01What are AI visibility tools?
AI visibility tools track how AI assistants — ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude, Google AI Overviews — talk about your brand. They run or index prompts buyers actually ask, then report whether you appear in the answer, how prominently, with what sentiment, and which sources the AI cited.
The category matters because a growing share of buying research now ends inside an AI answer instead of a list of links. If the answer recommends your competitor, no amount of classic SEO ranking fixes that.
02How is this list ranked?
By what a team of 10–500 people actually walks away with for the money — not by feature-list length. We weighted real entry pricing, engines covered, honesty of the sales motion, and what happens after measurement. Full disclosure: Roman, ranked first, is our product. The criteria are the same for every entry, including the skip-it-if call against ourselves.
03What is the cheapest way to start tracking AI visibility?
Otterly.AI at $29/month is the lowest credible entry point — 15 prompts across six platforms. Semrush’s AI Toolkit at $99/month makes sense if you already live in Semrush. Past those, expect $200–500/month for serious multi-engine coverage from any vendor.
04Do any AI visibility tools actually write or publish content?
Mostly no — measurement is the product, and the writing stays your job. The exceptions: Roman researches, writes, and publishes articles and page refreshes as part of the plan (20–75 articles a month). Adobe LLM Optimizer can deploy on-site fixes to Adobe-managed sites. Profound recently launched template-based Agents with an approval queue, which reviewers still describe as early.
05Which tools track Claude?
Roman, Profound, Scrunch AI, and AthenaHQ track Claude (Semrush covers it on enterprise plans). Ahrefs Brand Radar, Adobe LLM Optimizer, Otterly, and Peec’s default set do not — worth checking if Claude answers matter in your category.
06How reliable are AI visibility scores?
Treat every score as directional. AI answers are non-deterministic — enterprise case studies report 40–60% of cited sources churning month to month — and no vendor has firmly proven a mention-to-traffic correlation yet. The honest use of these tools is tracking movement over time and tying it to what you shipped, not chasing a single number.
07Are there other tools worth watching?
Three that narrowly missed this list: Trakkr (from ~£79/mo, eight models including Grok and DeepSeek, with built-in article generation), Evertune (enterprise brand-perception analytics across model training data), and LLM Pulse (~€49/mo budget European option). Conductor has also added AI search tracking to its enterprise SEO platform.