Updated
Updated What changed on
- Added the Ahrefs March 2026 study showing the share of AI Overview citations that also rank in the Google top 10 has fallen from 76% to 38%.
- Added the cross-platform overlap figure, which is the clearest argument for tracking citations separately from rankings.
AI search rank trackers, tested from a UK consultant perspective.
Two years ago this category did not exist. Today over a dozen vendors will sell you a dashboard that watches your brand inside large-language-model answers, with prices spanning from $20 a month to north of $700 for what is sometimes the same underlying signal. This list cuts through the marketing layer - what each one actually does under the bonnet, the buyer it genuinely fits, and where free quarterly sampling beats the paid product outright.
- Funding has poured in. Profound raised a $96M Series C at a $1B valuation led by Lightspeed in February 2026, after a $35M Sequoia-led Series B, taking it to roughly $154.5M. Peec has raised $29M and told TechCrunch its valuation passed $100M inside its first year. Scrunch raised a $15M Series A led by Decibel with Mayfield and Homebrew. And Adobe completed its acquisition of Semrush in April 2026, at roughly $1.9B. The category is being financed like it matters.
- Established SEO suites added AI modules, then changed how they sell them. Ahrefs Brand Radar and SE Ranking's AI Search Toolkit both shipped this year. None are best-in-class for AI alone, but the bundling tilts the decision when the suite is already on the procurement spreadsheet.
- Four vendors renamed or repackaged mid-year, which is why most comparison pages are now wrong. Semrush retired the standalone AI Toolkit and folded AI visibility into plan pricing under Semrush One, with the old add-on URL now a hard 404. SE Ranking's tracker became the AI Search Toolkit and spun out a separate product called SE Visible. HubSpot's AI Search Grader became the AEO Grader. Surfer became Positive Surfer under Positive Group.
- AIClicks now offers nine engines including Google AI Mode, Grok and DeepSeek, though you only select three at $59/mo. Ahrefs added Grok tracking with 12.7M monthly prompts indexed.
- HubSpot's paid AEO product sits at $50/mo with no HubSpot subscription required, which is the cheapest continuous monitoring in the category. It covers three engines and measures brand perception rather than live citations.
The 30-second pick
Want broad engine coverage at mid-market price: AIClicks ($59/mo). Agency reporting on AI plus classic SEO together: Rankability ($79/mo). Enterprise with budget for synthetic personas and CDN data: Profound. Citations rather than mentions: Scrunch AI. Solo founder cheapest credible option: Rankscale ($20/mo) or Otterly Lite ($29/mo). Start with a free reading: the UK visibility checker here returns a baseline score in under two minutes.
Why rank and citation are now separate measurements
of pages cited in Google AI Overviews also rank in the top 10 for that query.
How it was measured: 863,000 keyword SERPs and 4 million AI Overview URLs. Ahrefs measures the top 10 as blocks, counting ads, featured snippets and video packs as separate blocks.
of links cited by ChatGPT, Gemini and Copilot appear in Google's top 10 for the same prompt. Perplexity is the outlier at closer to one in three.
How it was measured: 15,000 prompts. This is 2025 data and has not been re-run, so treat it as directional rather than current.
more organic clicks go to a brand cited inside an AI Overview than to one that is not cited on the same query.
How it was measured: 3,119 search terms across 42 client organisations, 25.1M organic and 1.1M paid impressions, June 2024 to September 2025. Informational and educational queries only, which are the ones most exposed to AI Overviews, so this is not a whole-market figure. In absolute terms it is 0.70% against 0.52%. Paid click-through was 91% higher when cited.
The category is three things in a trench coat
The biggest mistake when comparing AI rank trackers is treating them as one category. They are not. They split into three families that solve different problems and price accordingly.
Dedicated AI visibility
Profound, Peec AI, Scrunch, AIClicks, Otterly, Rankscale
Pure-play LLM and answer-engine tracking. Pick when AI is its own workstream.
SEO suite with AI module
SE Ranking AI Search Toolkit, Ahrefs Brand Radar, Semrush One
Bolt-on to an existing rank tracker. Pick when SEO is the larger budget and AI is a layer.
Hybrid SEO + AI
Rankability, Nightwatch
Reports both signals in a single dashboard. Pick when the same team owns both.
Free baseline
HubSpot Grader, this site's tool
A one-shot reading. Run it before deciding whether ongoing monitoring earns its place at all.
What you are actually measuring
The marketing copy across these tools blurs five different signals together. Knowing which one matters to your team is the difference between paying $30/mo and $300/mo.
- Mentions. Did the AI engine name your brand in the answer? Cheapest signal to capture. Almost every tool offers this.
- Citations. Did the engine link to one of your URLs as a source? More valuable, fewer tools do it well (Scrunch, SE Ranking, Rankability).
- Source-URL detection. Which exact page on your site got pulled in? The cited URL is the actionable handle - it tells your content team what to refresh. Scrunch and SE Ranking lead here.
- Share of voice. Of relevant AI answers in your category, what percentage mention you vs each competitor? Ahrefs, Peec and Rankability all surface this.
- Sentiment. Is the mention framed as "the leading" or "a cheaper alternative"? Peec, Scrunch, Rankscale and Nightwatch invest most here. HubSpot's AEO Grader weights sentiment at 40 out of 100, more than any other single factor it scores.
If you only care about the first signal, the $20-$30 tier works. If you need the cited URL by name (to know which page to fix), step up to a citation-aware tool. If you need sentiment with example quotes for client reporting, plan for the $200+/mo tier.
How AI rank tracking actually runs under the bonnet
- Prompt set. You define (or the tool suggests) 25 to 500 prompts that represent how your buyers ask AI. Engine coverage spans AI Overviews and Gemini AI Mode on the Google side, plus the chat clients Perplexity, Claude, ChatGPT, Copilot and Grok.
- Run frequency. Daily on enterprise tiers, weekly or fortnightly at mid-market. For most brands what genuinely works is a fortnightly auto-run with one manual deep-dive monthly.
- Parsing. Each answer is parsed for brand mentions, competitor mentions, cited URLs, sentiment markers, position-in-answer. Better tools run the same prompt multiple times per check and aggregate to smooth variance.
- Persona vs real-engine. Profound and Scrunch use synthetic-persona prompts to simulate buyer journeys. SE Ranking, Ahrefs and most others hit the real engine APIs or UIs directly.
- Output. Visibility score, share of voice, citation count, sentiment trendline, list of cited URLs. The honest dashboards also show example quotes - the rest just give you a number.
What the pricing actually buys you
Pricing pages all show entry-tier numbers. The working tier, meaning the plan you need to actually use the tool, is usually one or two steps up. Prices below were checked against live vendor pages on 20 July 2026.
- Below $50/mo: Rankscale Essentials ($20, hidden in their compare table), Otterly Lite ($29, 15 prompts). Both constrain real work. Useful for solo testing.
- $50-$150/mo working tier: HubSpot AEO ($50), AIClicks Starter ($59, 30 prompts), Nightwatch Starter (EUR 79, 50 prompts across six engines), SE Ranking AI add-on ($89 on top of Core), Peec Starter ($95, 50 prompts), Profound Starter ($99, ChatGPT only), Rankability Starter ($99). This is where most in-house mid-market teams land.
- $150-$500/mo serious tier: Semrush Starter ($165.17), Otterly Standard ($189, 100 prompts), AIClicks Pro ($189, 150 prompts), Ahrefs Brand Radar ($199 to $398 depending which Ahrefs page you read), Scrunch Core ($250, 125 prompts), Profound Growth ($399, 100 prompts and three engines), Goodie Explorer ($399). Citation depth, multi-brand and sentiment with quotes live up here.
- $500+/mo enterprise: AIClicks Business ($499), Ahrefs Brand Radar all-platforms ($699), Rankability Agency ($799), Profound Enterprise and BrandLight (both custom, neither published). Pay this when AI visibility is a board-level metric.
Every figure above was checked against the vendor's live pricing page on 20 July 2026. The method, the full 18-tool dataset and the three vendors whose own pages cannot be used to work out a price are in the pricing audit.
Two things worth knowing before you budget from any list like this. Every vendor except Nightwatch prices in US dollars, so UK buyers carry the exchange rate on top. And billing periods are not comparable: Profound, Rankability and Positive Surfer publish annual-billed figures only, while Peec, AIClicks and Scrunch quote monthly.
The thing nobody says out loud: Most agencies running GEO programmes for small UK B2B clients do not yet need a paid tracker. The signal moves slowly, the prompts that matter for a single niche brand are few enough to track manually in a spreadsheet on a fortnightly cadence. A paid tracker is genuinely useful when you have 15+ prompts you care about across 3+ engines, or when you are reporting to a board that wants a chart. Below that volume, $59/mo buys you a chart, not insight.
Where the AI engines themselves currently point users
I asked Claude, Perplexity and Gemini the literal question "what are the best AI search rank trackers in 2026" with web search enabled. The pattern across all three:
- Rankability appears in every engine's answer, usually as "best for agencies".
- Profound, Peec AI and Scrunch are the consistent enterprise picks.
- SE Ranking shows up specifically for AI Overview tracking inside a rank-tracker workflow.
- Otterly and Nightwatch are named as the affordable options.
- AIClicks and Rankscale get cited less often but appear when "budget" or "ChatGPT specifically" is in the prompt.
If you are tracking your own brand's appearance in AI engines, the tools above are the ones AI engines themselves currently recommend - which means they have done the GEO work to be recommended. That alone is worth noticing.
13 AI rank trackers, grouped by buyer fit.
Ordered by fit, not funding or hype. Each row names the buyer the tool actually serves.
| Tool | Category | Pricing | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|
| Rankability | Hybrid SEO + AI tracker | From $99/mo (Starter, billed annually, 10,000 credits) | Agencies wanting AI and classic SEO in one weekly client report |
| Profound | Enterprise prompt monitoring | $99/mo Starter, $399/mo Growth, Enterprise custom (all billed yearly) | Enterprise teams running AI visibility as a dedicated workstream |
| Peec AI | Dedicated AI visibility | From $95/mo (Starter, monthly) | Lean B2B/SaaS marketing teams that want clean dashboards over deep analytics |
| SE Ranking AI Search Toolkit | SEO suite with AI module | $89/mo add-on ($71.20 annual) on top of Core at $129/mo monthly | SEO teams already inside SE Ranking who want AIO source-URL detection |
| Scrunch AI | Citation-first AI tracker | From $250/mo (Core, 125 prompts) to Enterprise | Content and SEO teams optimising for citations rather than mentions |
| AIClicks Rank Tracker | Dedicated AI visibility | From $59/mo (Starter, 30 prompts, 3 engines) | Widest engine pool at mid-market price without an enterprise contract |
| Ahrefs Brand Radar | SEO suite with AI module | Paid add-on. Two live Ahrefs pages disagree: from $199/mo on the pricing page, $398/mo or $699/mo on the product page | Teams already on Ahrefs that want brand monitoring to support AI work |
| Semrush (AI features in Semrush One) | SEO suite with AI module | From $117.33/mo (SEO plan, billed annually). Starter at $165.17/mo carries the AI prompt tracking | Teams that want a full SEO suite with AI signals as one layer |
| Nightwatch | Hybrid SEO + AI tracker | From EUR 79/mo (Starter, monthly) | Marketing teams wanting AI plus traditional rank tracking on one bill |
| Otterly.AI | Dedicated AI visibility | $29/mo entry (Lite, 15 prompts); $25/mo on annual | Founders, solo consultants and small agencies doing their own GEO tracking |
| Rankscale AI | Dedicated AI visibility | $20/mo Essentials (hidden in the compare table); $99/mo Pro is the lowest tier actually shown | Solo SEOs and lean teams testing page-level AI citation on a tight budget |
| HubSpot AEO Grader | Free baseline | Free; paid HubSpot AEO from $50/mo with no HubSpot subscription required | First-time sense-check on brand perception before opening a budget |
| AI Search Visibility (this site, free) | Free baseline | Free | A UK-context first reading before committing to any paid tracker |
1Rankability
From $99/mo (Starter, billed annually, 10,000 credits)Best for: Agencies wanting AI and classic SEO in one weekly client report
Unlimited clients and unlimited users on every tier, with plans separated only by credit volume rather than locked features. That is unusually agency-friendly. Credits roll over one billing cycle. The catch is transparency: the pricing page does not publish which AI engines are tracked, and gives no prompt-to-credit conversion, so you cannot work out what 10,000 credits buys in AI visibility terms before you pay.
2Profound
$99/mo Starter, $399/mo Growth, Enterprise custom (all billed yearly)Best for: Enterprise teams running AI visibility as a dedicated workstream
Synthetic-persona prompt tracking, CDN log integration for bot-to-human attribution, prompt-volume research at scale. Starter gives 50 prompts and 1,500 responses a month but covers ChatGPT alone, so the tier you actually need is Growth at $399 for 100 prompts, 9,000 responses and three engines. Their own FAQ still references a "Lite" plan that no longer appears in the tier list. API access is Enterprise only.
3Peec AI
From $95/mo (Starter, monthly)Best for: Lean B2B/SaaS marketing teams that want clean dashboards over deep analytics
Starter covers 50 prompts, 1 project and 1 country with daily tracking and unlimited users, which is genuinely useful for agencies. Countries and languages cost nothing extra, so multi-market tracking is cheap here. The cost to watch is engines: each model beyond your three is a separate charge at +$35/mo on Starter, +$85 on Pro and +$165 on Advanced.
4SE Ranking AI Search Toolkit
$89/mo add-on ($71.20 annual) on top of Core at $129/mo monthlyBest for: SEO teams already inside SE Ranking who want AIO source-URL detection
Best prompt volume per pound in this list once you are already a customer: 200 prompts across five engines on the add-on, or 100 prompts tracked daily on Core itself. Keyword-level AI Overview appearance with the exact cited URL is the headline feature. 14-day trial with no card, plus five free public checks a day without an account. Renamed from AI Visibility Tracker, and SE Ranking has since spun out a separate product called SE Visible.
5Scrunch AI
From $250/mo (Core, 125 prompts) to EnterpriseBest for: Content and SEO teams optimising for citations rather than mentions
The right tool when the question is "which URLs and publishers does AI cite for our category" rather than "are we mentioned at all". Core includes 5 site audits a month, 3 personas, 5 competitors and 2 languages, and there is a 7-day self-serve trial. API, Looker Studio and MCP access are Enterprise only. The site is running a "next chapter" announcement, so check the roadmap before signing anything annual.
6AIClicks Rank Tracker
From $59/mo (Starter, 30 prompts, 3 engines)Best for: Widest engine pool at mid-market price without an enterprise contract
The best price-to-engine-coverage ratio here and one of the few trackers at this tier covering both Google AI Mode and Grok. Daily refresh on every self-serve tier, which several pricier tools do not offer. 3-day trial with no card. Reporting is functional rather than polished. Note that engine count is capped per tier, so a broad set means Business at $499, not Starter.
7Ahrefs Brand Radar
Paid add-on. Two live Ahrefs pages disagree: from $199/mo on the pricing page, $398/mo or $699/mo on the product pageBest for: Teams already on Ahrefs that want brand monitoring to support AI work
Less a dedicated tracker and more a brand-mention layer, built on a 403M prompt index. Strong on share of voice across the web, which is upstream of future citations. Weak on prompt-level analytics, and custom prompt tracking is metered in checks rather than prompts. Get the price in writing: the $199 and $398/$699 figures were both live on the same day. There is no free trial.
8Semrush (AI features in Semrush One)
From $117.33/mo (SEO plan, billed annually). Starter at $165.17/mo carries the AI prompt trackingBest for: Teams that want a full SEO suite with AI signals as one layer
The standalone AI Toolkit add-on no longer exists. AI visibility, sentiment and prompt tracking are now plan features under Semrush One, and the old add-on URL is a hard 404. Any comparison still quoting an AI Toolkit price is out of date. Starter tracks 50 prompts daily and 1 domain; Pro+ doubles that to 100 and Advanced to 200. Broad engine list including Claude and Grok, which most dedicated trackers gate behind enterprise. 7-day trial plus a permanent free tier.
9Nightwatch
From EUR 79/mo (Starter, monthly)Best for: Marketing teams wanting AI plus traditional rank tracking on one bill
The best engine coverage per pound in this list. Starter gives 50 AI prompts across all six engines plus 500 keywords, 5 websites and daily rank tracking on Google, YouTube, Bing, Yahoo, DuckDuckGo and Maps. Citation Intelligence and Prompt Research are new. 107,000+ locations for local tracking. 14-day full-feature trial with no card, though it auto-bills afterwards unless cancelled. Priced in euros, not dollars.
10Otterly.AI
$29/mo entry (Lite, 15 prompts); $25/mo on annualBest for: Founders, solo consultants and small agencies doing their own GEO tracking
Cheapest headline price in the category, with 1,000 GEO URL audits a month on Lite and 50+ countries on every tier. The engine add-ons are where it gets expensive: AI Mode and Gemini are $9/mo each on Lite and Claude is $29, so a full set is roughly $76/mo rather than $29. 15 prompts goes quickly, and Standard at $189/mo for 100 prompts is the real working tier.
11Rankscale AI
$20/mo Essentials (hidden in the compare table); $99/mo Pro is the lowest tier actually shownBest for: Solo SEOs and lean teams testing page-level AI citation on a tight budget
The widest engine coverage in this list and the only one that does not gate engines by tier. Credit-based, at roughly 0.25 credits per engine per prompt, with Pro giving 1,200 credits and up to 4,800 AI responses. Page-level citation tracking, query fan-out and sources-box analysis are the differentiators. Two warnings: the $20 Essentials plan is not shown as a tier card and is only reachable via the compare table, and its stated limits contradict themselves between the desktop and mobile views.
12HubSpot AEO Grader
Free; paid HubSpot AEO from $50/mo with no HubSpot subscription requiredBest for: First-time sense-check on brand perception before opening a budget
Renamed from AI Search Grader, so old links now redirect. Scores out of 100 across five weighted dimensions: sentiment 40, presence quality 20, brand recognition 20, share of voice 10, market competition 10. Worth understanding what that measures: it reads what models already believe about your brand, largely from training data, rather than tracking live citations. It is not a substitute for the trackers above. Results in under two minutes, but a form fill is required.
13AI Search Visibility (this site, free)
FreeBest for: A UK-context first reading before committing to any paid tracker
Built on this site with UK-context prompts as the default rather than US, because every paid tool in this category defaults to US locale prompt sets. Use it once as a sense-check, then decide whether ongoing paid tracking pays off or whether quarterly manual sampling suits the stage you are at.
A note on omissions
Tools deliberately left off this list: AccuRanker (AI is a thin layer on a rank tracker, not the focus), Knowatoa (interesting on sentiment but limited reviews to verify), Brand24 (a brand-mention tool with AI as add-on), Writesonic GEO (mostly a content tool with tracking attached), AI Rank Checker (pay-as-you-go model that suits some teams but lacks the analytics of the listed alternatives). Not bad tools, they just did not earn a recommendation slot for the typical UK B2B use case this list serves.
One correction worth making: Frase belongs in the conversation on price. Its AI Visibility module includes 50 tracked prompts on the $39/mo Starter plan, which undercuts every dedicated tracker at the same prompt count. It only covers ChatGPT and Google AI at that tier, and it is a content platform first, so it sits on the GEO tools list rather than here. If prompt count matters more to you than engine breadth, look at it.
Common doubts on tracker pricing and fit.
How does an AI rank tracker differ from a brand mention tool?
An AI rank tracker runs a fixed set of prompts against LLMs and AI engines on a schedule and records whether your brand is named in the answer, where it sits in the answer, and which URLs the engine cited. A brand mention tool scans web content (forums, news, reviews) for mentions of your brand. The two overlap in tools like Ahrefs Brand Radar that try to do both, but the underlying signals are different. Mention tools tell you what people are saying. Rank trackers tell you what the AI is saying on your behalf.
How much do AI search rank trackers actually cost in 2026?
Verified July 2026: entry-level pricing sits around $20-$59/mo (Rankscale Essentials, Otterly Lite, AIClicks Starter). Mid-market working pricing is $89-$189/mo (SE Ranking AI add-on, Peec Starter, Profound Starter, Rankability Starter, Otterly Standard, AIClicks Pro). Serious tiers run $250-$399 (Scrunch Core, Profound Growth), and enterprise climbs past $700 with Ahrefs Brand Radar all-platforms at $699 and Rankability Agency at $799. The big trap is entry-tier limits, and they are usually about engines rather than prompts. Profound Starter at $99 covers ChatGPT alone. Otterly Lite at $29 excludes Gemini, Claude and Google AI Mode unless you pay add-ons.
How does AI search rank tracking actually work?
The tracker sends your prompts to the target answer engines (AI Overviews, Gemini AI Mode, Perplexity, Claude, ChatGPT) on a fixed schedule, captures each answer, and parses whether your brand was named, where in the answer it sat, and which URLs were cited as sources. Stronger tools sample several variants per query and aggregate over time to smooth response variance. Some (Profound, Scrunch) lean on synthetic personas to simulate buyer journeys; others (SE Ranking, Ahrefs) hit the real engine APIs or UIs directly.
Is AI search ranking the same as SEO ranking?
No. SEO ranking is a position on a Google or Bing results page. AI search citation is whether your brand or content appears inside a synthesised AI answer, where it sits in that answer, and which sources the engine cited. The signals overlap (E-E-A-T, schema, citation density all matter to both) but the measurement is fundamentally different. AI engines do not return ranked pages, they return composed answers, and most rank trackers measure mentions and citations rather than positions.
How often should I check AI search rankings?
For most brands, weekly or fortnightly is enough. Daily creates noise because AI outputs vary per session. Monthly is too slow if you are actively running GEO work. Pick a cadence and stick to it - trends matter more than single readings. Enterprise teams running active prompt-testing programmes can justify daily; everyone else should pick a day, set the schedule and resist the urge to refresh.
Why are AI rankings inconsistent between checks?
AI engines produce different outputs for the same prompt depending on session context, model updates, retrieval results and other factors. Variance is real. Better trackers sample several prompt variants per query and aggregate over time to smooth the noise out. One-shot checks are unreliable - which is why the free graders (HubSpot, the visibility checker here) are good for a baseline reading but poor for measuring movement.
Do these tools track UK-specific results?
Most default to US-context prompts. Otterly covers 50+ countries on every tier and Nightwatch claims 107,000+ locations across 190+ countries, which is the widest here. Peec includes countries at no extra cost but Starter covers one country, so you add markets by moving up a tier. SE Ranking supports seven markets. For UK B2B specifically, set prompts that explicitly mention UK context (for example "best plumber in Manchester" rather than "best plumber"). The free AI visibility checker here defaults straight to UK locale, which is rare in the category.
Do I need an AI rank tracker if my brand is too small to be mentioned?
Probably not yet. The honest pattern: if you cannot already point to your brand or category being mentioned in ChatGPT or Perplexity by running the prompts manually, paying a tracker to confirm that monthly does not move work forward. Spend the budget on the underlying GEO work (schema, content depth, third-party citations) until you can see at least occasional mentions, then bring in tracking. A free quarterly sample beats a paid tool that only ever reports zero.
Jason Burns
Independent UK SEO, GEO and AI consultant. 17 years in search. Portfolio includes 3M, BlackRock, Unilever and E.ON. Owner of SEO Moves Ltd since 2014.
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