Who AI recommends, and who's tracking it: the 2026 AI-visibility tool landscape

The funnel you can’t see#

For twenty years, winning customers online meant winning Google. You earned a rank, you earned a click. That bargain is ending. Around 60% of Google searches now end without a click — the answer is the destination, and AI assistants are pushing that further.

Your buyers stopped scrolling ten blue links. They ask an assistant “what’s the best tool for this?” and get one answer with a short list of names. There is no page two. If you’re not on that list, you never enter the conversation — and you will never see it in your analytics, because there was no impression to log and no click to miss.

That is a real revenue leak with no instrumentation. An entire category of tooling has appeared in the last two years to fix the instrumentation half. This post is an honest map of it, including where we sit.

What StayFound does#

StayFound is an AI-visibility suite built around one loop: Monitor, then Optimize, then Prove. See exactly where you lose across every AI engine, get the highest-leverage fix in your hands, and watch the answer change.

• Monitor. We ask ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude and Grok the questions your buyers actually ask, then measure whether you were named, where in the answer you landed, who beat you, and which sources the models read to get there.
• Optimize. We rank the moves by impact and hand you the artefact, not the advice — paste-ready JSON-LD schema, the specific third-party listings AI engines lean on in your category, crawler rules for your robots.txt, and an llms.txt (with honest caveats about what that last one is worth).
• Content recommendations. We also tell you what to write. Every scan returns the pages worth publishing to earn citations in your category — each one typed by format (Comparison, Listicle, How-to, Problem/Solution, Year-specific), given an actual working title, and explained in a sentence: why that piece earns a mention where your current pages don’t. It’s a commissioning brief, not a keyword list.
• Prove. Every scan is kept, so the score, the sentiment and the sources you own move visibly over time. That’s how you tell a fix that worked from one that didn’t.

How the measurement actually works#

AI search is won or lost one question at a time, so our unit of analysis is the prompt, not the day. A daily average tells you the weather; the prompt tells you which deal you lost.

Each scan runs four steps:

1. Discover the competitive set. We ask the models who they consider your rivals, rather than trusting a list you typed in. The answer is frequently not the list you would have typed.
2. Run an intent-weighted prompt set. Buyer questions, weighted so “best X for Y” counts for more than idle curiosity.
3. Detect mentions and position. Being named fourth is not being named first. We score position, not just presence, and roll it into a position-weighted visibility score and a share of voice against the discovered competitors.
4. Read the citations. The sources behind each answer are the lever. They are what you can actually change.

One note on honesty, because it matters in a category this new: when the dashboard shows an illustrative result rather than a live measurement, it is labelled sample data. We would rather show you a smaller number that is real.

The field#

Fair summaries. Each of these is a good tool that some team should buy instead of ours.

• Profound — the enterprise leader on data depth. High prompt volume, broad model coverage, serious export and reporting for teams with dedicated analysts. Priced accordingly.
• Peec AI — Berlin-built, the strongest mid-market option. Fast interface, a Looker Studio integration, and a genuinely useful separation of explicit brand mentions from source citations.
• Otterly.AI — the cheapest entry in the category and a sensible first purchase to establish whether you show up at all. Watch the engine add-ons.
• Scrunch AI — was the other enterprise contender until Sitecore acquired it in June 2026. Still capable; its roadmap is now a DXP roadmap rather than a standalone one.
• Semrush AI Toolkit — the pragmatic pick if you already pay Semrush. AI visibility lands inside the workflow your team is already in, which is worth more than a feature checkbox.
• Ahrefs Brand Radar — the widest engine list of the SEO-suite add-ons, including Claude and Meta AI, in a clean standalone view. It requires an Ahrefs base plan underneath it.

Capability comparison#

Pricing comparison#

Competitor pricing verified August 2026 from public sources: Stork.AI, Indexly, That Marketing Buddy, Geoptie, Trakkr, Menra, EWR Digital, Industry Lens. Vendors change prices and several publish none officially, so third-party figures disagree — Profound in particular is reported at $99, $399 and $499 depending on the source and the plan being described. Treat these as directional and confirm with the vendor. StayFound’s own figures come from our pricing page.

What StayFound gives you that they don’t#

1. You get the fix, not just the chart. Most of this category ends at a dashboard. We generate the artefact: the JSON-LD block — pages carrying schema see roughly 2.8× the citation rate — the named third-party listings worth claiming in your category, and crawler allow-rules for GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, PerplexityBot, ClaudeBot, Google-Extended and the rest. You paste it. A chart that tells you you’re losing isn’t a product.
2. You’re told what to write, specifically. Not “publish more comparison content” — an actual title, the format that wins in your category, and the reason that piece gets cited when your current pages don’t. Hand it to a writer as-is.
3. You can start at zero. A real free tier with no card, and a full AI-visibility report on your domain without creating an account at all. Everywhere else in this table, finding out costs money.
4. $29 buys every engine. Elsewhere $29 buys a restricted set and full coverage is an add-on ladder. Solo covers ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude and Grok at the first paid tier.
5. Metrics you can act on. Not a score in isolation: share of voice with your rank in the category, engines mentioning you out of the ones we ask, and cited sources you own against the ones you’re absent from. That last number is a to-do list, not a chart.
6. Agency economics that work. $499 for 10 brands with white-label reports and API access pays for itself inside one client retainer.

What they do better than us#

This section exists because we would want to read it. AI answers change fast, and a comparison table written by a vendor is worth exactly as much as the parts that cost the vendor something.

• Profound has more data. Higher prompt ceilings, deeper exports, and tooling built for a dedicated analyst. If AI search is a board-level number with a team behind it, that depth is worth the five-figure commitment and we will tell you so.
• Peec is more mature in the dashboard. The Looker Studio integration and the mention-versus-citation split are things we don’t match today.
• Semrush and Ahrefs are already in your stack. If your team lives in one of those, the switching cost of a standalone tool is real and often decisive.
• We are in private beta. StayFound is onboarding design partners through 2026. Our prompt volumes are lower than Profound’s and our enterprise controls are still being built. If you need a mature, fully self-serve platform this quarter, buy one of the above.

How to choose#

• You don’t yet know if you appear in AI answers. Start free. Run a report on your domain, prove there’s a problem, then decide what to spend.
• You know you have a problem and want it fixed. You need a tool that produces artefacts, not observations. That’s the gap we built into.
• AI search is a board-level number and you have analysts. Go to Profound, and use its prompt volume properly.

One last thing#

StayFound’s own product tells customers that comparison pages, listicles and year-specific posts are the formats AI engines cite most. Until this post, we had published none of them. That was a fair thing to hold against us, so we fixed it.

If you want to know what the engines say about you, that report is free and takes about two minutes.