Updated
Updated What changed on
Fact-checked Every vendor price, plan limit and engine list was re-checked on the vendor's own pages on 14 October 2026 with two separate fetches. Where a price only appears once the page runs in a browser (Rankscale, Peec and Semrush's AI toolkit), one fetch could read it. Google's guidance on structured data for AI features and the Ahrefs JSON-LD test were checked the same day, and the currency notes record what a UK office connection was shown. Funding lines marked "as of July 2026" and the May 2026 AI-engine test were not re-run.
- Profound has dropped its $99 Starter and $399 Growth plans, so brands now get a free 7-day trial or a custom Enterprise contract.
- Rankability now starts at $97 a month for 100 tracked AI queries across 11 engines, replacing the credit-based $99 Starter and the $799 Agency plan.
- AIClicks now charges extra for Claude, Perplexity, Grok and DeepSeek on Starter and Pro, and Nightwatch Starter is EUR 99 billed monthly, with EUR 79 the yearly rate.
- Ahrefs Brand Radar now prices its AI index at $199 per platform or $699 for all on its pricing page, has paused new Grok data and tracks Claude on custom prompts.
- Semrush still sells a standalone AI Visibility Toolkit at $99 a month per domain, Sitecore now owns Scrunch, and HubSpot's grader is called AI Search Grader again.
- Corrected the description of my own free checker: it scores structural readiness and does not poll AI engines with UK prompts.
- Removed schema from the list of AI citation levers: Google says structured data is not required for its AI features, and Ahrefs' May 2026 test found no citation lift from adding JSON-LD in AI Mode or ChatGPT.
- The cheapest tracker tier is now $17 to $29 a month (Rankscale Essentials billed yearly, Otterly Lite), not $20 to $30.
- Corrected the currency note: from a UK connection, SE Ranking and Semrush showed pounds and Ahrefs' Brand Radar page showed euros, so not every vendor prices in US dollars.
- Replaced the "UK-aware prompts" hero label with "UK market notes", since nothing on this page runs UK prompts.
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 $17 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 $180M Series D at a $1.8B valuation in September 2026, co-led by Sequoia and Kleiner Perkins, following a $96M Series C at $1B led by Lightspeed in February 2026. Peec said in an October 2026 press release that it has raised $40M, though its own website still says about $29M, and its CEO told TechCrunch in November 2025 that the valuation had passed $100M. Scrunch raised a $15M Series A led by Decibel with Mayfield and Homebrew, then Sitecore bought it in June 2026. And Adobe completed its acquisition of Semrush in April 2026, a deal Adobe valued at about $1.9B when it announced it in November 2025. The category is being financed like it matters.
- Established SEO suites added AI modules, then changed how they sell them. Ahrefs Brand Radar became a standalone tool in November 2025, and SE Ranking sells an AI Search Toolkit on top of its plans. None are best-in-class for AI alone, but the bundling tilts the decision when the suite is already on the procurement spreadsheet.
- Vendors keep renaming, repackaging and changing hands, which is why most comparison pages are now wrong. Since July alone, Profound withdrew its $99 and $399 self-serve plans, Rankability swapped credits for tracked queries, and HubSpot's AEO Grader went back to its old name, AI Search Grader. Semrush puts AI visibility in its Semrush One plans but also sells a standalone AI Visibility Toolkit at $99/mo per domain. SE Ranking's tracker became the AI Search Toolkit, with a separate product called SE Visible. Surfer now trades as Positive Surfer under Positive Group.
- AIClicks has grown its engine pool to 13, but on Starter ($59/mo) and Pro you choose from ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot, AI Overviews and AI Mode, and Claude, Perplexity, Grok and DeepSeek cost extra. Ahrefs added Grok in April 2026, but its help centre now says new Grok data collection is paused; Claude is available on custom prompts instead.
- HubSpot's paid AEO product costs $50/mo, or $45 on annual billing, for 25 prompts, with a 28-day trial and no HubSpot subscription required. It covers three engines and measures brand perception rather than live citations.
The 30-second pick
Want broad engine coverage at mid-market price, or agency reporting on AI plus classic SEO together: Rankability ($97/mo, 11 engines on every tier). Daily tracking of AI Overviews, AI Mode and ChatGPT on a monthly plan: AIClicks ($59/mo). Enterprise with budget for synthetic personas and CDN data: Profound (custom pricing only). Citations rather than mentions: Scrunch AI. Solo founder cheapest credible option: Rankscale ($17/mo, yearly only) or Otterly Lite ($29/mo). Start with a free reading: the visibility checker here gives you a structural baseline score.
Why rank and citation are now separate measurements
of URLs cited in Google AI Overviews appeared in the first 10 results blocks for that query. Ahrefs counts blocks, not organic results, so this is not the same as ranking in the top 10.
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 went to a brand cited inside an AI Overview than to one that was not, in Seer's 2025 study (data to September 2025). Treat it as dated: Seer's April 2026 update says cited brands saw lower click-through as impressions more than doubled while clicks stayed flat.
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, so the data is now more than 12 months old. 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 AI Search 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 $17-$29 tier works (Rankscale Essentials billed yearly, Otterly Lite). 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, AI Mode and Gemini on the Google side, plus the chat clients Perplexity, Claude, ChatGPT, Copilot and Grok.
- Run frequency. AIClicks, Peec, Otterly, Rankability, SE Ranking and Semrush all run prompts daily on their entry tiers. Daily runs do not mean daily decisions: for most brands what genuinely works is reviewing the trend fortnightly, 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 re-checked against live vendor pages on 14 October 2026.
- Below $50/mo: Rankscale Essentials ($17, yearly only, shown only 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, 25 prompts), AIClicks Starter ($59, 30 prompts), SE Ranking AI add-on ($89 on top of Core), Peec Starter ($95, 50 prompts), Rankability Starter ($97, 100 queries across 11 engines), Nightwatch Starter (EUR 99 monthly or EUR 79 billed yearly, 50 prompts across six engines), Semrush AI Visibility Toolkit ($99 per domain billed annually, 25 prompts), Rankscale Pro ($99). This is where most in-house mid-market teams land.
- $150-$500/mo serious tier: Semrush Starter ($165.17 billed annually), Otterly Standard ($189, 100 prompts), AIClicks Pro ($189, 150 prompts), Ahrefs Brand Radar ($199 per AI platform), Peec Pro ($245, 150 prompts), Scrunch Core ($250 per brand, 125 prompts), Rankability Agency ($297, 300 queries), Goodie Core ($354 monthly or $295 billed annually, five engines). Citation depth, multi-brand and sentiment with quotes live up here.
- $500+/mo enterprise: AIClicks Business ($499), Ahrefs Brand Radar all platforms ($699), Rankscale Enterprise ($780), Profound Enterprise and BrandLight (both custom, neither published). Pay this when AI visibility is a board-level metric.
Every figure above was re-checked against the vendor's live pricing page on 14 October 2026. The method and the wider dataset are in the pricing audit.
Two things worth knowing before you budget from any list like this. Several trackers show prices in the visitor's local currency, so UK readers may see pounds or euros. On 14 October 2026, from a UK connection, SE Ranking and Semrush showed pounds, Ahrefs' Brand Radar page showed euros, and Nightwatch prices in euros. Others quote US dollars, where UK buyers carry the exchange rate on top. And billing periods are not comparable: the Semrush figures here are billed annually and Rankscale's cheapest plan is yearly only, while Peec, AIClicks, Rankability, Scrunch and Nightwatch quote monthly prices.
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 pointed users in May 2026
In May 2026 I asked Claude, Perplexity and Gemini the literal question "what are the best AI search rank trackers in 2026" with web search enabled. This test was not re-run in October, so treat it as a dated sample. The pattern across all three then:
- 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 recommended in that sample - which means they had 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 $97/mo (Starter, billed monthly, 100 tracked AI queries); $970 a year on annual billing | Agencies wanting AI and classic SEO in one weekly client report |
| Profound | Enterprise prompt monitoring | Brands: free 7-day trial, then Enterprise (custom). Agencies: $99/mo plus $399/mo per client workspace | Enterprise teams running AI visibility as a dedicated workstream |
| Peec AI | Dedicated AI visibility | From $95/mo (Starter, monthly); $80/mo billed annually | 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. A UK connection is shown £69 and £95 | SEO teams already inside SE Ranking who want AIO source-URL detection |
| Scrunch AI | Citation-first AI tracker | From $250/mo per brand (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) | Daily Google AI and ChatGPT tracking at a low entry price, with room to add engines later |
| Ahrefs Brand Radar | SEO suite with AI module | Paid add-on: $199/mo per AI platform or $699/mo for all (£159 and £560 in Ahrefs' own price list). Custom prompt packages from $50/mo | 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 50 daily AI prompts. Standalone AI Visibility Toolkit $99/mo per domain, billed annually | Teams that want a full SEO suite with AI signals as one layer |
| Nightwatch | Hybrid SEO + AI tracker | From EUR 99/mo (Starter, billed monthly) or EUR 79/mo billed yearly | 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 | $17/mo Essentials (yearly only, shown in the compare table only); $99/mo Pro is the lowest tier card | Solo SEOs and lean teams testing page-level AI citation on a tight budget |
| HubSpot AI Search Grader | Free baseline | Free; paid HubSpot AEO $50/mo ($45 billed annually) for 25 prompts, 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 free structural first reading before committing to any paid tracker |
1Rankability
From $97/mo (Starter, billed monthly, 100 tracked AI queries); $970 a year on annual billingBest for: Agencies wanting AI and classic SEO in one weekly client report
Unlimited clients, team members, API and MCP access on every tier, with plans separated by tracked AI queries and content projects rather than locked features. That is unusually agency-friendly. Rankability dropped its credit system after July: Starter now tracks 100 AI queries daily, Agency 300 at $297 and Agency Pro 500 at $497. Every tier covers the same 11 platforms, including Claude, Grok and Copilot, which several trackers on this list keep for enterprise or charge extra for. The 7-day trial needs a card. The pricing page has changed at least once since July, so treat these figures as a 14 October 2026 snapshot.
2Profound
Brands: free 7-day trial, then Enterprise (custom). Agencies: $99/mo plus $399/mo per client workspaceBest 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. Profound has removed the $99 Starter and $399 Growth plans it listed in July, so brands now choose between a free trial and a custom Enterprise contract. The trial runs 50 prompts daily for 7 days on ChatGPT, Gemini and AI Overviews, but you cannot edit the prompts and there is no history, export or API. Agencies get a separate route: $99/mo for Agency Growth plus $399/mo per client workspace, which covers ChatGPT, Perplexity and AI Overviews at 100 prompts daily.
3Peec AI
From $95/mo (Starter, monthly); $80/mo billed annuallyBest 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. The FAQ says countries and languages cost nothing extra, but the plan table caps Starter at one country and Pro at three, so in practice more markets means a higher tier. 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 on monthly billing ($30, $70 and $140 on annual). Perplexity has left the included choice since July, so tracking it now means paying for an extra model.
4SE Ranking AI Search Toolkit
$89/mo add-on ($71.20 annual) on top of Core at $129/mo monthly. A UK connection is shown £69 and £95Best 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 on the entry add-on package, 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, which includes 20 AI prompts a day, plus five free public checks a day. Renamed from AI Visibility Tracker. SE Ranking also sells SE Visible as a standalone product, from $99/mo for 200 prompts across five engines.
5Scrunch AI
From $250/mo per brand (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, 1 persona, 1 language, 5 competitors and 5 user licences, and there is a 7-day free trial. API, Looker Studio and MCP access are Enterprise only, and so is the annual discount. Sitecore bought Scrunch in June 2026, so check how the roadmap and contract terms sit under the new owner before signing anything long.
6AIClicks Rank Tracker
From $59/mo (Starter, 30 prompts, 3 engines)Best for: Daily Google AI and ChatGPT tracking at a low entry price, with room to add engines later
Daily refresh on every self-serve tier, with Google AI Mode and AI Overviews in the included choice from $59. The engine pool grew from nine to 13 after July, adding Naver AI, Mistral, Qwen and Meta. The catch is what the entry tiers include. The pricing page marks Claude, Perplexity, Grok and DeepSeek as additional cost on Starter and Pro, and does not publish the add-on prices. Business at $499 is the tier that lets you pick six from the full pool. 3-day free trial on every plan. Reporting is functional rather than polished.
7Ahrefs Brand Radar
Paid add-on: $199/mo per AI platform or $699/mo for all (£159 and £560 in Ahrefs' own price list). Custom prompt packages from $50/moBest 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 prompt index the product page puts at 475M+ (an Ahrefs help article says 405+ million). Strong on share of voice across the web, which is upstream of future citations. Weak on prompt-level analytics. Custom prompt tracking is metered in checks rather than prompts: packages start at $50/mo for 2,500 checks, and Claude, added in July 2026, uses 8 checks per update. The July mismatch between two Ahrefs pages has gone: both now price the index per platform or for all platforms. The pricing page shows $199 and $699, while the Brand Radar product page served euros (EUR 179 and EUR 654) to a UK connection on 14 October 2026.
8Semrush (AI features in Semrush One)
From $117.33/mo (SEO plan, billed annually). Starter at $165.17/mo carries 50 daily AI prompts. Standalone AI Visibility Toolkit $99/mo per domain, billed annuallyBest for: Teams that want a full SEO suite with AI signals as one layer
AI visibility, sentiment and prompt tracking are plan features under Semrush One. Starter tracks 50 prompts daily and 1 domain; Pro+ doubles that to 100 and Advanced to 200. Semrush also sells a standalone AI Visibility Toolkit at $99/mo per domain billed annually, with 25 daily prompts, extra prompts at $60 per 50 and no free trial. Claude and Grok are not named on the rendered pricing pages I checked on 14 October 2026, so confirm engine coverage in writing if you need them. 7-day trial on the main plans plus a permanent free tier.
9Nightwatch
From EUR 99/mo (Starter, billed monthly) or EUR 79/mo billed yearlyBest for: Marketing teams wanting AI plus traditional rank tracking on one bill
Six AI engines, Claude included, on every tier. Starter gives 50 AI prompts and 1,500 AI answers a month across all six, plus 500 keywords, 5 websites and rank tracking on Google, YouTube, Bing, Yahoo, DuckDuckGo and Maps. Professional is EUR 199 a month (EUR 159 billed yearly) for 150 prompts and 25 websites. 107,000+ locations for local tracking. 14-day trial with no card, though it auto-bills afterwards unless cancelled. Priced in euros, not dollars. Note that EUR 79 is the yearly-billing rate; billed monthly, Starter is EUR 99.
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
$17/mo Essentials (yearly only, shown in the compare table only); $99/mo Pro is the lowest tier cardBest for: Solo SEOs and lean teams testing page-level AI citation on a tight budget
The longest named engine list here, and like Rankability and Nightwatch it does not gate engines by tier. Credit-based, and the engine mix decides how far credits go: ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and AI Mode cost 0.25 credits a run, DeepSeek 1, Claude 2 and Meta Muse Spark 4. Pro gives 1,200 credits and up to 4,800 AI answers; a new Pro+ tier at $229 gives 3,000 credits and REST API access. Page-level citation tracking, query fan-out and sources-box analysis are the differentiators. One warning: Essentials is not shown as a tier card, the compare table says $17/mo yearly only while the page's own structured data lists a $20 monthly Essentials offer, and its limits do not display properly.
12HubSpot AI Search Grader
Free; paid HubSpot AEO $50/mo ($45 billed annually) for 25 prompts, with no HubSpot subscription requiredBest for: First-time sense-check on brand perception before opening a budget
HubSpot has gone back to the AI Search Grader name, and the old AEO Grader address now redirects to it. 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 short form is required for the full results. The paid HubSpot AEO product has a 28-day trial with no card.
13AI Search Visibility (this site, free)
FreeBest for: A free structural first reading before committing to any paid tracker
A free readiness score across six dimensions, with no account needed. It is not a live citation count: it does not poll ChatGPT, Perplexity or Gemini. Instead it builds up to six test queries from your brand and page headings, with links to run them yourself in Perplexity, ChatGPT and Google AI Mode. 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 (its AccuLLM prompt tracker is now a separately priced product, from $206/mo billed yearly for 100 prompts across ChatGPT, Perplexity, AI Overviews and AI Mode, which is steep next to the tools above), Knowatoa (interesting on sentiment but limited reviews to verify), Brand24 (a brand-mention tool with AI visibility sold as an add-on), Writesonic GEO (now leads with AI search tracking on every tier, but the $79/mo Starter, billed annually, covers three engines and Perplexity is Enterprise only), AI Rank Checker (Cognizo bought it and retired the pay-as-you-go wallet, so it now starts at $499/mo). 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 October 2026: entry-level pricing sits around $17 to $59 per month (Rankscale Essentials on yearly billing, Otterly Lite, AIClicks Starter). Mid-market working pricing is $89 to $189 per month (SE Ranking AI add-on, Peec Starter, Rankability Starter, Otterly Standard, AIClicks Pro). Serious tiers run $199 to $499 (Ahrefs Brand Radar per platform, Scrunch Core, AIClicks Business), and among the 13 picks here the top published tiers reach $699 for Ahrefs Brand Radar across all platforms and $780 for Rankscale Enterprise. Profound no longer publishes a paid price for brands: you get a free trial or a custom Enterprise contract. The big trap is entry-tier limits, and they are usually about engines rather than prompts. AIClicks Starter at $59 charges extra for Claude, Perplexity and Grok. 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, Google AI Mode, Gemini, 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 and citation density matter to both; Google says structured data is not required for its AI features, though it still helps rich-result eligibility) 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?
Few of the vendor pages I checked say which locale their default prompts use, so set the market yourself. Otterly covers 50+ countries on every tier and Nightwatch claims 107,000+ locations across 190+ countries, which is the widest here. Peec's FAQ says countries cost nothing extra, but Starter covers one country and Pro three, so in practice you add markets by moving up a tier. SE Ranking's standalone SE Visible product covers seven markets, including the UK. 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 scores how ready your page is to be cited; it does not run UK-locale prompts against the engines.
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 (content depth, third-party citations) until you can see at least occasional mentions, then bring in tracking. In Ahrefs' May 2026 test, adding JSON-LD gave no citation lift in AI Mode or ChatGPT. A free quarterly sample beats a paid tool that only ever reports zero.
Jason Burns
Independent UK SEO, GEO and AI consultant. In search since 2007. Portfolio includes 3M, BlackRock, Unilever and E.ON. Owner of SEO Moves Ltd since 2014.
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