You searched “best AI visibility tools” and got fifteen tabs of nearly identical listicles. Each one quietly puts the publisher’s own product at #1. Each one calls every other tool a “point solution.” Each one has a 14-day trial CTA you’ve already stopped reading.
This is not that.
We run an AI visibility product. We’re going to mention it once, in the place where it actually fits, and we’re going to be honest about who it’s for and who it isn’t. The other 95% of this post is a real comparison of the platforms we’d recommend depending on your stage, budget, and what you’re actually trying to accomplish.
TLDR
The AI visibility tools market raised $300M+ in funding between summer 2025 and spring 2026. Profound is the clear leader. Peec AI is the fastest-growing challenger. Otterly is the most accessible monitoring tool. The legacy SEO platforms (Semrush, Ahrefs, Conductor) have the most users but the shallowest features. Here’s the short version:
- Profound: $155M raised, $1B valuation, Fortune 500 clients. Enterprise pricing. The category leader.
- Peec AI: $29M raised, $4M+ ARR in ten months. Best mid-market analytics platform.
- Otterly: Affordable monitoring starting at $29/month. Best entry-level tool.
- Bluefish, Scrunch, Evertune, AthenaHQ: All well-funded, all real, all enterprise-focused.
- Semrush, Ahrefs, Conductor: SEO platforms with AEO modules bolted on. Shallow but bundled into existing contracts.
If you’re an SMB and you’ve never measured AI visibility, none of these are the right starting point. We’ll explain why later in the post.
What “AI visibility” actually means
AI visibility is the practice of measuring and improving how often your brand appears when someone asks ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, or Google’s AI Overviews a question relevant to your business. Some people call this Answer Engine Optimization (AEO). Others call it Generative Engine Optimization (GEO). The terminology is unsettled. The work is the same.
The shift it responds to is real. Conductor’s State of AEO/GEO 2026 report found 94% of CMOs plan to increase AI visibility spend this year. Enterprises already allocate 12% of digital budgets to it. AI search visitors convert at 4 to 5 times the rate of traditional organic search visitors, according to Karl Wells of The Washington Post. ChatGPT processes 72 billion messages per month. McKinsey projects agentic commerce will reach $5 trillion globally by 2030.
So this is a real market. The question is which tool to use.
The honest answer is that it depends on three things: your company size, your budget, and whether you actually have the team to act on what these tools tell you. We’ll walk through the major options and tell you who each one is for.
How we evaluated these tools
A real comparison weights five things:
- Funding and runway. This category is moving fast. A vendor with two years of cash will out-build a vendor with six months.
- Customer roster. Named Fortune 500 clients are signal. “Trusted by thousands” is not.
- Platform coverage. ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, AI Overviews, Copilot, Grok, AI Mode, DeepSeek. The leaders cover most. The laggards cover three.
- Action layer. Does it just measure, or does it help you do something with the measurement?
- Honest pricing. If a vendor won’t show you a number until you take a sales call, that’s a tell.
We did not weight self-published case studies or G2 review counts. Those are gameable. We weighted disclosed funding, named enterprise customers, and product depth.
Profound
Founded: 2024. Funding: $155M total. Valuation: $1B (Series C led by Lightspeed, February 2026). Headcount: ~228.
Profound is the category leader and it is not close. James Cadwallader and Dylan Babbs raised $3.5M in seed in August 2024, then $20M Series A from Kleiner Perkins, then $35M Series B from Sequoia, then $96M Series C from Lightspeed eighteen months after launch. The Series C valued the company at $1B. That is the fastest path to unicorn in B2B SaaS this year.
The customer list is the real story. Profound counts Target, Walmart, Ramp, MongoDB, U.S. Bank, Figma, Charlotte Tilbury, Indeed, DocuSign, and Chime as customers. Roughly 10% of the Fortune 500 use the platform. More than 2,000 individual marketers across 500+ organizations log in daily.
What it does: Profound is a “read/write” platform. It monitors how AI describes your brand across all major answer engines (Answer Engine Insights), tracks how AI agents read your site (Agent Analytics), and shows you the questions people are actually asking AI about your category (Conversation Explorer). Then it lets you act on that data. The Profound Agents feature, launched alongside the Series C, generates AI-optimized content and runs marketing workflows in the company’s voice.
Pricing: Self-serve Lite starts at $499/month. Enterprise is custom and not cheap. Our research suggests typical enterprise contracts land in the $30,000 to $100,000+ range annually.
Best for: Fortune 500 marketing teams. B2B companies with an established marketing function and a real budget. Anyone who needs to defend AI visibility to a board.
Not for: SMBs. The platform is built for teams that already know what to do with data. If you don’t have someone whose job is to act on the findings, you’re paying enterprise SaaS prices for a dashboard you’ll check once a month.
Peec AI
Founded: February 2025 (Berlin). Funding: $29M total. ARR: $4M+ in ten months. Customers: 1,300+.
Peec AI is the fastest-growing challenger in the category. Marius Meiners, Tobias Siwonia, and Daniel Drabo met in Antler’s Berlin Winter 2024 cohort. They raised €1.8M pre-seed in April 2025, €5.2M seed from 20VC five weeks later, and a $21M Series A from Singular in November 2025. Total: $29M, all in under twelve months.
Their customer list is one of the strongest non-Profound rosters in the category. Chanel. Axel Springer. ElevenLabs. Wix. HomeToGo. Glide. n8n. Attio. TUI. They add roughly 300 new customers per month.
What it does: Peec AI monitors brand mentions across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini, and Google AI Overviews. The dashboard centers on prompts (not keywords) and tracks visibility, ranking, sentiment, and the sources shaping each answer. Action recommendations are surfaced inline. Their proprietary data layer, built on filtered raw search request data, is what differentiates the analytics.
Pricing: Starter at €75/month for 25 prompts. Pro at €169/month for 100 prompts. Enterprise from €424/month. The lower tiers can be tested before committing. No annual lock-in required.
Best for: Mid-market B2B and consumer brands. Marketing teams that need real analytics without enterprise pricing. European companies that care about GDPR-native data handling.
Not for: Fortune 100 enterprises that need 50-seat deployments and SOC 2 Type II by default. Or single-founder SMBs without a marketer to act on the data.
Otterly.AI
Founded: 2023. Funding: Undisclosed (likely bootstrapped or small seed). Customers: Among the four platforms with the most customers in the category.
Otterly is the most-mentioned mid-market tool in the AI visibility comparison guides we read for this post. It’s also the most accessible. Pricing starts at $29/month, which is the lowest credible entry point for ongoing AI visibility monitoring on the market.
What it does: Otterly tracks brand mentions for user-defined prompts across ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot, and Perplexity. It alerts you when mention patterns change. It does competitive comparison reporting. It’s not trying to be a content production platform or an action layer. It’s monitoring, done well, at a price most marketing budgets can absorb.
The strategic partnership with Storyblok announced in late 2025 was a notable signal. Content platforms are starting to bundle AI visibility monitoring directly into their products, and Otterly was the partner Storyblok chose.
Pricing: From $29/month for entry-level monitoring. Higher tiers scale with prompt volume and platform coverage. A 14-day evaluation window is available.
Best for: Solo marketers, agencies tracking client brands, anyone who wants ongoing AI visibility monitoring without an enterprise contract.
Not for: Teams that need an action layer, content generation, or revenue attribution. Otterly tells you what’s happening. It does not help you fix it.
The Rest of the Field
The four tools above are the ones most readers should evaluate first. But the category has real depth, and depending on your situation, one of the following might be a better fit.
Bluefish
$24M raised in a Series A from NEA. Founders include Alex Sherman (sold PromoteIQ to Microsoft in 2019) and Andrei Dunca (sold LiveRail to Meta in 2014). 80% of customers are Fortune 500. Adidas and Tishman Speyer are named. The platform is built for brand protection in the AI era: real-time crisis detection, sentiment monitoring, brand safety scoring. It does not yet support Claude, Copilot, AI Mode, or DeepSeek as of late 2025. Pricing is custom enterprise, sales-led only.
Best for: Fortune 500 corporate communications teams worried about brand misrepresentation in AI answers.
Scrunch AI
$19M raised, Series A led by Decibel. 500+ brands as customers. Co-founder Chris Andrew was the first employee and CPO at Hearsay Systems (acquired by Yext). The differentiator is the Agent Experience Platform, a content delivery layer that serves AI-optimized versions of your pages directly to bots. Adobe’s LLM Optimizer is the only other platform with a comparable feature.
Best for: Mid-to-large enterprises with complex product catalogs and the engineering capacity to deploy a content delivery layer.
Evertune
$19M raised, Series A from Felicis. Founded by Trade Desk veterans (Brian Stempeck took The Trade Desk from $0 to $50B market cap). Runs over 1 million prompts per brand per month, an order of magnitude more than competitors, which gives them statistical significance the smaller-volume platforms can’t match. They also have direct API access to foundation models, so they can isolate base-model knowledge from search-augmented responses. Customers include Canada Goose and Miro.
Pricing: Starts at $3,000/month. The most expensive platform in the category.
Best for: Automotive, healthcare, B2B software, and other high-consideration purchase categories where statistical rigor matters.
AthenaHQ
$2.2M seed (Y Combinator). The smallest war chest in this list, but the founder is Andrew Yan, a former Google Search PM who worked on Google’s next-gen AI search alongside DeepMind. The platform’s differentiator is the Action Center, which automatically generates and publishes AI-optimized content. Native Shopify and GA4 integrations let you tie AI visibility directly to revenue. Customers include SoFi, Wix, and ZoomInfo.
Pricing: Self-serve at $295/month for 3,600 credits. Enterprise custom.
Best for: Tech-forward marketing teams that want automation, not just monitoring.
Semrush, Ahrefs, Conductor (the legacy bolt-ons)
These are the dark horse of the category. None of them lead in mindshare. All of them have more existing paying customers than every pure-play platform combined. Their AI visibility features are bundled into existing SEO contracts, so the revenue is invisible, but the user count is enormous.
- Semrush AI Visibility Toolkit: Add-on at $99/month on top of existing Semrush plans ($129.95 to $499.95).
- Ahrefs Brand Radar: Standalone tool, free tier available, paid plans from $129/month.
- Conductor AI Search Performance: Enterprise SEO platform with AEO module. Custom pricing, typically $2,000+/month.
Best for: Teams already paying for one of these platforms. The AI visibility module is good enough to start, and you don’t need a new vendor relationship.
Not for: Anyone who needs depth. These features are real, but they’re shallow compared to the dedicated platforms above.
A comparison table
| Tool | Funding | Starting price | Best for | Action layer? |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Profound | $155M | $499/mo | F500 enterprise | Yes (Agents) |
| Peec AI | $29M | €75/mo | Mid-market | Limited |
| Otterly | Undisclosed | $29/mo | SMB / solo marketers | No |
| Bluefish | $24M | Custom | F500 brand protection | Limited |
| Scrunch AI | $19M | $299/mo | Enterprise content delivery | Yes (AXP) |
| Evertune | $19M+ | $3,000/mo | High-consideration B2B/B2C | Yes (Content Studio) |
| AthenaHQ | $2.2M | $295/mo | Automation-first teams | Yes (Action Center) |
| Semrush AI Toolkit | n/a | $129.95 + $99/mo add-on | Existing Semrush users | No |
| Ahrefs Brand Radar | n/a | Free / $129/mo | Existing Ahrefs users | No |
| Conductor | n/a | ~$2,000/mo | Enterprise SEO teams | Limited |
Where Surmado fits in this stack
We promised one mention. This is it.
Surmado AI Visibility is a $50 deliverable, not a SaaS subscription. You don’t log in. You don’t configure a dashboard. You ask Scout (our AI research analyst) to run an AI visibility report on your business. Scout pulls real prompts, queries the major answer engines, identifies who’s appearing instead of you, finds the citation sources AI is using, and produces a report with a prioritized action plan. The report shows its work: methodology, citations, confidence intervals.
This is not a competitor to Profound or Peec. It’s not even in the same category. Profound is enterprise software for marketing teams that already know what they’re doing. Surmado is a one-time research deliverable for SMBs and agencies that need to know where they stand, what to fix, and in what order. Most of our customers run our AI Visibility report once or twice, fix the priorities Scout identifies, and either stop there or move to one of the bigger platforms once they’ve outgrown a starter audit.
If you’re a Fortune 500 marketing team with a six-figure AEO budget, hire Profound. If you’re an established mid-market brand with a marketer to act on the data, look at Peec AI. If you’re a small business or an agency client who has never measured AI visibility before and you don’t know what you’re missing, run Surmado AI Visibility for $50 and start there. You’ll know within a week whether you need a $30,000/year enterprise platform or whether the audit was enough.
KEY TAKEAWAY: The right AI visibility tool depends on your stage. Enterprise teams need Profound or Peec. Mid-market teams need Otterly or Scrunch. SMBs need a one-time audit before they need ongoing monitoring at all.
Common mistakes we see
Mistake 1: Starting with the most expensive tool. Enterprise platforms charge enterprise prices because they assume an enterprise team will act on the data. If you don’t have that team, you’re buying a dashboard, not an outcome.
Mistake 2: Treating AI visibility as a measurement problem. Measurement without action is theater. The platforms with action layers (Profound, AthenaHQ, Scrunch, Evertune) cost more for a reason. The cheaper monitoring-only tools work, but only if your team or your agency is going to do the optimization work themselves.
Mistake 3: Confusing “tracked” with “improved.” Watching your visibility number go up and down is not the same as making it go up. The work is in the content, the schema, the citation sources, and the technical foundation. The tool surfaces the gap. You (or your agency) close it.
Mistake 4: Assuming AI visibility is separate from SEO. It’s not. The content that ranks well in Google is increasingly the same content that AI cites. If your SEO foundation is broken (slow site, no schema, thin content, no E-E-A-T signals), no AI visibility tool will save you. Start with a site audit. Then layer on AI visibility monitoring.
What to do this week
If you’re an SMB owner who’s never measured AI visibility:
- Today: Search for your business and your top three competitors in ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews. Note who appears.
- This week: Run Surmado AI Visibility ($50) or test Otterly on the entry tier for a month.
- Avoid: Signing a $30,000 enterprise contract before you understand the basics.
If you’re a mid-market marketer evaluating tools:
- Today: Decide whether you need monitoring only or monitoring + action.
- This week: Demo Peec AI and Otterly. Compare their prompt coverage and pricing against your budget.
- Avoid: Picking a tool because it has the loudest case studies. Most are self-published.
If you’re an enterprise marketer with budget:
- Today: Map your top 50 customer questions across ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and AI Overviews.
- This week: Demo Profound and at least one alternative (Bluefish if brand protection is the priority, Evertune if statistical rigor matters, Scrunch if content delivery to AI agents is on the roadmap).
- Avoid: Buying the platform with the biggest funding round. Buy the one whose action layer matches what your team will actually use.
FAQ
What’s the difference between AEO, GEO, and AI visibility? Functionally, nothing. Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) and Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) are two terms for the same practice. “AI visibility” is the cleanest umbrella term. Some agencies prefer one acronym for SEO reasons. The work doesn’t change.
Will AI visibility tools work for B2B? Yes. Most of the leading platforms (Profound, Peec, AthenaHQ, Evertune) skew B2B in their customer rosters. The prompts you track will be longer and more specific than B2C prompts, but the methodology is identical.
How fast do these tools show results? Measurement is immediate. Improvement takes 4 to 12 weeks depending on your content velocity and how much foundational work needs to happen first. AI models update their training and retrieval data on different cycles, so a fix that works for ChatGPT may take longer to show up in Claude.
Are the legacy SEO tools (Semrush, Ahrefs) good enough? For most teams already paying for them, yes. The dedicated platforms go deeper, but if you’re not going to act on deeper data, the bolt-on modules are sufficient. The exception is enterprise teams with serious AEO budgets, where the dedicated platforms pay back the cost.
Do I need both an AI visibility tool and an SEO tool? For now, yes. The Venn diagram is overlapping but not identical. SEO tools are still better at backlink analysis, technical audits, and traditional rank tracking. AI visibility tools are better at prompt-level monitoring and citation source analysis. Over the next two years, the tools will converge.
The Bottom Line
Profound is the category leader. Peec is the best mid-market alternative. Otterly is the most accessible monitoring tool. Bluefish, Scrunch, Evertune, and AthenaHQ are real, well-funded, and serve specific niches well. The legacy SEO platforms are good enough for teams already paying for them.
The right tool depends on your stage, not the leaderboard.
If you’re not yet ready for any of them, Surmado AI Visibility is a $50 one-time audit that tells you where you stand and what to fix. Customers are skipping Google. They’re asking AI. What is AI saying about you?
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