number decides your tier more than any feature comparison.
Then pick your engines from where your buyers are, not from the vendor's list. If your market is UK B2B, Google AI Overviews and ChatGPT carry most of it. Paying an add-on for Meta AI coverage is a rounding error. If you sell to developers, Claude matters more than it does for anyone else, and Claude is the most commonly gated engine in this comparison.
Last, be honest about who reads the output. Founder-led teams can work from a CSV export. Agencies need something a client will open. Enterprise teams need role access and trend lines. That decides platform, and it is the only place where paying enterprise money is defensible.
A tool tells you that you are not being cited. It does not tell you why. That part is content structure, entity clarity and whether anyone else on the web vouches for you, which is the work in GEO consulting.
// questions I get
What clients ask before paying for a tracker.
What is an AI visibility tool?
An AI visibility tool checks whether your brand or content appears in AI-generated answers. The better ones track a fixed prompt set across engines such as ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini, Google AI Overviews and AI Mode, then report brand mentions, cited URLs and competitor share of voice over time.
How much do AI visibility tools cost?
Verified July 2026 entry prices run from $29 a month for Otterly Lite to $250 a month for Scrunch Core. The headline price is usually not the working price. Once you need 50 or more prompts across four or more engines, most tools land between $130 and $400 a month.
What is the cheapest AI visibility tool?
Otterly.AI has the lowest headline price at $29 a month, but that tier covers 15 prompts and excludes Gemini, Google AI Mode and Claude, which are paid add-ons. AIClicks at $59 a month is the cheapest tool whose entry tier tracks a usable prompt set with a choice of engines.
Do I need a paid AI visibility tool?
Not at the start. Free graders and manual prompt sampling will tell you whether AI answers mention you at all. Pay for a tracker when you need a trend line, when competitors are being cited for queries that drive your pipeline, or when someone has to report on it monthly.
Which AI visibility tools track Google AI Mode?
Verified in July 2026: SE Ranking, AIClicks, Ahrefs Brand Radar, Peec AI and Positive Surfer track Google AI Mode on named tiers. Otterly charges for it as an add-on. Profound and Scrunch cover it on enterprise plans. AI Mode and AI Overviews cite different sources, so a single combined Google score hides the gap.
Which AI visibility tools track Claude?
Claude coverage is the most commonly gated engine. Semrush includes it in plan pricing. Otterly sells it as an add-on from $29 a month. AIClicks includes it in its nine-engine pool. Profound and Scrunch reserve it for enterprise tiers. Ahrefs Brand Radar does not cover Claude at all.
Are free AI visibility tools accurate?
Free tools are accurate for what they measure, which is usually a single snapshot or a structural score. They do not run enough prompt variants to replace paid tracking. Use one to decide whether paid monitoring is worth opening, not as the monitoring itself.
What should an AI visibility tool track?
At minimum: the prompt that triggered the answer, whether your brand was named, which URLs were cited, which competitors appeared instead, which engine produced it, and how all of that moves over time. Refresh frequency matters as much as engine count. Weekly sampling misses most movement.
Do UK teams pay more for AI visibility tools?
Every tool in this comparison prices in US dollars, so UK buyers carry the exchange rate and any card conversion fee on top of the listed price. Budget in pounds against a rate you can live with, and check whether VAT is added at checkout before you commit to an annual plan.
Written by
Jason Burns
Independent UK SEO, GEO and AI consultant. 17 years in search. Portfolio includes 3M, BlackRock, Unilever and E.ON. Owner of SEO Moves Ltd since 2014.
More about Jason →// next step
Not sure which tier you actually need?
Send your domain and three buyer prompts. I will tell you whether a paid tracker is worth it yet, or whether the next pound should go into content, schema and citations first.
Ask for a visibility review