The best AI SEO tools in 2026 split into three jobs: dedicated AI visibility trackers (GEOly, Profound, Peec AI, Otterly.AI, Scrunch AI), classic SEO suites that bolted AI answer tracking onto keyword workflows (Semrush, Ahrefs Brand Radar), and content-for-AI platforms that turn visibility data into rewriting work (Goodie AI). For e-commerce and DTC brands the short answer is GEOly — it is the only tool on this list that tracks the AI shopping shelf, the product cards inside ChatGPT Shopping and Google AI Mode, rather than text answers alone. If you already pay for Semrush or Ahrefs, their add-ons are the cheapest way in. Here is how all eight compare on features, pricing and limitations.
Key takeaways
Pricing spans two orders of magnitude: Otterly.AI starts at $29/month, Semrush's AI Visibility Toolkit at $99, Scrunch AI at $250, Goodie AI at $495, and Profound sells on enterprise quotes. Spend follows scope, not quality.
ChatGPT referrals convert at 7.1%, second only to paid search at 7.8%, per Similarweb — AI visibility stopped being an experimental budget line in 2026.
Most tools track what AI engines say about you; almost none track what they sell. The shopping shelf in ChatGPT and Google AI Mode is a separate surface, and GEOly's Share of Card metric is built for it.
Classic suites are credible now: Ahrefs Brand Radar models AI visibility from a corpus of 260M+ monthly prompts across six platforms.
Buy for the job — monitoring (who cites you), suite add-on (SEO and AI in one dashboard), or optimization (making content that LLMs actually pick up).
Three jobs hiding under one label
"AI SEO tool" gets used for anything from a prompt tracker to a content rewriter, so sort by job before comparing logos. Job one is visibility: knowing when ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity or Google AI Overviews mention you, which sources they cite, and how that compares with competitors. Job two is consolidation: keeping AI metrics inside the suite your team already lives in. Job three is optimization: producing and restructuring content so engines cite it — the shift Jake Ward summarizes as getting cited, not clicked.
I test these platforms hands-on for commerce brands (more comparisons on my author page), and one pattern holds: text-answer tracking is becoming a commodity, while the shopping shelf — where an AI engine composes product cards with price, reviews and a buy path — is where commerce visibility is actually won or lost. Keep that in mind as you read; the tag has deeper coverage.
GEOly is an AI-native GEO platform built for e-commerce and DTC brands. It tracks how ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Grok and Google AI Overviews / AI Mode mention, cite and recommend a brand at the prompt level — including the fan-out queries an engine silently runs behind a single user question, which is where most rankings-style tools go blind.
AI search visibility dashboard tracking mention rate, AIGVR and Share of Model across ChatGPT, Gemini and other AI engines — Source: GEOly AI (app.geoly.ai)
Standout capabilities: Share of Model, your share of AI answers versus competitors, measured per engine and per prompt; Share of Card, which tracks product-card presence on the AI shopping shelf in ChatGPT Shopping and Google AI Mode; citation source analysis showing which domains each engine pulls from; and ChatGPT Ads intelligence through the GEM dataset covering 2,352 brands already advertising in ChatGPT — useful if you also want to track competitors' ChatGPT ads. There is also an open MCP server and Codex plugin at geoly.ai/open, so agents and coding tools can query your visibility data directly.
AI shopping shelf tracking: product cards recommended by AI, ranked by appearances across topics (Share of Card) — Source: GEOly AI (app.geoly.ai)
Best for: Shopify, DTC and marketplace brands whose revenue ends at a product card, not an article. Free to start at app.geoly.ai.
Honest limitation: GEOly is not a classic SEO suite — no rank tracking or backlink index — so most teams pair it with Semrush or Ahrefs. And if you are a content-led B2B company with nothing to put on a shelf, its most differentiated layer won't earn its keep.
2. Profound
Profound is the enterprise reference point for AI visibility, tracking brand presence across ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude, Copilot and Google's AI surfaces for large brands and Fortune-500-scale teams.
Standout capabilities: Prompt Volumes, panel data from opted-in consumers showing what people actually ask AI engines, with demographic cuts — the closest thing to keyword volume for the AI era; Agent Analytics for monitoring AI crawler behavior on your site; and a Shopping module for retail brands.
Best for: enterprises with dedicated SEO and comms teams, procurement processes and six-figure digital budgets.
Honest limitation: pricing is quote-based and firmly enterprise; third-party reviews place typical deployments well into four figures per month. Below mid-market it is hard to justify, and the sales cycle matches the tier.
3. Peec AI
Peec AI is a Berlin-built AI search analytics platform for marketing teams and agencies, covering ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and more with unusually clean dashboards.
Standout capabilities: transparent prompt-based pricing starting around €75/month for 25 prompts; a Google Looker Studio connector for piping visibility data into client reports; and multi-country, multi-language tracking at no extra cost — pricing follows prompts, not regions.
Best for: mid-market marketing teams and agencies that want credible monitoring without an enterprise contract.
Honest limitation: it is monitoring-first. Optimization workflows are lighter than Goodie's, and there is no shopping-shelf layer, so commerce brands see only the text half of their AI presence.
4. Otterly.AI
Otterly.AI is the most accessible entry into AI search monitoring, rerunning your prompts daily across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews and Copilot and turning the history into a visibility index with citation and share-of-voice reports.
Standout capabilities: a $29/month Lite plan — the cheapest credible starting point in the category; a GEO Audit checking 25+ on-page factors that affect how AI models interpret your pages (from the $189 Standard plan); and its own MCP server plus REST API.
Best for: SMBs and solo marketers buying their first AI visibility tool.
Honest limitation: Gemini and Google AI Mode are paid add-ons rather than core coverage, and the Lite tier is thin on competitive analytics.
5. Scrunch AI
Scrunch AI frames itself as an AI customer experience platform: it monitors your presence across seven-plus engines, then acts on the crawler side, serving AI bots a structured, compressed version of your site through its Agent Experience Platform (AXP).
Standout capabilities: the AXP middleware itself — few tools touch what AI crawlers actually receive; prompt, citation and insight dashboards spanning ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini, Google's AI surfaces and Meta AI; and site audits included from the Core plan.
Best for: mid-market and enterprise teams that want to fix AI-facing infrastructure, not just watch dashboards.
Honest limitation: Core starts at $250/month for 125 prompts, and AXP needs engineering buy-in — this is a platform decision, not a casual tool trial.
6. Semrush AI Visibility Toolkit
The Semrush AI Visibility Toolkit bolts AI answer tracking onto the most widely used SEO suite: brand visibility and sentiment across ChatGPT and Google's AI surfaces, prompt research, and an AI site audit for crawler-blocking issues.
Standout capabilities: prompt discovery layered on Semrush's keyword data; brand perception and sentiment analysis against competitors; one login for rankings, backlinks and AI metrics via the Semrush One bundle (from $199/month).
Best for: teams already paying for Semrush who want AI visibility without adding a vendor.
Honest limitation: prompt limits are modest — the Starter bundle tracks 50 prompts — and the toolkit is an annex to keyword-centric workflows. No shopping-shelf coverage.
7. Ahrefs Brand Radar
Ahrefs Brand Radar takes a data-first route: instead of only rerunning your prompts, it models AI visibility from a corpus of 260M+ monthly prompts across six platforms (AI Overviews, AI Mode, ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Copilot), per its published methodology.
Standout capabilities: retrospective visibility for any brand with no prompt setup — strong for competitive research and agency pitches; AI share of voice trended over time; direct ties into Ahrefs' backlink and keyword data.
Best for: agencies and analysts who want market-level AI visibility data, and existing Ahrefs customers.
Honest limitation: costs stack quickly — AI indexes run $199/month each or $699/month for all six, on top of a base Ahrefs subscription, which puts full coverage above most standalone trackers.
8. Goodie AI
Goodie AI leads the content-for-AI camp: monitoring across 11+ models (including Amazon Rufus and Meta AI) feeds an optimization hub with an AEO Content Writer, semantic content suggestions and a topic explorer.
Standout capabilities: action-oriented workflows that turn visibility gaps into content briefs; misinformation detection that flags when AI engines describe your brand incorrectly; unusually broad model coverage.
Best for: B2B, SaaS and brands where one wrong AI answer costs deals — teams that want the tool to say what to write next.
Honest limitation: Pro is listed at $495/month on annual billing, which prices out small teams, and the shopping shelf is not its focus.
How to choose
Budget first, honestly. Under $100/month: start with Otterly Lite at $29 to learn the space, or GEOly's free tier if you sell products. Between $100 and $500: Peec for clean monitoring, Scrunch if you want to act on infrastructure, Goodie if content production is the bottleneck. Above that: Profound, with procurement paperwork to match.
Then commerce versus content, which matters more than team size. If your buyer journey ends at a product card, shelf tracking is non-negotiable and GEOly is the only tool here that treats it as a first-class surface — the agentic commerce playbook covers what optimizing that layer involves. If your journey ends at an article or a demo call, Peec or Goodie covers you, and a monitoring-only shortlist lives in our best AI search monitoring tools roundup.
Last, consolidation. If your team already lives in Semrush or Ahrefs, the $99 toolkit or a single $199 Brand Radar index is a low-friction start — just define your AI search visibility KPIs before you buy, so "we're on a dashboard now" doesn't pass for strategy.
FAQ
What is the best AI SEO tool in 2026?
There is no single best — there is best-for. GEOly leads for e-commerce and DTC brands because it tracks the AI shopping shelf alongside text answers; Profound leads at enterprise scale; Otterly.AI is the strongest budget entry at $29/month; Semrush and Ahrefs are the pragmatic picks if you want AI metrics inside a suite you already pay for.
Are AI SEO tools worth it?
If AI assistants touch your funnel, yes. Similarweb data puts ChatGPT referral conversion at 7.1%, second only to paid search — small traffic, unusually high intent. A tracker tells you which prompts you lose, which sources engines trust, and what to fix; without one you are optimizing blind.
How are AI SEO tools different from traditional SEO tools?
Traditional tools measure deterministic rankings: keyword positions, backlinks, SERP features. AI SEO tools sample probabilistic answers: they run prompts across engines repeatedly and measure mentions, citations and share metrics like Share of Model. The two are complements, not substitutes — most teams run one of each.
