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AI Visibility Tools in 2026: An Honest Comparison
A round-up published elsewhere this month ranked six AI-visibility tools: Fokal, Profound, Otterly.ai, Peec AI, Nightwatch, and Scrunch AI. All six are real, all six do something useful, and all six cost $99/mo or more, or don't publish a price at all. Here's what each one actually does, and where a free, infrastructure-based checker fits in a category none of them cover.
The six paid tools
| Tool | What it does | Price |
|---|---|---|
| Fokal | Done-for-you AI-SEO agent. Writes a keyword-researched article every weekday, publishes it, fixes schema and metadata it finds broken, tracks visibility across ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews. | $99/mo |
| Profound | Full-stack AI-search marketing platform. Answer Engine Insights, Prompt Volumes, Agent Analytics across ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and Perplexity. Demo-led, enterprise-oriented. | Not published |
| Otterly.ai | Tracks brand mentions and citations across 7 AI engines. Prompt research, search analytics, a content audit with crawlability checks. 40+ countries, GDPR compliant. | 14-day trial, no CC |
| Peec AI | AI search analytics for marketing teams. Three metrics: Visibility, Position, Sentiment, tracked across ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini on prompts you control. | Not published on homepage |
| Nightwatch | Long-running SEO rank tracker that folded in AI visibility. Google/Bing/YouTube rank tracking down to the zip code, plus a Share of Voice metric for AI engines. | 14-day trial, no CC |
| Scrunch AI | AI customer-experience platform. Monitors brand presence in AI search, analyzes AI-agent traffic hitting your site, serves optimized content to crawlers at the edge. | Free 30-second audit, paid plans undisclosed |
All six are real companies doing real work in this space. Nothing above is a knock on any of them, it's what each one's own site and the roundup that ranked them say about what they do.
What all six have in common
Every one of them measures AI visibility by asking an LLM questions and reading the answers back, whether that's Profound's "Prompt Volumes," Peec's "Position" metric, or Otterly's "AI Prompt Research." That's a legitimate, useful measurement. It's also inherently a snapshot: ask the same question tomorrow, or with a different sampling seed, and the answer moves. None of the six check whether the underlying infrastructure, the actual files and markup a crawler reads, is even in place to be found at all.
What we check instead
The free AI Visibility Score this studio runs never calls an LLM to ask its opinion. It checks nine technical conditions directly: a file exists or it doesn't, a schema block validates or it doesn't, a robots.txt entry blocks a crawler or it doesn't. Same input, same result, every time, no live AI query anywhere in the pipeline. Full detail: GEO Is Not Guesswork.
This isn't a substitute for what the six tools above do. It answers an earlier, more basic question: can an AI agent even read your site at all, before anyone measures whether it chooses to mention you. If the answer is no, "$99/mo to track mentions" is measuring a number that infrastructure gaps are already suppressing.
Price and scope, side by side
| The six above | This studio | |
|---|---|---|
| Method | Live-prompt an LLM, read the answer | Check files and markup directly, no LLM call |
| Cheapest confirmed price | $99/mo (Fokal) | Free one-time check, $9-15/mo ongoing monitor |
| What it tells you | How often and how favorably AI mentions your brand | Whether an AI crawler can technically read your site at all |
| Fixes it for you | Fokal does; the other five measure only | Free tools generate the actual llms.txt/schema/robots.txt files |
Try it
9 checks, 0 API calls, $0 Paste a URL into the free checker and see the same infrastructure rubric described above, run against your own site, in about a minute. No signup.
Start here, no signup. Full rubric: the published methodology. Want ongoing monitoring instead of a one-time check: Pulse, $9-15/mo.
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