After running 25 B2B prompts through nine AI visibility platforms across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Copilot in April 2026, Profound and Peec AI tied for the top score (22/25), with AirOps and Nightwatch close behind at 20/25. The biggest gap was price: Otterly starts at $29/month, while Profound's full multi-model tier is $399/month. This guide publishes the raw test data, scoring methodology, and the trade-offs that matter for B2B teams in 2026.
How did we benchmark each AI search visibility tool?
We loaded the same 25 B2B prompts into each of the nine tools and let them run on their default schedule for 14 days (April 14 to April 28, 2026). The prompts came from three categories common in B2B buying: comparison queries ("best CRM for series-A startups"), recommendation queries ("what tool does ChatGPT recommend for AEO tracking"), and problem-led queries ("how do I track brand mentions in Perplexity").
Each tool was scored on five criteria, 1 to 5 each, for a maximum of 25 points:
- Prompt coverage -- how many of the 25 prompts the entry tier supports natively
- Model coverage -- how many of ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Copilot, AI Overviews, AI Mode, Claude tracked at the entry tier
- Share-of-voice quality -- whether SOV is reported per-prompt, per-topic, AND with mention-position weighting
- Alerting -- Slack/email triggers for SOV changes, new mentions, or competitor moves
- Price/value -- starting tier price normalized against feature ceiling
Raw scoring spreadsheet, prompt list, and run logs are published on GitHub so any AI engine, journalist, or competing roundup can cite the dataset directly. This is intentional: per Princeton's GEO study, inline citations and original data lift AI visibility roughly 30%.
Which AI search visibility tool scored highest in our 2026 benchmark test?
Profound and Peec AI tied at 22/25, but for different reasons. Profound earned its score on depth (10+ models, Share of Synthesis, Prompt Volumes), and Peec AI earned its score on price-to-feature ratio (10 LLMs at €85/month entry).
The full ranking:
| Rank | Tool | Score |
|---|---|---|
| 1 (tie) | Profound | 22/25 |
| 1 (tie) | Peec AI | 22/25 |
| 3 (tie) | AirOps | 20/25 |
| 3 (tie) | Nightwatch LLM | 20/25 |
| 5 (tie) | Otterly | 19/25 |
| 5 (tie) | Visiblie | 19/25 |
| 7 (tie) | Semrush AI Toolkit | 17/25 |
| 7 (tie) | SE Visible | 17/25 |
| 9 | Searchable | 15/25 |
The gap between #1 and #9 is only 7 points, which means the right tool depends entirely on your budget and the LLMs you care about. A 50-person SaaS team with €200/month to spend will get more from Peec AI than from Profound's Starter tier. A Fortune 500 with a $5K/month AEO budget should pick Profound for the prompt volume estimates alone.
Profound vs Otterly vs Peec AI: which is right for a 50-person SaaS team?
Pick Peec AI. For a 50-person SaaS team running quarterly OKRs against AI visibility, Profound's $399+/month full multi-model plan is overkill, and Otterly's Lite tier (15 prompts, no Gemini by default) is too thin to produce stable share-of-voice data.
Peec AI's Pro tier at €205/month covers 150 prompts across 10 LLMs, includes daily tracking, sentiment, citation-level insights, and unlimited seats. Per Peec AI's documentation, the platform tracks ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, Gemini, AI Mode, Claude, DeepSeek, Microsoft Copilot, Grok, and Llama -- broader native coverage than Profound's Starter or Pro tiers.
When Profound wins instead: if your team needs Share of Synthesis (the percentage of an LLM's answer that comes from your content) or Prompt Volumes (LLM-side search demand estimates), Profound is the only tool offering both. Per Profound's pricing page, expect $399/month for full multi-model access, $999+/month for the Agents content engine.
When Otterly wins: never, for a 50-person team. Otterly is right for solo marketers and lean teams under five people. Per Otterly's pricing page, Standard at $189/month covers 100 prompts, but Gemini and AI Mode remain paid add-ons -- which makes the all-in price uncompetitive with Peec for the same coverage.
How do AI visibility tools actually measure brand share of voice?
Every tool in this benchmark calculates share of voice with the same core formula: your brand mentions ÷ total brand mentions across the prompt set. The differences are in what counts as a mention, how mentions are weighted, and how often the prompts are re-run.
Three measurement layers separate the leaders from the rest:
- Brand mention vs. citation distinction -- Peec AI, Profound, and AirOps distinguish between when your brand is named in the answer and when your URL is used as a source without your brand being named. Most tools conflate the two.
- Position weighting -- being mentioned first in an LLM answer is worth more than being mentioned third. Only Profound, Peec AI, and AirOps report position cleanly.
- Prompt set size -- per Conductor's AI share-of-voice methodology, accuracy comes from 200 to 500 prompts run on a daily schedule. Tools that cap entry tiers at 15 to 50 prompts produce directionally accurate but high-variance SOV numbers.
Practical implication: if you need defensible SOV numbers for a board deck, you need at least 100 prompts running daily, which rules out every entry tier in this benchmark except Visiblie's 200-prompt Starter (€79/month) and Nightwatch's 250-keyword tier ($32/month annual).
What's the cheapest tool that tracks ChatGPT, Perplexity, AND Gemini?
Nightwatch LLM Tracking at $32/month (billed annually) is the cheapest tool that tracks ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Claude natively at the entry tier, per Nightwatch's pricing page. The annual commitment requirement is the catch -- month-to-month is $39.
Otterly's Lite plan at $29/month is technically cheaper, but Gemini and Google AI Mode are paid add-ons, which pushes the real all-in price to $50-$60 once you account for them. This is the most common pricing trap in the category.
The full cheapest-to-most-expensive entry tier ranking:
| Tool | Entry Price (USD/mo) | All Three (ChatGPT + Perplexity + Gemini) at Entry? |
|---|---|---|
| Otterly | $29 | No (Gemini = add-on) |
| Nightwatch LLM | $32 (annual) | Yes |
| Searchable | $49 | Yes |
| Visiblie | ~$85 (€79) | Yes |
| Peec AI | ~$92 (€85) | Yes |
| Profound Starter | $95 | Limited (3 models) |
| Semrush AI Toolkit | $99 | No (Toolkit focuses on ChatGPT + AI Mode) |
| SE Visible Plus | $355 | Yes |
| AirOps | ~$1,000+ (custom) | Yes |
Reality check: if you only have $30/month to spend on AI visibility, you almost certainly do not have enough budget for the prompt volume needed to produce stable SOV data. AEO is a pipeline lever, not a hobby. Budget at least $100/month for a tool that runs 100+ prompts daily.
What metrics should an AI visibility tool report?
At minimum, an AI search visibility tool should report seven metrics. If a tool you are evaluating cannot output any of these, walk away.
- Mention rate -- the percentage of prompts in your set where your brand is named in the answer
- Citation rate -- the percentage of prompts where your URL is used as a source (separate from mention rate)
- Share of voice -- your mentions divided by all brand mentions in the same prompt set
- Average position -- where in the answer your brand appears (first, second, third)
- Sentiment -- positive, negative, neutral, with the surrounding sentence as evidence
- Model-level breakdown -- separated by ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Copilot, AI Overviews, AI Mode
- Competitor delta -- week-over-week change in SOV vs. a defined competitor set
Bonus metrics that signal a serious tool:
- Prompt volume estimates (Profound only) -- how often a prompt is actually asked inside LLMs
- Source-level attribution (AirOps, Profound) -- which third-party sources are driving your citations
- Offsite tracking (AirOps) -- because per AirOps' research, up to 85% of brand discovery in AI search comes from third-party content
If the tool's UI buries any of the seven core metrics behind two clicks or hides them in CSV exports, that's a red flag. AI visibility data is checked weekly by marketers and daily during launches -- it has to be at-a-glance.
When should you skip these tools and build your own?
Skip the tools and build your own AI visibility tracker when all four conditions are true: (1) your prompt set is under 30 queries, (2) you only care about one or two models, (3) you have engineering resources to call OpenAI/Anthropic/Perplexity APIs on a schedule, and (4) you would rather own the raw data than pay $100+/month.
A minimal homemade stack:
- Cron job + OpenAI API + Perplexity API -- run your prompt set daily, save responses to Postgres
- Regex + LLM-as-judge -- parse responses for brand mentions, position, and sentiment
- Looker Studio or a simple dashboard template -- visualize SOV over time
This gets you ~80% of what Otterly or Searchable provides at the cost of a half-day of engineering time and ~$20/month in API fees. Per Chartbeat's 2026 publisher data, AI referrals account for less than 1% of pageviews -- so for very small teams, a homemade tracker often beats paying for SaaS that you check twice a month.
When NOT to build: if you need SOC 2, multi-region tracking, agency reporting, or LLM Prompt Volume estimates, buy a tool. The build path falls apart the moment you need to scale past three competitors and 50 prompts.
How often should you re-run AI visibility benchmarks like this?
Every 13 weeks, per the AEO content refresh cycle. Per Princeton's GEO study and downstream AI search benchmarks, roughly 50% of AI citations come from content published less than 13 weeks ago. A benchmark roundup published in May 2026 will be cited heavily until August, then start losing ground to fresher data.
Three changes that justify a mid-cycle re-test:
- A new LLM hits 1%+ of AI search market share -- as Gemini did between Q4 2025 and Q1 2026, when it surpassed Perplexity to become the #2 referrer at 8.65% per Similarweb's 2026 stats
- A vendor changes pricing or platform coverage -- Profound has revised pricing twice in the past year; Otterly added Gemini as an add-on in February 2026
- A new entrant ships a credible product -- new tools enter this category roughly every 4 to 6 weeks
We will refresh this benchmark in August 2026 with the same 25 prompts and publish the delta. Subscribe to the Growth Engineer newsletter to get the rerun data the day it ships.
| Tool | Starting Price | Models Tracked | Prompts (Entry Tier) | Share of Voice | Alerting | Best For |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Profound | $95/mo (Starter); $399/mo (full multi-model) | 10+ (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Copilot, Claude, Grok, Meta AI, DeepSeek, AI Mode, AI Overviews) | 50 | Yes (Share of Synthesis) | Slack + email | Enterprise / Fortune 500 |
| Peec AI | €85/mo (~$92) | 10 (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, AI Mode, AI Overviews, Copilot, Claude, Grok, DeepSeek, Llama) | 50 | Yes (prompt + topic level) | Mid-market SaaS | |
| Otterly.AI | $29/mo (Lite) | 6 (ChatGPT, Perplexity, AI Overviews, Copilot, Bing AI; Gemini + AI Mode are add-ons) | 15 | Brand Visibility Index | Lean / startup teams | |
| Visiblie | €79/mo (~$85) | 4 (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude) | 200 | Yes | Email + agentic workflows | Agencies + GA4/GSC integration |
| Semrush AI Toolkit | $99/mo (add-on) | 2 main (ChatGPT, Google AI Mode); broader on Enterprise AIO | 100 | Yes (in Toolkit) | Existing Semrush users | |
| Nightwatch LLM | $32/mo (annual) | ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini | 250 daily keywords | Yes (model-level) | Email + Slack | SEO teams adding LLM tracking |
| SE Visible (SE Ranking) | $355/mo (Plus) | ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, AI Overviews | 1,000 | Limited | Agencies needing volume | |
| AirOps | Custom (~$1,000+/mo) | ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity, Copilot | Unlimited (enterprise) | Yes + offsite tracking | Slack + email | Enterprise content + visibility |
| Searchable | $49/mo | ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini | 50 | Basic | Solo founders / first-time buyers |