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AI visibility tools, and what they will not tell you

This is not a ranking. We have not run these tools side by side on the same brand for six months, and anyone who claims to have done so at this point in the category's life is selling something. What we have done is establish, from primary sources, what each one costs, what each one pays a site like this to recommend it, and how we know.

16 tools · checked 2026-07-10 · our commercial interest in each

1 of these tools do not publish a price.

Profound, the category leader at a $1 billion valuation, shows no pricing ladder. Peec's numbers exist only on third-party review sites. Writesonic's own pages contradict each other. Every "GEO tool pricing" article you have read filled those gaps with figures it could not source. We leave them empty and say so, because an empty cell is information and an invented one is not.

AI visibility trackers

Tools whose main job is telling you whether AI assistants mention your brand. Read the evidence on answer volatility before you buy any of them: a single blended "AI visibility" percentage is averaging three engines that agree with each other only 2.37% of the time.

Nightwatch

pays 30%
Price
published on site
Source
vendor-page

The best affiliate economics of any tool in this category, and on-theme: it ships Citation Intelligence for AI mentions. Stated plainly so you can weigh it: if we ever enrol, this is the tool with the strongest financial pull on our judgement. That is exactly why it sits at the top of this table rather than buried in it.

Otterly.ai

pays 20%
Price
$29/mo entry tier
Source
vendor-page

The cheapest credible entry point in the category, and the only GEO-native tracker we found with a real, published referral programme. We separately confirmed that otterly.ai/affiliate and otterly.ai/partners both return 404; the live path is /referral.

Rankscale

pays 10%
Price
from ~$20/mo
Source
vendor-page

Third-party sites claim '15% lifetime'. The vendor's own page says 10% for up to 12 months. Where a vendor page and an aggregator disagree, we publish the vendor page and flag the conflict.

Peec AI

pays us nothing
Price
from about €89/mo
Source
third-party

We could not read a price ladder off peec.ai itself; the figures circulating come from third-party review sites. We confirmed peec.ai/affiliate returns 404. Raised roughly $29M as of November 2025.

Profound

pays us nothing
Price
not published
Source
not-published

The category leader: $155M raised, a $96M Series C at a $1B valuation in February 2026, and a genuinely large citation dataset. Its own pricing page shows no ladder. It also publishes a 'best generative engine optimisation tools' article in which it ranks itself. Both facts belong in the same sentence.

Suites and content tools

Established SEO and content platforms, most of which have added AI visibility features. Note which of them can pay us, and which cannot.

SEO suites and content tools, pricing and payouts
Tool What it is Pays us Note
Ahrefs SEO suite with Brand Radar (AI visibility) NOTHING Ahrefs closed its affiliate programme in 2019 and has said it has no plans to relaunch. It also publishes some of the largest and most methodologically transparent citation research in this field. It can never pay us a penny. Notice how rarely it tops a 'best AI visibility tools' listicle.
Screaming Frog technical crawler NOTHING Their FAQ confirms no affiliate programme and no reseller discounts. Another tool no commission-funded listicle has any reason to recommend.
Clearscope content optimisation NOTHING No partner page found. Absence of a programme is not proof one does not exist, so we record it as 'none found' rather than 'none'.
Semrush SEO suite with AI Visibility Toolkit about $200 per sale, $10 per trial We confirmed the affiliate landing page resolves (HTTP 200) while several GEO-native vendors' equivalents 404. A large one-time bounty rewards a burst of traffic rather than a good long-term recommendation. Adobe agreed to acquire Semrush for about $1.9 billion, expected to close in the first half of 2026.
Surfer SEO content optimisation 75% to 125% of the first payment A very large first-payment bounty. Structurally, this pays most for getting someone to sign up once, and nothing at all for whether the tool serves them a year later.
Frase content optimisation with AI visibility features 30%, rising to 40% Frase also publishes a 'best AI visibility tools' listicle that features Frase.
Scalenut AI content platform 30%, rising to 40% Lifetime recurring commission. Among the strongest financial incentives in this table, which is precisely why we are telling you about it rather than letting it quietly shape a ranking.
NeuronWriter content optimisation 30% Terms partly corroborated by aggregators rather than read cleanly off the vendor's own page. Treat the 'lifetime' qualifier as unconfirmed.
Mangools SEO suite 30%, up to 35% A short 30-day cookie against a lifetime commission.
SE Ranking SEO suite with an AI Search add-on 30% A genuine conflict between the vendor's own legal text and every aggregator. We publish the conflict rather than pick the more flattering number.
Writesonic AI writer repositioned around AI search 20% Aggregators widely claim '30% lifetime'. The vendor's own affiliate page says 20% for 12 months. Writesonic's own pricing pages also contradict each other on tier prices.

Should you buy any of them?

Honestly: probably not yet, and not because they are bad. Because of what the evidence says they can measure. A tracker samples a handful of prompts on a schedule. Real users type millions of variants, and the same prompt returns a different list of brands more than 99 times out of 100. A number built on that foundation moves for reasons that have nothing to do with your marketing.

Benjamin Houy built one of these tools, ran it for seven months, and shut it down. His conclusion, which cost him a company to reach:

Customers were churning because the product didn't change what they needed to do. There's no secret GEO strategy. AI models reward the same fundamentals that already drive SEO and PR.

If you need a number to report upward, buy the cheapest one that names its methodology and treat it as a weather vane, not a speedometer. If you want to be cited more, the evidence points at the unglamorous things: be genuinely worth citing, get mentioned in places that already are, and make your pages easy to quote. None of that requires a subscription.

Every claim in this section is graded and sourced in the evidence ledger. Our commercial interest in each tool named here is published on who pays us.