Our Best AI SEO Tools for 2026 (Reviewed and Ranked)

We've spent +100 hours over the past six weeks personally testing every major AI visibility platform to understand the best-fit solutions for different use AI SEO cases. Here's what we learned, and what you should be looking for.

Key Takeaways

• AI search is becoming mainstream: AI referral traffic already accounts for 1.08% of all website traffic across major industries, with IT companies seeing 2.80% of their traffic from AI sources. By 2027, AI search is projected to reach 28% of total global search traffic.
• The AI SEO market is exploding: According to the Wall Street Journal, the global SEO services market will grow from $81.46 billion in 2024 to $171.77 billion by 2030, with AI search optimization driving much of this 13.24% CAGR growth.
• Early movers win: Businesses optimizing for AI visibility now are securing citations before competitors, with AI search traffic converting at 4.4x the rate of traditional organic search according to 2025 industry data.

About the reviewers: Generate More is an AI SEO agency helping founders and revenue leaders of $1-20M ARR tech and B2B services scale up revenue growth without increasing marketing headcount.

Our Top 10 AI Search Visibility Solutions

What You Should Expect from an AI SEO Tool in 2026

Before diving into specific tools, let's establish baseline expectations. A good AI visibility solution should:

• Track the AI engines that matter: At minimum ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews. Bonus points for Claude, Gemini, and emerging platforms.
• Show you where your brand is mentioned: Not just that you appeared, but in what context, for which prompts, and compared to competitors.
• Provide actionable insights: Data without direction is useless. You need to know what to fix, not just what's broken.
• Scale with your needs: Whether you're tracking 50 prompts or 500, the pricing should be reasonable and transparent.

What you shouldn't expect (yet): Perfect attribution from AI search visibility to closed sales deals. The technology isn't there, and any tool promising complete ROI tracking is overselling. These tools give directional insights. 

1. Promptwatch - Best for B2B SaaS & Tech Companies

Our AI SEO Rating: 4.4/5

After personally testing 15+ AI visibility solutions over six months, Promptwatch emerged as our top overall pick for SaaS, B2B services, and technology companies serious about AI search optimization.

What makes Promptwatch unique

Promptwatch is built around actual prompts—the real questions users ask AI engines—rather than abstract keyword monitoring. This methodological precision means you're tracking how ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, and Google AI Mode actually respond to user queries, not approximations.

The platform's Monitor structure gives exceptional flexibility for organizing tracking by geography, funnel stage, product line, or campaign type. Unlike competitors that force one-size-fits-all configurations, Promptwatch lets you structure your AI visibility strategy around your actual business.

Standout features

Daily Refresh Cycles: While competitors update weekly or monthly, Promptwatch checks tracked prompts every 24 hours, giving you near real-time visibility into changes in AI engine responses. This matters when running PR campaigns, publishing new content, or responding to competitive moves.

Answer Gap Analysis: This feature identifies prompts where competitors appear but you don't, or where you're missing citations despite having relevant content. For experienced SEO professionals, this delivers the exact intelligence needed for strategic decisions about content creation and citation-building.

Multi-Modal Traffic Attribution: Promptwatch offers three distinct attribution methods: JavaScript snippet implementation, Google Search Console integration, and server log analysis. This combination provides the most comprehensive picture of AI-driven traffic available in any tool tested.

Source-Level Citation Tracking: Beyond just showing you appeared in AI results, Promptwatch reveals which specific domains, YouTube videos, Reddit threads, and webpage URLs AI engines cite. This transforms off-page SEO and digital PR from guesswork into data-driven strategy.

Monitor-Based Organization: Create unlimited Monitors to segment tracking however your business requires—by funnel stage, geography, product line, campaign, or any combination. Each Monitor operates independently with its own budget allocation.

Limitations

Promptwatch assumes SEO expertise and doesn't over-explain its interface. The Answer Gap report and Source tracking provide powerful data but require experience to interpret properly. Less experienced marketers may find the learning curve steep without additional guidance.

Agency workflows need refinement, particularly around multi-client management and email address limitations. The product works excellently for managing your own business but hasn't fully optimized for agency use cases yet.

Content creation features lag behind specialized tools like Writesonic or Surfer SEO and feel tacked-on rather than core to the product vision.

Who should choose Promptwatch:

• B2B SaaS companies establishing AI search presence
• Digital agencies managing AI visibility for tech clients
• SEO professionals who need data over hand-holding
• Marketing teams tracking PR and content impact on AI citations
• Startups building AI-first go-to-market strategies

Who should skip it:

• Complete beginners needing extensive guidance
• Enterprises requiring hundreds of prompts across dozens of products
• Teams prioritizing flashy interfaces over data substance

See our in-depth Promptwatch AI visibility review.

2. (Tied) Writesonic — Best For Content Creation

Our AI SEO Rating: 3.9/5

Writesonic started as an AI content creation platform and has evolved into a comprehensive solution combining content writing, SEO tools, and AI search visibility monitoring. The platform tracks brand mentions across ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and parses citations from AI Overviews and Perplexity.

What makes Writesonic unique

Writesonic is the only platform that genuinely integrates content creation with visibility tracking. The Content Strategy Planner analyzes your website, compares it to competitors, and provides content ideas that directly impact AI search visibility, connected to Ahrefs data with traffic estimates and difficulty ratings.

Standout features

1. Action Center: Writesonic conducts a site audit and provides a list of recommendations to enhance AI search visibility, with some issues fixable directly within Writesonic if you connect your website.
2. Geographic Intelligence: The platform scrapes AI interfaces while simulating different geographical locations, revealing how your brand appears differently across markets—critical intelligence that location-agnostic API monitoring misses.
3. Content Gap Analysis: Identifies opportunities where competitors are visible but you're not, providing specific content angles to cover in your next content batch.

Limitations

Writesonic cannot directly connect AI citations to actual leads or revenue—you'll still need GA4 setup to track actual conversions from AI search engines. Sentiment tracking exists but is locked behind the expensive $499/month Advanced plan, making comprehensive sentiment monitoring unaffordable for most SaaS companies.

Platform support is limited to WordPress, Cloudflare, and Vercel for AI crawler analytics, with no integration for Wix, Shopify, or Squarespace. At $249/month for the Professional plan (minimum for AI visibility features), it's competitively priced but not the cheapest option.

See our in-depth Writesonic AI visibility review.

2. (Tied) Scrunch

— Best for multi-engine AI visibility monitoring

Our AI SEO Rating: 3.9/5

Scrunch AI is a specialized AI visibility platform launched in 2024 that focuses on tracking how your brand appears across AI answer engines like ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Meta AI, Google AI Mode, Google AI Overviews, and Gemini. It is built for SaaS and B2B tech companies, in-house SEO teams, and agencies that want prompt-level, multi-engine monitoring rather than an all-in-one content and optimization suite. At $250/month for 350 prompts, it offers some of the broadest AI engine coverage in the category, with a clean UX, GA4 integration, and strong enterprise foundations, but it still leans heavily toward monitoring rather than prescriptive optimization.

What makes Scrunch AI unique

Scrunch AI stands out for its combination of extremely broad AI engine coverage and granular, prompt-level configuration. You decide which prompts to track, how to group them (by persona, journey stage, topic, or geography), and which AI engines each prompt runs on. This makes Scrunch particularly strong if you already have in-house SEO or content resources and just need accurate, flexible visibility data to guide them. The upcoming Agent Experience Platform (AXP) promises an AI-optimized “shadow site” that serves bot-friendly experiences without changing your human-facing pages, giving Scrunch a differentiated roadmap if it ships at scale.

Standout features

1. Multi-engine coverage and prompt-level tracking: Tracks brand presence, sentiment, and share of voice across ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini, Google AI Overviews, Google AI Mode, and Meta AI with daily or three-day refresh cycles. You configure the prompts and can tag and filter by topic, persona, stage, and region.
   
   
2. Sentiment and brand positioning analysis: Provides sentiment analysis and share-of-voice metrics showing how AI engines describe your brand versus competitors across different prompts and topics.
3. Agency- and enterprise-ready setup: Supports multi-brand setups, RBAC, SOC 2–compliant infrastructure, and an Enterprise Data API, making it suitable for agencies and larger organizations needing governance and scale.
4. Site audit for AI visibility: Includes a site audit focused on AI engine visibility that can uncover technical issues and give you ideas for where your content may be hard for AI crawlers to interpret.

Limitations

Scrunch AI is a monitoring-first platform with limited actionable optimization guidance today. The “Insights” functionality is still in beta and does not yet match the prescriptive recommendations of more mature all-in-one GEO tools: there is no integrated content editor, no schema or on-page optimization workflows, and only basic competitor analysis that rarely explains why competitors win citations. At $250/month, the value is excellent if you primarily care about comprehensive, accurate multi-engine monitoring and have internal teams to act on the data. If you want end-to-end content planning and optimization in one place, other platforms with stronger execution layers may be a better fit until Scrunch’s AXP and insights capabilities are fully realized.

Read our detailed Scrunch AI SEO review.

3. SE Ranking — Best Value for Combined SEO + AI Visibility

Our AI SEO Rating: 3.8/5

SE Ranking is an established all-in-one SEO platform that recently added AI Search Visibility as an optional add-on. The platform is used by agencies, founders, and in-house teams to manage the entire search process, making it a natural fit for tech companies already invested in SEO.

What makes SE Ranking unique

SE Ranking offers the best price-to-benefit ratio in the market, costing 35-50% less than buying separate SEO and AI visibility tools while offering comparable or better features. If you need both traditional SEO tracking and AI visibility monitoring, this is the most economical choice.

Standout features

1. Real-Time Interface Scraping: Rather than relying on vague third-party APIs, SE Ranking scrapes real AI search interfaces and stores cached snapshots of each AI result, allowing you to verify every mention by viewing the actual AI response.
2. AI Traffic Estimation: SE Ranking shows estimated traffic coming from AI Search Engines to your website without any additional Cloudflare setup—a feature not many tools offer.
3. Comprehensive Platform: For approximately €138/month, you get the full SEO suite (keyword research, rank tracking, backlink analysis, technical audit) plus 250 daily AI prompts tracked, 500 keywords to track daily, and access to SE Visible for sentiment analysis.

Limitations

AI visibility features are fragmented across three separate interfaces, creating a steep learning curve for new users. SE Ranking currently offers tracking for only two AI search engines—Google AI Overviews and ChatGPT—though they're working to add AI Mode and Perplexity.

The sentiment analysis is vague and lacks context, providing just a basic score rather than detailed information. For teams prioritizing user experience over comprehensive data, the scattered interface may be frustrating.

See our in-depth SE Ranking AI visibility review.

4. Scalenut — Best Budget Option

Our AI SEO Rating: 3.75/5

Scalenut is positioned as a simple and low-cost tool to track how brands show up in AI search, working with four AI search engines: Google AI Overviews, Perplexity, ChatGPT, and Claude.

What makes Scalenut unique

Scalenut offers usage-based pricing that's completely flexible, ensuring brands of all sizes can access AI-powered search visibility monitoring without unnecessary overhead. For tech companies with limited budgets, this is the most cost-effective entry point.

Standout features

1. Unbeatable Pricing: Tracking 150 prompts across 3 AI engines with weekly refresh costs approximately $78/month—significantly less than $249/month alternatives.
2. AI Traffic Monitor: Shows both top AI sources of traffic and most visited pages, displaying measured (not just estimated) traffic once you connect your domain through Cloudflare.
3. Reddit Sentiment Tracking: Social UpReach module tracks Reddit threads and sentiment about your brand, valuable because Reddit is frequently mentioned in AI search results and influences AI answers.

Limitations

Scalenut monitors only 4 AI search engines and does not include Copilot. The tool provides data but minimal execution guidance—there's no "Action Center" with clear issues and solutions.

Despite claims of daily updates in their help center, in practice the process may run monthly rather than daily or weekly, potentially causing delays in decision-making. The AI Traffic Monitor requires connecting your domain to GEO Watchtower through Cloudflare, adding setup complexity.

See our in-depth Scalenut AI visibility review.

5. Gumshoe AI — Best for Persona-Driven Strategic Insights

Our AI SEO Rating: 3.7/5

Gumshoe AI is a Seattle-based startup founded by Patrick O'Donnell, known for his work on Urbanspoon and MightyAI. The company raised $2 million in pre-seed funding in May 2025 and has quickly established itself with a unique persona-driven approach to AI visibility tracking.

What makes Gumshoe AI unique

Unlike competitors that track generic keywords, Gumshoe builds rich, realistic buyer personas and shows you WHO sees your brand and in what context. This strategic lens reveals insights other tools completely miss—particularly valuable for SaaS companies with distinct customer segments like technical buyers versus business decision-makers.

Standout features

1. Persona-First Methodology: Instead of treating all queries the same, Gumshoe asks AI models to respond through the lens of distinct customer types, providing human details that the models would know about their users. For B2B SaaS, this means you can see how your product appears to CTOs versus marketing directors versus procurement managers.
2. Most Comprehensive AI Engine Coverage: Tracks ChatGPT (multiple versions including GPT-5, GPT-5 Mini, GPT-4o), Gemini, AI Overviews, Perplexity, Claude, Grok, DeepSeek, and AI Mode—only missing Copilot. This is the most complete coverage available.
3. Rigorous Data Quality: Dual validation system (API-first connection plus native interface validation) ensures results stay consistent with real-world responses. Every conversation starts fresh with no cookies or history, and you get full conversation transcripts to verify every finding yourself.

Limitations

Gumshoe doesn't analyze whether mentions are positive, negative, or neutral—you can see you're mentioned, but not if AI is praising or criticizing your brand. Additionally, it can't connect AI citations to actual visits, leads, or revenue, functioning as a monitoring tool rather than an attribution platform.

The pricing model is polarizing: fantastic value for weekly monitoring at $60-224/month, but premium-priced for daily comprehensive tracking at $450-1,680/month. For comparison, tracking 50 prompts across 3 AI engines costs $60/month weekly or $450/month daily, while Writesonic offers daily monitoring of 150 prompts for $249/month. For SaaS companies needing daily monitoring of many prompts, costs escalate quickly.

See our in-depth Gumshoe AI visibility review.

6. Otterly AI — Best for Detailed GEO Audits

Our AI SEO Rating: 3.3/5

Launched in October 2024, Otterly AI has grown rapidly to over 10,000 users by September 2024 and positions itself as a specialized tool for understanding brand visibility in AI-generated responses across six platforms.

What makes Otterly AI unique

Otterly AI offers the most detailed GEO audit at this price point, analyzing 25+ factors and delivering specific recommendations including content optimization strategies, technical improvements, structured data implementation guidance, and authority signal enhancement.

Standout features

1. Comprehensive Platform Coverage: Monitors six AI platforms—ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, Gemini, Microsoft Copilot, and AI Mode—more comprehensive coverage than most competitors.
2. Brand Visibility Index: A unique metric showing how visible each brand is in AI answers based on mention frequency and average position within answers, not found in other AI search visibility tools.
3. Best-in-Class GEO Audit: Analyzes 25+ factors affecting AI visibility and provides specific recommendations, making it the most detailed audit tool in the ~$200/month price range.

Limitations

Otterly AI does not provide direct website traffic estimation from AI search engines and cannot correlate citations to actual website visits. Documentation claims sentiment tracking as a core feature, but it's not accessible in the dashboard—representing either a hidden feature, removed functionality, or marketing claims ahead of product reality.

Data refreshes only weekly, meaning monitoring can be up to 7 days behind real-time. At $189/month for 100 prompts, pricing is competitive but the interface has too many disconnected table charts, creating a steeper learning curve than competitors.

See our in-depth Otterly AI visibility review.

7. Peec AI — Best for Multi-Engine Monitoring

Our AI SEO Rating: 3.2/5

Peec AI is an AI search visibility tool focused on helping businesses monitor their visibility across major AI search engines with a clean, intuitive interface and straightforward setup process.

What makes Peec AI unique

Peec AI has comprehensive multi-AI engine coverage including ChatGPT, AI Overview, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude, and AI Mode—tracking all major platforms except DeepSeek.

Standout features

1. Excellent User Experience: The interface is easy to navigate with a 3-minute setup process, suggested prompts included, and kickstart sessions available for group onboarding.
2. Affordable Sentiment Tracking: Brand sentiment tracking is included in the €199/month intermediate plan, compared to gated behind the $499/month plan in Writesonic or missing entirely from other platforms at this price point.
3. Real-Time UI Scraping: Peec AI queries AI platforms at regular intervals (usually daily) and runs prompts through multiple AI search engines in real-time.

Limitations

Peec AI does not provide a playbook or AI-search visibility auditing tool that shows all issues with your site and how to fix them—you get signals that you need to translate into a content strategy yourself. It does not show an estimated number of visits coming from AI search engines, and offers no built-in end-to-end AI referral attribution.

The sentiment metric is just a number without much additional context—it would be more useful with explanations of how to improve brand sentiment or examples of conversations contributing to the score.

See our in-depth Peec AI visibility review.

8. Profound — Best for Enterprise E-Commerce

Our AI SEO Rating: 3.1/5

Profound is an enterprise-focused AI visibility platform that raised $35M in Series B funding led by Kleiner Perkins. The platform is used by Fortune 100 brands like Ramp and IBM to track how brands appear in AI-generated answers across ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews.

What makes Profound unique

Profound's direct consumer interface monitoring captures what real users actually see, including all dynamic retrieval-augmented content from RAG systems. Unlike API-only competitors, Profound monitors the actual AI search engines that consumers use, ensuring results reflect real-world responses with live citations.

Standout features

• Sleek AI-First UX: Modern, polished interface with AI-assisted onboarding, comprehensive documentation, and plenty of helpful nudges throughout the platform—one of the best user experiences in the category.
• Built-in Sentiment Analysis: Detailed positive/negative/neutral brand sentiment tracking included as default, with comprehensive dashboards showing how AI represents your brand across different contexts.
• CDN Integrations: Native integrations with major CDNs like Cloudflare, Akamai, and Amazon CloudFront enable accurate traffic attribution for enterprise e-commerce sites—particularly valuable for large retailers.

Limitations

Profound cannot be used for multi-account setups, eliminating agency use cases entirely. At $399/month for the Growth plan (100 prompts across 3 engines), it costs 3-4x more than alternatives offering similar features at $100-150/month.

The automated setup lacks configurability—you cannot manually choose which competitors to track, which prompts to prioritize, or which specific pages to monitor. Traffic attribution relies heavily on CDN integrations, making it accurate for major retailers but leaving clear gaps for SaaS companies and smaller agencies without enterprise CDN infrastructure.

Platform coverage is limited to ChatGPT, Perplexity, and AI Overviews, with Claude, Gemini, and Google AI Mode not yet supported.

Who should consider Profound:

• Fortune 500 brands and enterprise e-commerce sites with CDN infrastructure
• Major retailers needing sentiment analysis and don't mind premium pricing
• Large organizations requiring SOC 2 compliance and SSO

Who should skip it:

• SaaS startups and B2B tech companies (better value alternatives exist)
• SEO agencies needing multi-account support
• Companies requiring flexible configuration and competitor benchmarking

See our in-depth Profound AI visibility review.

9. GetMentioned — Best for Unlimited Users

Our AI SEO Rating: 3.1/5

GetMentioned is a newer AI search visibility platform that takes a unique approach by mimicking real user behavior rather than relying on API integrations, providing more authentic visibility data.

What makes GetMentioned unique

Unlike tools that use API integrations, GetMentioned mimics real user queries by automating what you would do manually—opening ChatGPT, typing the question, reading the response, and analyzing it.

Standout features

1. Real User Data Accuracy: Mimics actual user behavior instead of API shortcuts, showing responses real users see rather than API-optimized versions that minimize token usage.
2. Unlimited Users and Companies: Track multiple brands and invite entire teams at no extra cost—both €89/month (30 prompts) and €199/month (100 prompts) plans include unlimited users and companies tracked, making it ideal for agencies.
3. Multi-Geo Tracking: Allows tracking prompts across more than five countries, capturing how AI tools provide different answers depending on the user's location.

Limitations

GetMentioned doesn't perform automated sentiment analysis of how your brand is portrayed in AI responses. It also won't show how many visits or conversions came from AI mentions, functioning as a monitoring tool rather than attribution platform.

The actionable insights function is still in beta testing and needs improvement—the tool provides a list of action points but doesn't explain how to execute them. Documentation is minimal, likely because it's a recent product still in beta.

See our in-depth AI GetMentioned AI visibility review.

10. SEMRush — Lowest Cost SEO Reporting Add-On

Our AI SEO Rating: 2.6/5

SEMRush is an established all-in-one digital marketing platform (used by over 10 million marketers globally) that has expanded into AI visibility tracking. The AI SEO Toolkit monitors how brands appear across ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, and Google AI Mode, with promised Gemini support coming soon.

What makes SEMRush unique

SEMRush positions itself as the budget-friendly option at just $99/month, significantly undercutting competitors by 20-60%. For existing SEMRush customers, the AI visibility features integrate with the platform's existing keyword and SEO infrastructure, potentially offering consolidation benefits.

Standout features

• Lowest Entry Price: At $99/month, SEMRush is the most affordable AI visibility solution in the market, making it accessible to small businesses with tight budgets.
• Keyword-Level Daily Tracking: Unlike competitors focusing on prompt-level analysis, SEMRush operates at the keyword level with daily refresh cycles, leveraging existing SEO infrastructure.
• Multi-Account Friendly: Easy to set up multiple website properties, making it viable for SEO agencies managing multiple clients (though costs stack at $99 per additional domain).

Limitations

SEMRush's AI visibility tool feels rushed to market and suffers from fundamental usability problems. The interface has critical bugs—competitor configuration automatically selects wrong domains, the system doesn't remember user preferences, and dashboards require repeated reconfiguration.

Limited AI engine coverage (only ChatGPT, AI Overviews, and AI Mode—no Perplexity, Claude, Copilot, or Gemini despite promises of "coming soon"). The tool generates irrelevant prompts for B2B/SaaS niches, with smaller SaaS vendors missing from competitor lists entirely.

The promised "Growth Actions" functionality—critical for actionable insights—is not yet available despite being advertised. Documentation lacks transparency about whether the tool monitors live interfaces or uses static API calls.

The bottom line on SEMRush:

You get what you pay for. At $99/month, you're essentially paying beta-tester prices for a beta-quality product. The low price reflects product immaturity, not value.

Who should consider SEMRush:

• Existing SEMRush power users wanting to experiment without major investment
• Budget-conscious solopreneurs who can tolerate significant limitations
• Patient agencies willing to wait 6-12 months for the platform to mature

Who should skip it:

• SaaS/B2B companies needing accurate niche tracking
• Serious AI SEO practitioners requiring production-ready tools
• Anyone expecting polished, bug-free experiences

The bugs aren't polish issues—they're fundamental usability failures. For most use cases, spending 2-4x more on a mature competitor delivers significantly better ROI.

See our in-depth SEMRush AI visibility review.

Other AI visibility solutions on our radar

In addition to the above tools, we're aware of a number of other solutions that we either plan to test, or have excluded from our review because of the scope of the solution.

Our bottom line on AI visibility tools

Over the past year we've seen a massive increase in AI visibility startups. The barriers to enter this market are relatively low, but that also means there is considerable confusion about which features are needed and which features are expensive good-to-haves. The incumbent SEO visibility solutions Ahrefs, SEMRush, and SE Ranking are all investing heavily into the space, but there is no clear market leader yet.

For most B2B SaaS and tech companies, we recommend starting with Promptwatch. At $89-199/month, it delivers the most complete package for teams serious about optimizing their AI presence with daily tracking, comprehensive attribution, and strategic intelligence without enterprise complexity. The Answer Gap analysis and Source tracking provide exactly the data SEO professionals need to make strategic decisions.

If you need an all-in-one platform that combines visibility tracking with content strategy and actionable recommendations, Writesonic or Scrunch AI deliver comprehensive solutions at $249-250/month. Writesonic excels at integrated content planning, while Scrunch offers the broadest AI engine coverage with enterprise-ready infrastructure.

If you're already invested in SEO tools, SE Ranking delivers incredible value: full SEO suite plus AI visibility for €138/month. Just be prepared for a fragmented user experience across multiple interfaces.

The AI visibility space is evolving rapidly. What works in early 2026 might be obsolete by year end. Test before committing to annual contracts, and remember: no tool will magically fix your AI visibility. They just help you understand where you are and what might move the needle.

If you have any questions about our rankings or you have other solutions to suggest, reach out on LinkedIn.