Original data
The best AI visibility tools, ranked by the engines.
· Measured 1 to 25 September 2026
Ask ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity or Google's AI Overviews which tool to use to track your brand in AI answers, and five names come back far more often than the rest: Semrush, Otterly.AI, Profound, Peec AI and Ahrefs. We counted. That is 391 answers to 20 buyer questions, each asked four times from 1 to 25 September 2026.
We sell one of these tools. Greater Than Services was named in 0 of those answers, and it sits in the table below with everyone else.
Key takeaways
- Semrush was named in 160 of 391 answers (41%), ahead of Otterly.AI (152) and Profound (150).
- Small tools get named when the engine reads their own page. For GrackerAI, LLM Pulse, Ranketta, Sight and Wellows, the engine had read the tool's own site in 92% to 100% of the answers that named it. For the five most named it was 3% to 21%.
- Answers move. Asked the same question on the same engine at the next run, the engines named 54% of the same tools again.
- Our own product was named in 0 of the 391 answers.
The ranking
Every tool named in at least one answer, ranked by how many of the 391 answers named it. The engine columns split that count. The last column shows how often the engine had also read the tool's own website in the answers that named it.
| # | Tool | Answers naming it | Share | ChatGPT | Claude | Gemini | Perplexity | AI Overviews | Own site read |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Semrush | 160 | 41% | 28 | 27 | 37 | 32 | 36 | 21% |
| 2 | Otterly.AI | 152 | 39% | 36 | 31 | 29 | 36 | 20 | 13% |
| 3 | Profound | 150 | 38% | 26 | 30 | 31 | 33 | 30 | 14% |
| 4 | Peec AI | 116 | 30% | 24 | 28 | 19 | 33 | 12 | 3% |
| 5 | Ahrefs | 80 | 20% | 20 | 9 | 21 | 17 | 13 | 8% |
| 6 | Scrunch | 68 | 17% | 15 | 16 | 13 | 13 | 11 | 9% |
| 7 | AthenaHQ | 47 | 12% | 10 | 10 | 6 | 14 | 7 | 6% |
| 7 | SE Ranking | 47 | 12% | 10 | 6 | 10 | 8 | 13 | 21% |
| 9 | Rankscale | 32 | 8% | 7 | 9 | 8 | 3 | 5 | 25% |
| 10 | Writesonic | 29 | 7% | 10 | 9 | 5 | 4 | 1 | 10% |
| 11 | Conductor | 25 | 6% | 3 | 3 | 7 | 7 | 5 | 20% |
| 12 | Surfer | 23 | 6% | 6 | 2 | 10 | 4 | 1 | 0% |
| 13 | GrackerAI | 20 | 5% | 2 | 8 | 4 | 5 | 1 | 100% |
| 14 | Goodie | 18 | 5% | 2 | 4 | 2 | 6 | 4 | 6% |
| 15 | LLMrefs | 17 | 4% | 5 | 4 | 2 | 6 | 0 | 0% |
| 16 | BrightEdge | 16 | 4% | 3 | 0 | 6 | 4 | 3 | 19% |
| 17 | Ayzeo | 15 | 4% | 4 | 8 | 2 | 0 | 1 | 80% |
| 17 | LLM Pulse | 15 | 4% | 3 | 1 | 4 | 5 | 2 | 93% |
| 19 | Ranketta | 14 | 4% | 3 | 5 | 2 | 2 | 2 | 100% |
| 19 | Sight | 14 | 4% | 2 | 3 | 8 | 0 | 1 | 93% |
| 19 | Trakkr | 14 | 4% | 0 | 4 | 4 | 5 | 1 | 79% |
| 22 | Alhena | 13 | 3% | 1 | 5 | 3 | 1 | 3 | 85% |
| 22 | Evertune | 13 | 3% | 4 | 3 | 1 | 3 | 2 | 62% |
| 22 | Frase | 13 | 3% | 1 | 6 | 4 | 2 | 0 | 54% |
| 22 | Wellows | 13 | 3% | 3 | 2 | 5 | 1 | 2 | 92% |
| 26 | Finseo | 11 | 3% | 0 | 7 | 2 | 2 | 0 | 100% |
| 27 | Promptwatch | 10 | 3% | 4 | 4 | 0 | 2 | 0 | 30% |
| 28 | Cognizo | 9 | 2% | 2 | 3 | 1 | 2 | 1 | 78% |
| 28 | Siftly | 9 | 2% | 0 | 4 | 4 | 1 | 0 | 100% |
| 30 | Dageno | 8 | 2% | 0 | 2 | 3 | 0 | 3 | 100% |
| 31 | Brandlight | 7 | 2% | 2 | 0 | 0 | 4 | 1 | 14% |
| 31 | Mentionova | 7 | 2% | 0 | 1 | 2 | 2 | 2 | 57% |
| 33 | AirOps | 6 | 2% | 1 | 2 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 50% |
| 33 | Rankability | 6 | 2% | 1 | 3 | 1 | 1 | 0 | 67% |
| 35 | Nightwatch | 3 | 1% | 0 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 0 | 33% |
| 35 | Omnia | 3 | 1% | 0 | 1 | 1 | 0 | 1 | 67% |
| 37 | AmICited | 2 | 1% | 0 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 1 | 100% |
| 38 | Geoptie | 1 | 0% | 0 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 0 | 0% |
| 38 | RankPrompt | 1 | 0% | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 0% |
| 38 | Rankshift | 1 | 0% | 0 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 0 | 0% |
| 38 | Search Atlas | 1 | 0% | 0 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 0 | 0% |
| 42 | Greater Than Servicesours | 0 | 0% | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | none named |
What this ranking measures, and what it does not
It measures who the engines recommend. That is what a buyer sees when they ask an assistant which tool to use, and it is the number every vendor on this list is trying to move. It is not a test of which tool works best. We did not run the tools against each other, and a tool can be good and rarely named.
Named means in the answer's own words. The engines write their sources into the text as links. A link to a vendor's blog post is where the engine read something, not a recommendation, so links are removed before names are counted. Counted without that step, any vendor whose blog post the engines cite picks up mentions no reader ever saw.
The engines do not agree. Otterly.AI led on ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity; Semrush led on Gemini and Google AI Overviews. Which assistant your buyers use changes which names they hear first.
Why a few names dominate, and how small tools get in
The five most-named tools are named whether or not their own site is read: of the answers naming them, the engine had read their own site in 3% to 21%. Their names come from other pages the engines read and from what the models already know. Leaving out the ranked tools' own sites, the sources the engines read most for these questions were reddit.com (76 answers), zapier.com (66 answers), linkedin.com (43 answers), yotpo.com (43 answers), amplitude.com (38 answers) and youtube.com (37 answers).
Smaller tools get in another way. GrackerAI was named in 20 answers, and in 20 of them the engine had read gracker.ai in the same answer. The same held for LLM Pulse, Ranketta, Sight and Wellows. When a small tool is named, the engine has almost always just read that tool's own page, typically a roundup of the best tools that includes itself.
Being read is not the same as being named. KIME's site was among the sources of 25 answers, and KIME was named in none of them.
For a buyer, that makes the engines' shortlist a reflection of which roundups they happened to read. Use it as a starting list, then run two or three tools on your own questions.
Which tool for which buyer
The same count, split by the kind of buyer the question came from, with what each vendor's own site says it offers that buyer.
The most-named tools, in their own words
What each of the ten most-named tools says it does, taken from its own site. Their site is the authority on what they offer, and on price, which we do not publish.
Semrush
Named in 160 of 391 answersThe AI Visibility Toolkit inside Semrush's marketing suite: brand mentions and citations in AI answers, share of voice, sentiment and prompt research.
- AI surfaces it lists
- ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, Google AI Mode
- Free to start
- A free AI visibility checker you can run three times a day without an account, and a seven-day trial of Semrush.
- Leads with
- Tracks appearances in AI Overviews beside the same brand's Google rankings.
From semrush.com, checked on 25 September 2026. Their site is the authority on what it offers.
Otterly.AI
Named in 152 of 391 answersAI search monitoring: where a brand is mentioned and its website cited across the AI search engines.
- AI surfaces it lists
- ChatGPT, Perplexity, AI Overviews, AI Mode, Gemini, Copilot
- Built for
- Agencies and marketing teams.
- Free to start
- A free trial, plus free GEO tools such as a crawlability checker.
- Leads with
- Prompt research beside the monitoring, to find which questions to track.
From otterly.ai, checked on 25 September 2026. Their site is the authority on what it offers.
Profound
Named in 150 of 391 answersAn AI marketing platform: how brands appear in AI answers, prompt volume data, and agents that act on it.
- AI surfaces it lists
- ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Microsoft Copilot, Google AI Overviews, Google AI Mode, Gemini, Grok, DeepSeek
- Built for
- Brands and agencies, from a self-serve trial to enterprise teams running marketing agents.
- Free to start
- A free Trial plan: 50 prompts a day for seven days on ChatGPT, Gemini and Google AI Overviews.
- Leads with
- Runs every tracked prompt daily and captures answers from the browser, as users see them.
From tryprofound.com, checked on 25 September 2026. Their site is the authority on what it offers.
Peec AI
Named in 116 of 391 answersAI search analytics for marketing teams: a brand's visibility, position, sentiment and citations across AI engines.
- AI surfaces it lists
- ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Google AI Mode, Perplexity, Gemini, Microsoft Copilot
- Built for
- Marketing teams and agencies.
- Free to start
- A free trial.
- Leads with
- One Looker Studio dashboard template, cloned for every client.
From peec.ai, checked on 25 September 2026. Their site is the authority on what it offers.
Ahrefs
Named in 80 of 391 answersBrand Radar, Ahrefs' tracker for how often a brand is mentioned in AI answers, YouTube and Reddit, built on a database of real search prompts.
- AI surfaces it lists
- ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Microsoft Copilot, Google AI Overviews, Google AI Mode
- Free to start
- A free AI visibility checker with no sign-up and no card.
- Leads with
- A prompt database Ahrefs puts at more than 450 million prompts a month.
From ahrefs.com, checked on 25 September 2026. Their site is the authority on what it offers.
Scrunch
Named in 68 of 391 answersA platform that monitors brand visibility and share of voice in AI search and optimizes a site for AI crawlers and agents.
- AI surfaces it lists
- ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, Google AI Mode, Google AI Overviews, Meta AI, Microsoft Copilot
- Built for
- Companies and agencies, including large enterprise brands.
- Free to start
- A seven-day free trial.
- Leads with
- AXP, a lightweight parallel version of a site translated for AI agents.
From scrunch.com, checked on 25 September 2026. Their site is the authority on what it offers.
AthenaHQ
Named in 47 of 391 answersA generative engine optimization platform that tracks AI search visibility across 11 or more models and turns citation and content gaps into work.
- AI surfaces it lists
- ChatGPT, Perplexity, AI Overviews, AI Mode, Gemini, Claude, Copilot, Grok, DeepSeek, Meta AI, Mistral
- Built for
- AEO, SEO, PR, content and brand marketing teams, including multi-brand portfolios, multi-location businesses and agencies.
- Free to start
- A free Essential plan that includes a credit allowance.
- Leads with
- GA4 and Search Console side by side with AI visibility, to compare SEO and AEO.
From athenahq.ai, checked on 25 September 2026. Their site is the authority on what it offers.
SE Ranking
Named in 47 of 391 answersSE Visible, SE Ranking's AI visibility app, also sold as a tracker inside the SE Ranking suite: brand mentions, sentiment and competitors in AI answers.
- AI surfaces it lists
- ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Google AI Overviews, Google AI Mode
- Built for
- Business owners, agencies, CMOs and digital marketers, PR and brand specialists, and product marketers.
- Free to start
- Five free checks a day on its tracker page with no account, and a free trial with no card.
- Leads with
- Shows the domains and URLs that appear most in AI answers, across seven markets.
From visible.seranking.com, checked on 25 September 2026. Their site is the authority on what it offers.
Rankscale
Named in 32 of 391 answersA brand visibility tracker across AI engines, with AI crawlability audits and shopping visibility.
- AI surfaces it lists
- ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini, Google AI Overviews, Google AI Mode, Copilot, DeepSeek
- Built for
- Agencies, enterprise and multi-brand SEO teams.
- Free to start
- A seven-day free trial of its Pro plan.
- Leads with
- Audits AI bot crawlability and site structure beside the visibility numbers.
From rankscale.ai, checked on 25 September 2026. Their site is the authority on what it offers.
Writesonic
Named in 29 of 391 answersAn AI search growth platform that tracks brand visibility, citations and share of voice across AI engines, with content, citation and shopping tools.
- AI surfaces it lists
- ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Google AI Overviews, Microsoft Copilot, Grok, Perplexity, DeepSeek, Meta AI
- Built for
- Marketing directors, SEO managers, content teams and agencies.
- Free to start
- A seven-day free trial with no card.
- Leads with
- Prompt volume estimates it says come from more than 2 billion AI conversations.
From writesonic.com, checked on 25 September 2026. Their site is the authority on what it offers.
Where we fit
Greater Than Services was named in 0 of 391 answers and cited in 1. We are newer and smaller than every tool above us, and the engines have not yet read a page that makes a case for us. This page is part of how we intend to change that without gaming it: publish the data, put ourselves in it, and let anyone recount it.
Greater Than Servicesour product
A workspace per brand that puts your buyer questions to five AI engines every week, records which answers named you and what they cited instead, shows your Google rank beside each answer, and drafts the fixes.
- AI surfaces it lists
- ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews
- For agencies
- The Agency plan: 10 client brands, 25 seats, white-label reports, an API and an MCP server.
- Integrations
- Google Search Console, WordPress, Shopify
- Free to start
- A three-day trial on one brand with a card, a preview workspace with ten weeks of history that needs no sign-up, and a free AI crawler checker.
- Leads with
- Keeps the full text of every answer, so you can read what each engine actually said.
Our own description, checked against the product on 25 September 2026.
How we measured this
These are buyer questions we track for our own product, Greater Than Services, in our own workspace. Each run puts every question to five engines, asking as a buyer in the United States. It ran four times, on 1, 2, 10 and 25 September 2026. 20 questions drew 391 answers.
- ChatGPT: OpenAI's GPT-4o with web search, through the API
- Claude: Claude Haiku 4.5 with web search, through the API
- Gemini: Gemini 2.5 Flash grounded in Google Search, through the API
- Perplexity: Sonar, which always searches the web
- Google AI Overviews: read from Google's own results page
Named means the tool appears in the answer's own words. The engines write their sources into the text as links, and a link to a vendor's blog is a source, not a recommendation, so links are removed before names are matched. Own site read means the tool's website was among the sources the engine cited for that answer. A tool named in the question itself is not counted for that question, because every answer repeats it.
Across all 20 questions, Google showed an AI Overview for 71 of the 80 searches, so the other 9 are not counted as answers. Answers move from week to week: asked the same question on the same engine at the next run, the engines named 54% of the same tools again.
What is left out. Five questions we tracked in September were answered as questions about other kinds of software, such as LLM observability and support chatbots, and rarely named an AI visibility tool at all. Their 89 answers are not in any figure here. We replaced them in our workspace on 25 September:
- “Top AI assistant tracking solutions for financial services and compliance-heavy industries?”
- “Best affordable AI assistant tracking software for startups under $500/month?”
- “Best AI visibility software for nonprofits and educational institutions on a tight budget?”
- “Which AI monitoring platforms are most popular with enterprise Fortune 500 companies?”
- “Which AI monitoring solution has the best customer support for non-technical marketing teams?”
We matched the 42 vendors we found named while reading the answers, plus our own. A long tail of others came up a few times each, including Bluefish, Knowatoa, Stackline, GetMint, Waikay, Fokal, and is not counted.
Where this can mislead. We chose the questions, and we sell a tool in this category, so read the figures as one company's measurement rather than a census. Answers came through each engine's API or Google's results page, which is close to what the consumer apps show but not identical, and from one country in English. Nobody paid to be on this page and no vendor saw it before it was published. Greater Than Services was named in 0 answers and cited in 1.
Every vendor description on these pages comes from that vendor's own site, checked on 25 September 2026, and says only what the site says. We do not publish anyone's prices; follow the link to their site for those.
Download the counts as CSV under CC BY 4.0, one row per tool with every breakdown on these pages, and recount them.
Questions people ask
What is the best AI visibility tool?
There is no single best one. Asked directly, the engines most often named Semrush, Otterly.AI, Profound, Peec AI and Ahrefs, in that order. Which suits you depends on the engines you need covered, whether you report to clients or track products, and whether you want to start free.
How do AI engines decide which tools to recommend?
From what they read. Across 391 answers, the smaller tools were named almost only when the engine had read the tool's own site in the same answer, while the most-named tools were named mostly from other pages and from what the models already know.
Do AI visibility tools track Google AI Overviews?
Most say they do. Of the 32 tools on these pages with descriptions checked against their own sites, 29 name Google AI Overviews among the surfaces they track. Google Search Console also has a free report of your pages' impressions in AI Overviews and AI Mode.
Is one free check enough to know whether AI recommends you?
No. When the same question went to the same engine at the next run, one to fifteen days later, the engines named 54% of the same tools again. One reading is a sample of one; the same questions asked every week show the trend.
Why is your own tool at the bottom of the ranking?
Because that is where the count put it. Greater Than Services was named in 0 of the 391 answers. A ranking that leaves out its author's own result is not worth trusting.