AI visibility tools compared, and the free stack that covers most of it
What each monitoring tool measures, what it costs, and the four free sources that answer most of the same questions. Including the one thing none of them can do.
The monitoring category grew fast and the products converged. Nearly all of them answer one question: across a list of prompts, on a list of assistants, do you appear, and how has that moved.
That is a useful question. Here is what it costs to have it answered, and what you can answer yourself for nothing.
What the paid tools do
| Tier | Published monthly | What you get |
|---|---|---|
| Entry | $29 | a small number of tracked prompts, one or two assistants |
| Mid | $189 to $295 | more prompts, more assistants, competitor comparison |
| Upper | $489 | wider coverage, reporting, team access |
Larger suites bundle it into existing SEO platforms at around $99 to $199 a month per domain, and specialist vendors run higher with real coverage typically starting a few hundred.
Published prices move and comparison articles disagree with each other constantly, which is itself worth knowing: most roundups of these prices are written by vendors who rank themselves first. Check the vendor’s own page before buying.
What none of them do
They do not change your site. This is the gap worth understanding before spending anything. Monitoring produces a list of recommendations, the list goes into a development queue, and the queue is where it stops. The most common failure of an AI visibility engagement is not a bad diagnosis, it is a correct diagnosis nobody ships.
Ask who deploys before you ask what it reports.
They cannot give you a reliable position. The systems are non-deterministic. A study run with 600 volunteers, 12 prompts and three tools, 2,961 runs in total, concluded that measuring a brand’s presence in AI answers with precision is not achievable, and that any tool reporting a ranking position in AI is overselling. The author had just joined an AI tracking company, which makes the conclusion more notable rather than less.
A survey of 163 practitioners found only 44% thought a tool was worth buying, and the most-cited objection was not the price. It was not believing the number.
The free stack
Four sources, each answering something the others cannot.
Bing Webmaster Tools, AI Performance. The most useful free thing in this category and the least used. In public preview since February 2026, it reports total citations, which pages were cited, and grounding queries: the retrieval-side queries that led to you. It covers Copilot and Bing’s AI summaries, not ChatGPT, and it is a sample. It is still the only free place to see real citations with the questions attached.
Google Search Console, generative AI performance. Added June 2026. Impressions for AI Overviews, AI Mode and Discover generative surfaces. No clicks, no queries, no position, no API. Directional only.
GA4, the AI Assistant channel. Real referral clicks from ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot, Deepseek and Grok. One trap: Google’s own AI Overviews and AI Mode are not in this channel, they are counted as Organic Search. So this number is real and partial.
Cloudflare AI Crawl Control, on the free plan, or your host’s logs. Confirms GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot and OAI-SearchBot are actually fetching your pages. If they are not, nothing downstream matters.
The part you have to do by hand
None of the above catches a citation that produces no click, and most of them do.
So: twenty to thirty fixed prompts, written as a customer would type them, run on the same day each month across the assistants you care about, logged in a sheet with three columns. Cited. Named without a link. Absent.
Two rules. Keep the prompts fixed, because the value is in the comparison. And expect noise, because two identical runs can return different sources, so the honest unit is a trend across months rather than a reading.
This is a manual version of what the paid tools automate, and at twenty to thirty prompts it takes under an hour a month.
When to pay
Pay when all three of these are true:
- The free sources show something moving and you want more resolution.
- Someone will read the report weekly and act on it.
- That someone can get changes deployed, or you have somebody who can.
If the third one is not true, buy the deployment first. A report on a site nobody is changing is an expensively formatted way of finding out you are not being cited, which the free stack will tell you in an afternoon.
What I use
For my own site: Bing Webmaster Tools, GA4, Cloudflare logs, and a prompt sheet with 24 rows that I run on the first of the month. Total cost, nothing. When a client is at the scale where a weekly report gets acted on, a paid tool earns its money; below that it mostly produces a number people stop opening.
Questions
- What is the best AI visibility tool?
- They measure much the same thing: whether you appear in answers to a set of prompts, across a set of assistants. Differences are coverage, prompt volume and price, running from about $29 to several hundred a month. For one person or a small business, the free stack plus a monthly prompt sheet covers most of it.
- Can I track AI visibility for free?
- Largely yes. Bing Webmaster Tools reports actual citations and the queries behind them. Google Search Console gives impressions for AI surfaces. GA4 has an AI Assistant channel for referral clicks. Cloudflare shows which AI crawlers fetched what. A fixed prompt list in a spreadsheet catches citations that produce no click.
- Do AI visibility tools report a ranking position?
- Some do, and it is the number to distrust. These systems are non-deterministic: the same prompt can return different sources on consecutive runs. One study of 2,961 runs concluded that measuring presence with precision is not achievable, and that a reported ranking position in AI is overselling.
- Is it worth paying for one?
- In one survey of 163 practitioners, only 44% thought buying a tool was worthwhile, and the most common objection was not price but disbelief in the number. Pay when someone will act on the report weekly. Before that, the free sources tell you the same story more cheaply.