A year ago "AI visibility" meant asking ChatGPT about your own business and hoping. Now there are more than a dozen tools that do it systematically: run the questions buyers ask, record who gets recommended, and track it over time. This guide compares the ones a small business or a small agency can actually afford, with the entry price of each as published on 6 September 2026.
We make one of these tools, so read the TangentFlow entry with that in mind. Everything else is from the vendors' own pages, linked in the sources.
Key takeaways
Entry prices run from $29 to $99 a month, and the tools split into two camps. Monitoring tools (Otterly, Peec, Semrush, Profound) tell you the score. Fix tools (TangentFlow, Surfeo, Frase, Ayzeo) tell you the score and write the pages. Pick by what you will do with the number.
What these tools actually do
Every tool here works the same way underneath. It takes a list of prompts, either generated for your market or typed by you, asks one or more AI assistants those prompts, and parses the answers for brand names, positions, sentiment and cited sources. Then it repeats the run daily or weekly and charts the change.
The differences that matter for a small business are:
- Which assistants are covered, and whether the cheap plan covers more than ChatGPT.
- How many prompts you get, because 15 prompts is a very narrow window on a market.
- Whether it writes anything, or hands you a list and wishes you luck.
- Whether it checks the site itself: robots.txt, llms.txt, schema, the facts assistants get wrong.
- Price per business, since most small businesses have exactly one.
The tools
1. Otterly.ai
Otterly is the cheapest serious monitoring tool at $29 a month for 15 prompts, with $189 a month adding 100 prompts and an API. It covers ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews and AI Mode, with Gemini and Claude as add-ons, and tracks sentiment and cited links. It does not generate content or a step-by-step fix list. Good for a founder who already knows what to write and wants to watch a fixed set of prompts.
2. Surfeo
Surfeo is the closest thing to a complete small-business package from Europe: a 0 to 100 score across ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Claude, a prioritised checklist, and generated articles. Starter is €39 a month for six articles, three models and 40 prompts; Growth is €99 for sixteen articles, four models, 75 prompts and alerts. EU-hosted and bilingual. The article caps are the thing to check against your plans.
3. TangentFlow
TangentFlow starts with a free scan on ChatGPT, then Pro at $29 a month for one business on all four assistants with 20 generated questions plus ten of your own, weekly re-checks, and unlimited drafts: comparison and alternatives pages, listings, FAQ, schema, llms.txt and social replies, with Autopilot publishing articles to your blog. It adds a "mirror moment" (what each assistant believes about you, fact by fact), before-and-after proof pages, and a claimable directory listing that shows AI crawler hits. Agency is $199 for eight businesses with white-label reports. It does not cover Google AI Overviews or sell prompt-volume data.
4. Profound
Profound is an enterprise platform with a self-serve door: $99 a month for ChatGPT only and 50 prompts, $399 for three engines and 100 prompts, then custom pricing for up to ten engines, prompt volumes from a real-user panel, and bot log analytics. If you have a marketing team and a budget, it is the deepest data set here. If you have one business, the entry plan is narrow for the money.
5. Peec AI
Peec tracks prompts daily across six models with source classification, sentiment, multi-country support, CSV export, a Looker Studio connector and an API, from roughly €89 a month. It does not generate content. Strong for mid-market B2B teams that already have writers.
6. Semrush AI Toolkit
Semrush added AI visibility to its suite at $99 a month per domain for 25 prompts, with sentiment, competitor comparison and integration with its keyword and site-audit tools. Makes sense if you already pay for Semrush; expensive as a standalone.
7. AthenaHQ
AthenaHQ uses a credit system: a free tier with 300 credits, then $295 a month for 3,600 credits across up to eleven engines, with an action centre, content gap analysis and GA4 attribution. The breadth is real; the credit model makes monthly cost hard to predict.
8. Ayzeo
Ayzeo covers seven engines with mention and citation analytics, sentiment with evidence phrases, a website audit, content tools and white-label PDF reports, from $39 a month. Pitched at agencies and SMBs alike.
9. Frase
Frase pairs daily monitoring across five engines with its content editor, brand-voice drafting and publishing to WordPress, Webflow and Wix, from $39 a month. If your bottleneck is writing, it is a sensible bundle.
10. HubSpot AEO Grader
HubSpot's grader is a free one-shot test across ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini that gives a single-page grade. No tracking, no history, no fixes. Useful for a first gut check and nothing after.
How to choose
Ask three questions.
Will I act on the number, or do I need the pages written? If you have a writer, a monitoring tool is enough. If you do not, pick a tool that drafts, and check the caps.
How many businesses? Most tools price per prompt set or per domain. Agencies should look at per-client pricing and white-label reports.
Which assistants do my customers use? For consumer and local questions, ChatGPT dominates, and a ChatGPT-only plan is a fair start. For B2B software, Perplexity and Gemini matter more, so a four-engine plan is worth the difference.
What none of them can do
No tool can put you in an answer. Assistants decide from what they read: your site's plain facts and the third-party pages they trust. A tool can only show you the gap and help you close it. Anyone promising guaranteed placement is selling something else.
FAQ
Is AI visibility tracking accurate?
Every tool samples. Answers vary run to run, so treat week-over-week trends as the signal, not any single result. Tools that store the verbatim answers let you check.
How often should I re-check?
Weekly is enough for a small business. Content and listing changes take two to four weeks to show in answers; daily checks mostly measure noise.
Do I need this if I rank well on Google?
Ranking helps, but assistants read a handful of sources and your plain-text facts, then name whoever those describe clearly. Plenty of page-one businesses are absent from AI answers.
Sources
- Otterly pricing and features: https://otterly.ai/
- Surfeo plans: https://surfeo.ai/en
- Profound product and pricing: https://www.tryprofound.com/
- Peec AI features: https://peec.ai/
- Semrush AI Toolkit: https://www.semrush.com/
- AthenaHQ pricing: https://www.athenahq.ai/
- Ayzeo: https://ayzeo.com/
- Frase comparison of AI visibility tools: https://www.frase.io/blog/the-10-best-ai-visibility-tools-in-2026
- Surfeo's SMB comparison: https://surfeo.ai/en/blog/best-ai-visibility-tools-smbs
- TangentFlow pricing: https://tangentflow.com/#pricing
