2026-09-17, GEO · Brand Monitoring · Analytics

Best AI visibility tools: GEO platforms compared, and when to build on an API

AI visibility tools, also sold as GEO or AEO platforms, report whether your brand shows up when people ask AI assistants about your category, how it is described, and next to which competitors. The established platforms (Profound, Peec AI, Otterly.ai, Scrunch, AthenaHQ, Semrush’s AI Visibility Toolkit and Ahrefs Brand Radar) differ on which engines they track at each tier, how many prompts a plan allows, and whether you can export the underlying data. When you need more than a plan’s prompt allowance, or the data feeds your own product or client reports, building on an answer API is the alternative, covered in the second half.

Facts about each platform come from its own pricing or product page, checked 2026-09-17 and linked. Plans change often in this category; re-check before you buy.

Comparison

Terms used below:

• Prompt: one tracked question, such as “best payroll software for a 20-person company”. A platform runs each prompt on each chosen engine at a set frequency.
• Answer volume: prompts × engines × runs per month, the unit that drives cost. Peec’s pricing page defines its monthly AI answers this way.
• Visibility: usually the share of answers that mention your brand. Definitions differ by vendor, so do not compare numbers across tools. See GEO vs SEO metrics.

Platforms

Profound

Profound’s pricing page shows two plans. The free Trial includes limited AI marketer credits, 10 unique prompts run once, ChatGPT only, unlimited seats, and no API access. Enterprise is custom-priced and adds custom prompt tracking, up to nine answer engines (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Mode, Google Gemini, Microsoft Copilot, DeepSeek, Anthropic Claude, Google AI Overviews and Exa Search), daily prompt frequency, multiple languages and regions, ChatGPT Shopping, CSV and JSON exports, API access, SSO/SAML and SOC 2.

Enterprise covers nine engines, including Exa Search and DeepSeek, with ChatGPT Shopping, exports and API. There is no self-serve paid tier on the pricing page, and the trial cannot show trends because prompts run once.

Fits enterprise brands with procurement processes that need many engines.

Peec AI

Peec AI’s pricing page lists Starter at €85 a month (50 prompts), Pro at €205 (150 prompts, 2 projects) and Advanced at €425 (350 prompts, 5 projects, multi-country, Looker Studio integration), each with unlimited users, daily tracking and three models chosen from ChatGPT, AI Mode, AI Overviews, Microsoft Copilot, Perplexity and Gemini. Additional models are add-ons priced per plan. Enterprise adds API access, SSO and up to 13 tracked LLM models. Listed metrics include visibility, position, sentiment and share of voice, plus source analytics, a fan-out overview and AI shopping features.

Pricing maps directly to answer volume, every plan tracks daily, and source and fan-out analysis are included. Standard plans are limited to three models, and the API is Enterprise only.

Fits in-house SEO and content teams tracking one or a few brands.

Otterly.ai

Otterly.ai’s pricing has Lite at $29 a month (15 prompts), Standard at $189 (100 prompts), Premium at $489 (400 prompts), and Enterprise from $1,000; annual billing is 15% less. All plans track ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity and Microsoft Copilot daily. Claude is an add-on ($29 a month on Lite), and Google AI Mode with Gemini is another ($9 a month on Lite). API access comes with Standard (2,000 API requests a month) and Premium (5,000). A free trial is offered.

It has the lowest paid entry price on this page, four engines included and an API on mid-tier plans. Fifteen prompts on Lite is a small sample of any category, and AI Mode and Gemini cost extra.

Fits small teams and solo marketers starting out, and agencies using the API tier for reporting.

Scrunch

Scrunch’s pricing lists Starter at $300 a month month-to-month or $250 billed annually, with 350 custom prompts, 3 personas, 5 page audits and 3 users, and Growth at $500 or $417 annually with 700 prompts, 5 personas, 10 page audits and 5 users. Monitoring covers ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, Google AI Mode and AI Overviews, and Meta. Enterprise adds SAML/OIDC and an Enterprise Data API. A seven-day free trial of Starter needs no payment details.

The entry prompt allowance is large, with personas and the full engine list on every plan. The Data API is Enterprise only.

Fits mid-market brands that need hundreds of prompts from the start.

AthenaHQ

AthenaHQ’s pricing starts with a free Essential plan: $25 of free credit (300 credits) across five models, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, Gemini and Copilot. Starter is $295 a month for 3,600 credits and 11 models, adding Claude, Grok, DeepSeek, Meta AI, Mistral and AI Mode, with API access and extra credits as paid add-ons. Enterprise is custom.

It has a free entry tier, eleven models on Starter, and content optimization features. Credit-based usage is hard to map to prompts × engines × days without the credit table, and the API costs extra.

Fits teams that want many engines, including Grok and DeepSeek, at a self-serve price.

Semrush AI Visibility Toolkit

Semrush’s AI pricing page lists the AI Visibility Toolkit at $99 a month per domain, with 25 custom prompts tracked daily, mentions from ChatGPT, Google AI, Gemini and Perplexity, and a seven-day trial. Its knowledge base describes prompt tracking on platforms including Google AI Mode and ChatGPT.

AI and organic visibility sit in one account next to Semrush’s SEO data. The allowance is 25 prompts per domain, and a toolkit-specific API is not described on the pages checked.

Fits existing Semrush customers.

Ahrefs Brand Radar

Ahrefs’ Brand Radar page covers AI Overviews, AI Mode, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Copilot and Claude, sold two ways. Custom Prompts tracks prompts you define, refreshed daily, from $50 a month ($699 a month for all models). The AI Visibility Index, at $199 a month, maps visibility across a database of 456M prompts that Ahrefs says is derived from its keyword data and expanded through People Also Ask and semantic fan-out.

It gives a market-level view without writing prompts, custom prompts for niches, and a link to Ahrefs’ SEO data. API access for Brand Radar is not described on the page checked.

Fits Ahrefs customers who want category-wide share of voice as well as tracked prompts.

Building on an answer API

A platform delivers a finished report. An answer API returns, for each prompt, engine and market, the full answer as JSON with sources, citations, the searches the engine ran and product blocks, and you decide what to compute. Reasons to take this route:

1. Scale. Allowances of 15 to 700 prompts are samples; a category audit or an agency with 30 clients needs thousands.
2. Ownership. The data lands in your warehouse, joins with CRM, traffic and revenue data, and survives a vendor change.
3. Custom metrics: citation position, fan-out coverage, product card presence, or a client-specific share-of-voice definition. See the share of voice framework.
4. Product. If AI visibility is a feature you sell, you need a data source rather than someone else’s dashboard. White-label AI visibility covers that model.

Answer API options

• DataForSEO AI Optimization API. Per its product page: LLM Scraper for ChatGPT and Gemini from $0.0012 per results page; LLM Responses through the official model APIs of ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and Perplexity at $0.0006 per task plus the model’s charges; LLM Mentions, a database of 280M+ prompts across ChatGPT and Google AI Overview, at $0.1 per request plus $0.001 per row. $50 minimum top-up.
• Bright Data AI scrapers. ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Copilot and Google AI Mode at $1.50 per 1K records pay as you go, 5K records a month free (product page).
• AnswerLine. One endpoint per engine: ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Copilot, Grok, Google AI Mode, Google Search with AI Overview, Google News. Credits per request: ChatGPT 5 (+2 once for fan-out, shopping, ads or raw response), Perplexity 4, Gemini 4, Copilot 5, Grok 5, AI Mode 4, Google Search 3 (+2 for the AI Overview). Async batches of up to 500 tasks with webhooks. Free tier of 500 credits a month; plans on /pricing.

Engine-by-engine comparisons are in best ChatGPT scraper, best Perplexity scraper, best Gemini scraper and AI Overview tracking tools.

A minimal build

1. Prompt set: group prompts by topic, intent and funnel stage, and keep a stable core. See prompt set design.
2. Schedule: a daily or weekly job submits one async batch per engine and market, with idempotency keys derived from prompt, market and date.
3. Receive: a webhook endpoint verifies the signature and stores each completed result.
4. Extract: brand mentions from the text, cited domains and positions from the sources, product presence from shopping blocks.
5. Aggregate: rates per prompt group, engine, market and week.
6. Report: a BI tool, a spreadsheet, or your own product UI.

One AnswerLine batch item:

{
  "taskType": "PERPLEXITY",
  "payload": { "prompt": "best payroll software for a 20-person company", "country": "US" },
  "idempotencyKey": "payroll-017-US-2026-09-17",
  "webhook": { "url": "https://example.com/hooks/answers" }
}

Most of the work is in steps 4 to 6. ChatGPT visibility tracker walks through a Python version, and the n8n workflow shows a no-code one.

How to choose

1. Who reads the output? A CMO dashboard favours a platform; a data team, a product or client reports favour an API.
2. How many prompts? Count prompts × markets. In the thousands, compare per-answer cost rather than plan price.
3. Which engines at which tier? Check whether AI Mode, Gemini, Claude or Grok are included or add-ons.
4. How fresh? Most plans listed track daily; confirm for your tier.
5. Can you get the data out? Check exports, the API tier and its rate limits. Without exports, leaving the tool means losing your history.
6. How is visibility defined? Ask for the formula. Mentions, citations and product placements are different outcomes; see mentions vs citations.
7. Sampling. How many runs per prompt per period? Single runs are noisy; see sampling vs census.

Tool type by team

Questions for a platform demo

1. Collection method: are answers collected from the consumer products or through model APIs? They measure different things; see provider APIs vs consumer answers.
2. Runs per prompt: how many times is each prompt run per day, and is the reported number one run or an average?
3. Markets: which countries and languages are supported on your plan, and does each market count as separate prompts?
4. Formula: how exactly are visibility, position and sentiment computed?
5. History: how long is history kept, and does it survive a plan downgrade?
6. Export: can you export every underlying answer with its sources, or only aggregates?

Cost example

50 prompts, three engines, daily: 4,500 answers a month, the volume Peec’s Starter plan describes.

API lines cost less per answer; platform lines include analysis, UI and support. Compare total cost: the platform fee against collection cost plus building and maintaining steps 4 to 6 above. Build vs buy and AI monitoring cost planning cover that accounting.

Common buying mistakes

• Comparing visibility scores across tools. Each defines the score differently; compare trends within one tool.
• Too few prompts per topic. One prompt per topic produces swings you will over-read.
• Leaving out engines your buyers use. If your audience uses Copilot at work or Perplexity for research, check they are included rather than add-ons.
• No access to answers. When a number moves, you need the answers behind it to explain why.

The quickstart and the AI visibility tracking use case cover the API route on your own prompts.

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