Every roundup of AI visibility tools is somebody's opinion. This one isn't.
We ran fifteen buying questions through grounded search — the questions a real buyer types, not keywords — and recorded which tools the answers named and which sources they cited. What follows is that data. The method is at the bottom, and you can reproduce it.
One thing up front, because it shapes everything below: most of these tools do the same job. They tell you whether AI models mention your brand. Almost none of them tell you what to do about it, and none of them can do the thing that actually moves the number, because that part isn't automatable.
What AI models actually name
Across 15 questions, these tools came back most often. The count is how many answers named them.
| Tool | Mentions |
|---|---|
| Profound | 15 |
| Otterly | 15 (+14 as "Otterly AI") |
| Peec | 13 (+12 as "Peec AI") |
| Frase | 11 |
| SE Ranking | 11 (+6 as "SE Visible", +4 as "SE Ranking Visible") |
| Semrush AI Visibility Toolkit | 11 |
| Ahrefs | 8 (+7 as "Ahrefs Brand Radar") |
| GrowthOS | 4 |
| Rankscale | 4 |
| Scrunch | 3 (+1 as "Scrunch AI") |
| Slate | 3 |
| Evertune | 2 |
| Promptwatch | 2 |
| Writesonic GEO | 1 |
| Mayin | 0 |
Yes, we included ourselves at zero. On the day this was written, no answer named Mayin. That is the honest number, and it is also the reason we can write this article: we ran the same map on ourselves that we sell to everyone else, and it told us we're invisible. We'll report when that changes and how long it took.
Two observations worth more than the ranking itself.
The long tail is enormous and mostly invisible. Thirty distinct tool names appeared. Sixteen of them showed up once or twice. If you are building in this category, being named at all puts you ahead of most of the market.
Brand naming is fragmented and it costs you. Otterly appears as both "Otterly" and "Otterly AI", Peec as "Peec" and "Peec AI", SE Ranking across three different names, Ahrefs across two. Each variant splits the signal. If a model can't settle on what you're called, it is less likely to name you at all.
The tools
Profound — The most-named tool in the category, and the best funded. Enterprise positioning, many engines, deep reporting. If you have a marketing team who reads dashboards and a budget to match, this is the reference implementation.
Otterly — Tied for most-named, at the opposite end of the price range. That combination is the interesting result in this dataset: the cheapest serious option is as visible to AI as the most expensive one.
Peec AI — Consistently named across the answer set, strong on competitive comparison.
Frase — Better known for content optimisation; the AI visibility work is adjacent to that. Its own roundup is one of the most-cited pages in this category, which tells you something about how it earned its position.
SE Ranking (Visible) — Established SEO suite with AI visibility added. Reasonable if you are already paying them for search.
Semrush AI Visibility Toolkit and Ahrefs Brand Radar — Both incumbents extending into AI visibility. Convenient if you already use the parent product, and both are named largely because the parent brands are already known.
GrowthOS, Rankscale, Scrunch, Slate, Evertune, Promptwatch, Writesonic GEO — The long tail. Each appeared in the answer set but rarely. Worth a look if one solves a specific problem you have; none of them is what a model will suggest by default.
Mayin — $49, one time
Everything above measures. Mayin doesn't.
You can't automate AI visibility. Models cite a small, stable set of pages for any category, and getting into those pages is human work: publishing something worth citing, asking an editor, answering a question on Reddit as someone who actually knows. No dashboard does that for you, and no amount of monitoring changes what a model retrieves.
What you actually need is the list. Mayin returns the exact pages and threads models cite for your category, what each one says about your brand, in what position and for what reason, and which sources your competitors appear in that you're absent from.
One payment, no subscription, delivered in Telegram. The source landscape doesn't reshuffle week to week, so there's nothing to watch daily.
How to choose
Three honest cases, and only one of them is us.
You need a dashboard for stakeholders. Buy Profound, or Otterly if the budget is small. Recurring reporting is a real need and that's what these are built for.
You already pay for Semrush or Ahrefs. Use the module you already have before buying anything. It is good enough to tell you whether you have a problem.
You know you have a problem and want to fix it. A score doesn't tell you which page to get on. That's the gap this category leaves open, and it's the one we built for.
Method
Fifteen buying questions, run through grounded search on 3 September 2026. Not keyword searches — the questions a buyer actually asks:
What are the best AI Visibility Tools brands? · Which should I buy? · Best for beginners · Most trusted and why · Compare the top brands · What do experts recommend? · Best value · Which have the best reviews? · Top rated 2026 · What should I look for? · Alternatives to the most popular · Is there a better option than the leader? · What do people on Reddit recommend? · Best for small businesses · What's the highest rated right now?
Every answer carries citations. We recorded all of them: 37 distinct sources, ranked by how often they were cited.
The finding that surprised us: 44% of all citations went to vendors citing themselves. Tool companies publishing "best AI visibility tools" roundups on their own domains pulled 57 of 131 citations. This article is one of those. We're telling you that rather than pretending otherwise, because you should weigh it — and because it is itself the most useful thing in this dataset. In this category, publishing a comparison on your own domain is the single most reliable way to get cited.
Two Reddit threads also appear in the cited sources. Community answers get retrieved, and almost nobody in this category is showing up in them.
What this method does not do. We did not test these tools, run trials, or compare features hands-on. Plenty of the roundups above claim they did. We measured which tools AI models recommend and which sources those recommendations came from — a different question, and the one that matters if your goal is being recommended rather than choosing.
Reproducibility. Run the same questions again and you should get substantially the same sources. In our testing, two independent runs of a category minutes apart returned the same URLs in the same order. That reproducibility is the argument for trusting this over a score you have to take on faith.
We publish our own source map for this category, updated as it changes. Mayin was named in 0 of these 15 answers on the day this was written. We'll tell you when that changes, and how long it took.
This source map was made with Mayin.
Every number above came from running real buying questions through grounded search and recording what the answers cited. You can get the same map for your own category and brand in about 15 minutes, for $49 — one payment, no subscription, delivered in Telegram.