AI search visibility tools compared (2026)

Consumers are increasingly asking ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews for recommendations instead of scrolling through Google results. If your business doesn't show up in those answers, you're invisible to a growing share of your potential customers. And unlike traditional SEO where you can type a keyword into Google and see your ranking, there's no built-in way to check how you appear in AI search.

That's where AI search visibility tools come in. This category has grown fast over the past year, with options ranging from free manual methods to enterprise platforms costing hundreds per month. This post covers what's out there, what to look for, and where different tools fit depending on your budget and what you actually need.

We make one of these tools (Doory), so we're obviously not neutral. But we've also spent a lot of time studying this space and we think the most useful thing we can do is give you an honest overview so you can pick the right tool for your situation, even if that's not us.

Start with the free approach

Before you pay for anything, you can get a useful picture of your AI visibility by doing it manually.

Pick 5-10 prompts that a real customer might type into ChatGPT or Perplexity. For a restaurant, that might be "best Italian restaurant in Bergen" or "where should I eat near Aker Brygge tonight." For a plumber, "reliable plumber in Oslo" or "emergency plumber near me recommendations." Use the kind of language your actual customers use, not marketing keywords.

Run each prompt. Write down which businesses appear. Then do the same thing next week. And the week after that.

You'll notice a few things quickly. First, AI results aren't stable like Google rankings. The same prompt can return different businesses on different days. Second, your competitors who rank well on Google might not show up in AI at all, and businesses you've never heard of might appear instead. Third, small changes in prompt wording can surface completely different results. "Best restaurant in Oslo" and "recommend a good dinner spot in Oslo" might give you two very different lists.

This manual approach is genuinely useful as a starting point. The limitation is that it's time-consuming to do regularly, hard to track trends over weeks and months, and easy to forget about after the first couple of times.

What to look for in a tool

Before getting into specific options, it's worth thinking about what actually matters in this kind of tool. Not all of them work the same way and the features that matter depend on what you're trying to do.

The most important thing is that the tool tracks prompts over time, not just one-off checks. Because AI results shift between sessions, a single snapshot tells you very little. You need to see trends. Is your visibility improving over weeks? Did that batch of new Google reviews change anything? Is a competitor gaining ground? Trending data answers these questions. A one-time report doesn't.

You also want to be able to set your own prompts. Some tools only track generic industry prompts, but the prompts that matter most are the ones your specific customers would actually type. A coffee shop in Grünerløkka needs to track different prompts than a coffee chain with 50 locations.

Competitor tracking is the other thing worth paying attention to. AI recommendations are comparative. When someone asks "best X near me," the AI picks from a set. Knowing who else appears in your prompts, and why, is often more actionable than just knowing whether you show up or not. If a competitor consistently appears and you don't, you can look at what they have that you don't. More reviews? Mentions on local blogs? A better-structured Google Business Profile?

Finally, think about whether you want a tool that just monitors, or one that also tells you what to do about it. Some tools are pure dashboards. Others generate specific actions based on what the data shows. For smaller businesses without a dedicated marketing team, the action-oriented tools tend to be more practical because the insight alone isn't enough if you don't have time to figure out what to do with it.

Tools by price range

This isn't an exhaustive list but it covers the main options across different price points.

Value tier (under $50/month)

This is where tools aimed at SMBs and smaller teams tend to sit. Good visibility without the complexity or the enterprise price tag.

Doory (doory.app) is what we're building. It's specifically designed for SMBs, which means it's priced for smaller budgets and doesn't assume you have a marketing team to interpret dashboards. It tracks your AI visibility across ChatGPT and Gemini (and more soon), monitors your competitors, incorporates review tracking, and generates specific weekly actions you can take to improve. The idea is that monitoring alone isn't enough for most small businesses. You also need to know what to do about what you find.

Peekaboo starts at around $50/month with brand tracking across several AI platforms and clean reporting. It also offers some free tools you can use without an account to get a quick sense of your visibility before committing.

Mid-range ($50-150/month)

Otterly.AI is an established tool in this range. It tracks mentions across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Google AI Overviews, and has been around long enough to have a solid track record. Good for agencies and in-house marketing teams who need reliable monitoring and reporting.

Peec AI sits in a similar range and goes deeper on source citation tracking. This means you can see not just whether you're mentioned in an AI answer, but whether your content is actually being used as a source for that answer. Useful distinction if you care about understanding why you're appearing (or not), not just whether you are. Doory.app also offers this capability and doing so surfaces very powerful insights.

Enterprise ($150+/month)

Profound, and Semrush's AI visibility toolkit are bigger platforms. More data, larger prompt volumes, more integrations, multi-brand support. Unless you're an agency managing multiple clients or a larger company with a dedicated marketing team, these are probably more than you need. They're priced and designed for teams that already have the resources to act on complex data.

What we think matters most

For most small and mid-size businesses, the gap isn't data, it's action. You can have the best AI visibility dashboard in the world, but if nobody on your team has time to look at it regularly and figure out what to do with the information, it doesn't help much. This is why we built Doory around weekly actions rather than dashboards. We think the tools that win in this space will be the ones that push useful information to you and suggest what you can do, rather than waiting for you to come and interpret charts. Having worked in startups and growing businesses we know time is your biggest constraint.

We also think competitor context matters more than absolute scores. "Your AI visibility score is 42" means nothing to most people. "Your competitor appears in 7 of your 10 key prompts and you appear in 2" tells you something immediately useful.

And we think reviews are underweighted in how most tools think about AI visibility. Recent review volume and review quality can have a meaningful effect on whether AI recommends a business. Most AI visibility tools don't touch reviews at all. They treat monitoring and review management as separate problems. We think they're connected, which is why Doory includes review tracking alongside AI monitoring.

Where to start

If you're not tracking your AI visibility at all yet, you can always start with a manual approach or simple tool. Run your key prompts, see where you stand.

If you want to track things easily over time, pick a tool that fits your budget and your team. If you're a smaller business that wants monitoring plus actions at an affordable price, we'd love you to try Doory. If you want a pure monitoring tool with an established track record, Otterly.AI or Peec AI are solid choices. If you need enterprise-grade data, look at Profound or Semrush.

The main thing is to start checking. The businesses that will do best in AI search are the ones that treat it like they treat Google: something worth monitoring regularly, not something to think about once and forget.