AI assistants are quietly becoming the new vendor shortlist. When a prospect asks ChatGPT "best CRM for a 10-person consultancy" or Perplexity "top alternatives to [your competitor]," the answer they get shapes who they even consider. If your brand isn't named, you're out before the demo call is ever booked. Traditional rank trackers can't see any of this, which is why a new category of "AI visibility" tools has landed in 2026, promising to tell you which prompts you show up in, which competitors are winning them, and which sources the engines are citing to build their answers.
The problem is that the category is genuinely messy. Pricing pages are half hidden behind demo forms, engine coverage changes month to month, and the "starter" plan of the most-hyped platform tracks exactly one model. We compared five of the most-cited platforms (Peec AI, Otterly.AI, Semrush's AI Visibility Toolkit, Profound, and AthenaHQ) against their official current pricing and documentation. No hands-on account testing this round: what you're reading is a documentation-and-pricing comparison for a small B2B team that has to decide where its first $100 to $500 of AI visibility budget goes. When we say "verified," we mean it against each vendor's own page.
A note on how we landed on this order, because it wasn’t the field we expected going in.
We started this comparison assuming Profound would win. It’s the platform everyone in the category name-drops, and its Prompt Volumes dataset is the one piece of technology in the category that competitors genuinely can’t replicate. But the moment you try to price it out for a small B2B team, the story changes: Profound doesn’t publish self-serve pricing, every path on the homepage is a “Get a Demo” CTA, and a 15-person team without procurement power has no business walking into that sales cycle blind. It’s a great product built for the wrong buyer.
Peec AI is what a small team should actually pay for. It publishes its prices, unlimited seats are on every tier, and the citation-source view (the one that names the actual URLs the AI answers were built on) is the piece a small team can turn into a to-do list on Monday morning. That’s the whole game. If Peec says “these three pages are winning your category’s AI answers this week,” you know exactly where to pitch a mention, publish a competitor comparison, or shore up your own page. It’s not the deepest tool on this list, and Claude coverage sits behind Enterprise, but nothing else on the field is putting up a fight on value at Peec’s Starter tier.
Otterly is the pick for anyone below Peec’s price point. A real $29/month plan in a category where the median headline price is $250 is worth showing up for, and the fact that Otterly bundles unlimited seats into even that plan is quietly the most small-team-friendly move any vendor made this year. It’s not what you’d standardize on at 25 people, but it’s the honest place to start if you’re two founders and a laptop.
Semrush is the “already in the ecosystem” answer. If you pay for Semrush anyway, the $99 add-on is fine. If you don’t, you’re paying $99 per domain, $99 per additional user license, and $60 for every extra 50 prompts before you’ve tracked much of anything. And AthenaHQ deserves the credit it gets for actually trying to close the loop between AI visibility and Shopify revenue, but $295/month plus a credit-based bill you can’t fully predict is a lot to ask a 10-person B2B team that just wants to know if it shows up in ChatGPT.
One caveat worth naming: pricing and engine coverage in this category are churning every few weeks. Everything here reflects each vendor’s official page on the day we checked, and every URL is in the Sources list. If you’re about to sign a contract, load the page yourself and confirm the number before you do.
If you’re also trying to fix the SEO side of the same problem, our best AI SEO tools ranking covers the tools that help you rank on Google’s own results page, and the best AI blog writing tools for SEO is the closest sibling to this list, because the pages your AI visibility tracker tells you to write are the same pages an SEO blog writer helps you ship. And for local-service B2B, our guide on how to get your Google Business Profile into AI Overviews is the companion move for teams whose buyers are more likely to ask an AI where the “best local X near me” is than they’re to type a category-level product query.
Pick the tool that matches the size of your team and the size of your problem, and start acting on the data. The gap between #1 and #5 on this list is smaller than the badges suggest. The real gap is between a team that watches its AI visibility every week and one that doesn’t watch it at all.
FAQ
What's the best AI brand visibility tracker for a small B2B team?
Peec AI. It scored 89 on our bench and takes Editors' Choice because it publishes its prices, covers six of the engines your buyers actually use, gives you unlimited seats on every plan, and offers a source-citation view that turns "we're invisible" into "here are the four pages we need to fix." Otterly.AI (83) is the runner-up and the pick if you're a solo founder validating whether AI search demand is real for you at all.
Is there a genuinely cheap way to start tracking AI brand visibility?
Yes. Otterly.AI's Lite plan is $29/month for 15 prompts across four base engines (ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity, and Microsoft Copilot) with unlimited team members and no credit card required for the trial. It's the honest entry point if you have more time than budget. Just note that Google AI Mode, Gemini, and Claude are paid add-ons on Otterly, and the jump from Lite to Standard is a 6x price cliff.
Why isn't Profound the top pick if everyone talks about it?
Because Profound is built for an enterprise buyer, not a small B2B team. Its homepage doesn't publish self-serve pricing; every CTA routes you to a demo. For a 15-person team without procurement power, walking into a demo-gated sales cycle before you even see a number is the wrong shape of buying process.
Do I need this if I'm already paying for Semrush?
Maybe. Semrush's AI Visibility Toolkit is a $99/month per-domain add-on on top of your existing subscription. If you're a single-domain B2B team already living in Semrush, it's the lowest-friction way to add AI visibility to your existing keyword and site-audit reports. If you manage several domains or want per-prompt source-citation depth, Peec AI at a similar price gives you more for the same money.
How did you actually score these?
This ranking is a documentation-and-pricing comparison, not a hands-on account test. Every claim about a plan, price, engine list, or feature was pulled from each vendor's own official pricing or documentation page on the day we checked, and every one of those pages is in the Sources list above. We scored five metrics (Engine Coverage, Price-to-Value, Actionability, Small-Team Fit, and Trial & Escape Hatch), weighted for a 5-to-30-person B2B team on a real budget, and combined them into the single 0-to-100 number on the badge.
