AI Visibility Tools in 2026: Everyone Measures, Nobody Earns

Every figure below comes from the vendor's own public pricing page, fetched the same day — not from review roundups, which in this category routinely contradict the vendors they describe. Where a number could only be confirmed second-hand it carries an asterisk and we say so. Prices in this market move quickly; the links are there so you can re-check any cell in thirty seconds. If a vendor updates a price after publication, their page wins, not this table. (For what the category is and how the three names — AI visibility, AEO, GEO — converged on one job, our field guide to the tools covers that ground; this piece is the priced snapshot of the market on one day.)

Whatever the landing page says, the meter underneath is the same everywhere: you pick N prompts — the questions you hope AI engines answer with your name — and the tool polls the engines on a cadence and reports whether you appeared. Fifty to a hundred prompts across three to five engines is the standard small-business parcel, and it costs $99–189 a month almost regardless of vendor. The interesting divergences are at the edges: Ahrefs will sell you the raw atom à la carte at roughly one to two cents per prompt-check, which makes it easy to compute what everyone else's margin looks like; and engine coverage is a second meter hiding in plain sight — on Otterly, tracking Claude specifically is a paid add-on that ranges up to $439 a month on the top plan, the most expensive single engine anywhere in the set. And at the enterprise end, six of the ten vendors put pricing behind a sales call rather than on the page — which tells you where the actual revenue is.

• Mirrors. Peec and Ahrefs Brand Radar measure and stop. Clean, honest scope — the dashboard is the deliverable.
• Mirrors with advice. Moz adds content briefs, Otterly adds weekly recommendations, Semrush surfaces the pages engines already cite in your category and suggests how you might earn a mention there, Profound attaches content agents. The advice can be good. It is still homework handed to you.
• Mirrors that produce — on your own site. Searchable meters finished articles into its plans (20 to 200 a month), AthenaHQ sells optimization "actions," and Scrunch goes furthest: it generates and serves an AI-optimized version of your site for crawlers. Everything in this bucket changes pages you control.

Here is the structural problem with all three buckets. When we audit live AI answers — the actual responses engines give to buying-intent questions — the pages they cite are overwhelmingly third-party: review sites, comparison posts, forums, news coverage. Not the brand's own site. A tool that measures your visibility and then improves your own pages is optimizing the minority share of the evidence an engine weighs. The heavier share — being written about by sites that are not you — is not on any of these ten price lists as a product. What exists beyond your own site is one of three things: unspecified (AthenaHQ's enterprise tier mentions off-page actions with no published mechanism or price), advice-shaped (Semrush pointing at pages where you could try to earn a mention), or — outside this set entirely — the done-for-you agency end, where ads promise all four engines recommending you in 90 days, guaranteed. About that last one:

Nobody can guarantee an AI engine's answer, and we can show you why with our own measurements. In our production monitoring, ChatGPT's API ran a live web search on only about 74% of calls — the rest answered from frozen training memory — so even a perfectly-placed citation isn't deterministically retrieved for a single engine, let alone four. And at temperature zero — the most repeatable setting there is — only 32 of 40 repeated probes in our testing returned the same verdict about a brand. Any mention count, including ours, is a floor, not a ranking: it proves presence, never absence. A vendor selling you a guaranteed outcome across four engines with four different retrieval stacks is selling something they do not control.

Stork runs Stork Wire, and this article is obviously adjacent to it, so here is the mechanic stated plainly. Wire members run a real news section on their own domain — we research, write and publish it — and member sites in the same market cover each other's products inside those articles, with followed links. Every member can read, hold or pull any article before and after it publishes, can block any product from ever being mentioned on their site with no reason given, and every page discloses how it's made. That is coverage on third-party domains — the heavy half of the evidence — plus the measurement riding along free: Domain Rating tracked weekly from install day, every citation listed with its URL, and optionally your own Google Search numbers via a read-only Search Console connection. What we will not promise is a specific number of links, a Domain Rating figure, or that any engine will recommend you — for exactly the reasons in the previous section. During the founding beta Wire is free for approved domains, with no card. If you just want to see where you stand today, the free check reads your visibility, Domain Rating and live backlinks in about ten seconds.

• Which unit am I actually buying? Get the price per tracked prompt per engine per month. It ranges from about a cent (Ahrefs à la carte) to several dollars — for the same atom.
• Where do your fixes land? If every deliverable is on my own domain, who is producing the third-party coverage engines actually cite — and what does that cost on top?
• Is Claude (or any engine I care about) in the base price — or a metered add-on I'll discover later?
• Will you put your guarantee in writing, per engine? Anyone who says yes to a specific AI engine's future answers is guessing with your money.
• What happens to my history if I cancel? A monitoring series you can't export is leverage for the vendor, not measurement for you.