5 AI Visibility Tools, Tested: What They Cost and What They Miss

Every one of these tools promises the same thing: it will tell you whether AI assistants recommend your brand. I paid for five of them and ran them side by side. What follows is what they actually cost, what they actually track, and the one thing none of them do.

Prices and coverage below were checked in July 2026. This category reprices and repackages constantly, so treat every number as a starting point to verify rather than a quote.

Engine coverage is a pricing lever, not a capability gap

The most common claim about AI visibility tools is that some of them only look at ChatGPT while ignoring Gemini, Perplexity and Google's AI Overviews. That is not really what is happening, and believing it will lead you to the wrong tool.

Technically, all of these products can read the major engines. The difference is commercial. Coverage is the lever vendors use to price-discriminate, so the engine list on the marketing page and the engine list on your plan are frequently not the same list.

• Peec AI caps every self-serve tier at three of its seven engines, charges €35 to €165 per month for each additional one, and reserves Claude and GPT-5 Search for Enterprise.

• Searchable's entry plan tracks ChatGPT only. Broader coverage starts on the tier above it.

• The Semrush AI Visibility Toolkit is marketed around seven engines, but reviewers counting what is actually tracked have reported three, in six countries, in US English only.

• Rankshift is the outlier: its full engine list is included on the cheapest paid plan.

The practical consequence: the headline price is rarely the real price, and the engines that get cut are usually the ones outside US English. If your buyers ask questions in Portuguese, German or Arabic, check what your plan actually queries before you trust the number on the dashboard.

The five tools

Rankshift

Rankshift is Belgian, launched in 2025, and was built by an SEO agency that got tired of clients asking whether they were visible in ChatGPT. It runs from roughly €69 to €425 per month with a 30-day trial and no free plan.

It is the value pick. Its full engine list is on every tier including the cheapest, and projects and seats are unlimited on all plans, which is unusual and genuinely useful if you look after more than one brand. It also exposes the underlying data through an API and business intelligence connectors instead of trapping it in a dashboard.

Where it falls down: the credit accounting is opaque, since every AI response consumes two credits and nothing rolls over, and the caps are daily rather than monthly, so you cannot re-run a prompt set on demand without spending that day's allowance. It launched in 2025, so there is no deep historical trend to look back on, and the API and crawler analytics only unlock on the middle tier.

Peec AI

Peec AI is Berlin-based, launched in February 2025, and has grown faster than anything else in the European category: a reported $10 million in annual recurring revenue within 16 months, more than 2,500 customers, and names like Chanel, Hugo Boss, Squarespace and TUI. Plans run €89, €205 and €425 with a seven-day trial.

Its methodology deserves credit. Rather than querying model APIs, it reads the actual interface by simulating real user sessions, so the data reflects what a person would see. That distinction matters more than it sounds, because API responses and interface responses are not the same answers.

Where it falls down: it does monitoring and nothing else. No site audits, no content generation, no optimisation recommendations, no revenue attribution, no historical backfill. Its own reviewers land on the same summary, which is that it is excellent at description and weak at prescription. It will show you the drop, the prompts affected and which competitor gained ground. It will not tell you why.

Lua

Lua is the odd one out in this list, and saying so is more useful than pretending otherwise. It does not do what the other four do.

The other four answer the question "am I showing up in AI answers". Lua is built for the question that comes after it. It takes a company's authority material and first-party data, the proprietary things only that business knows, and turns it into content at scale that AI systems can parse and cite. Measurement is not the product. Production is.

Which means two things. It is not comparable on the axis the other four are compared on: there is no per-engine cost to quote and no prompt cap to weigh, because it is not a tracker. And if what you want is a dashboard telling you where you currently stand, this is the wrong tool and three of the others are cheaper answers to that question.

Searchable

Searchable launched out of London in January 2026 and aims squarely at Shopify and direct-to-consumer brands. It runs roughly $50 to $125 per month.

Its sharpest idea is a feature that simulates queries to test whether you are returned as the definitive answer rather than merely mentioned somewhere in the response. That is a better question than share of voice, which counts appearances without weighing them. It is also trying to be end to end, combining monitoring with content and technical optimisation in one product, which is a more ambitious bet than its price suggests.

Where it falls down: the entry plan is ChatGPT only, which is easy to buy by accident. Documented engine coverage even at the higher tier is narrower than the rest of this list, with no Perplexity or Copilot. It is the youngest product here, prompt length is limited, and reviewers report the suggested prompts are not relevant enough, which matters more than it sounds: prompt selection determines every number downstream from it.

Semrush AI Visibility Toolkit

The Semrush AI Visibility Toolkit launched in March 2025, and Adobe went on to acquire Semrush for $1.9 billion in a deal that closed in April 2026. It costs $99 per month per domain, as an add-on that requires an active Semrush plan starting at $139.95, so the effective floor is around $239 per month for a single domain. Extra domains and extra seats are $99 each.

There are real data assets underneath it, specifically the Datos clickstream and Brand24 sentiment businesses that Semrush acquired, and if you already live inside Semrush the convenience of one dashboard is worth something.

Where it falls down: published reviews consistently raise metrics volatility, with one practitioner documenting a local market share figure swinging from 100% to 0% within weeks. Recommendations tend toward the generic, along the lines of "improve onboarding" or "increase market awareness". The methodology is opaque, per-domain pricing punishes anyone managing more than one brand, and cancellation runs through a form with a one to three day wait.

The comparison, in one table

Checked July 2026. Verify before you buy, because these change monthly.

What none of them tell you

Here is the gap that survived all five subscriptions. Every one of these products can tell you that you are absent from an answer. Not one of them can tell you why.

That distinction is the whole job. Knowing your share of voice fell four points is not actionable. Knowing it fell because your comparison page went stale, or because a source that used to cite you stopped, or because a competitor published the definitive guide to the category last month, is actionable. The dashboards render the symptom accurately and leave the diagnosis entirely to you.

So the honest way to budget for these tools is to treat the subscription as the cheap part. The work that changes the number is content, citations, entity consistency and first-party evidence, and none of that is included in any plan on this page.

The uncomfortable conclusion

After running all five, the thing I could not unsee is how simple the underlying mechanic is. Strip away the charts and every tracker here does one thing: it takes the prompts you care about, asks the AI models, and records who gets mentioned.

That is it. That is the product. Once you have seen it clearly, one to four hundred euros a month starts to look like a lot of money for something you could assemble yourself, and I eventually cancelled the trackers and did exactly that.

I am not going to pretend that is free. What you give up by building your own is the infrastructure that makes coverage broad and the data faithful, and that infrastructure is genuinely the expensive part of what these companies do. But it does reframe the question. You are not really paying for the insight. You are paying for someone else to have built the plumbing.

Which is worth knowing before you renew, because the answer changes depending on how many brands you track and how much you actually do with what comes back. If nobody on your team acted on last month's dashboard, the tool is not the thing that is missing.