AI visibility tool — every engine, one flat price
An AI visibility tool measures how often AI assistants — ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Google AI Overviews — mention, cite and recommend your brand when buyers ask them questions, and tells you what to fix. A good one covers every engine your buyers actually use, re-samples each prompt because answers vary run to run, reports how uncertain each number is, and publishes its price. steek.ai is one: every major engine included at a flat €19/mo, a 95% confidence interval on every metric, and its price published on the page instead of behind a sales demo.
The short version
- What it is: software that measures whether AI assistants name, cite and recommend your brand — and what to fix when they don't.
- Compare on five things: engine coverage, prompt limits, statistical honesty, price transparency, and whether there is a genuine free entry point.
- The category's habit: metered engines and demo-gated pricing. Several leading vendors publish no price on their product page at all.
- steek's answer: every engine it covers at a flat €19/mo (€29.90 month-to-month), no per-engine upcharge, no demo call.
- Honest limit: no day-one historical backlog, and not built for enterprise agent analytics.
What an AI visibility tool actually does
Discovery is moving inside the answer. When a buyer asks an assistant “what's the best X for a shop like mine?”, the brands it names win the decision — often with no click to anybody's website. Ahrefs measured a 58% lower average click-through rate on searches where an AI Overview appears across 300,000 keywords. Worse, the shift is nearly invisible in your own reporting: Profound finds over 97% of AI-referred visits carry no UTM, arriving as untagged “dark” traffic. An AI visibility tool exists because that surface has no native analytics: somebody has to ask the engines directly, repeatedly, and write down what they say.
In practice that means five jobs:
- Ask, on your behalf. It runs the buying-intent prompts your customers actually use against each engine, on a schedule — instead of you pasting questions into a chat window once a month.
- Record what came back. Whether you were mentioned, whether you were recommended (different, and the gap is the work), which competitors appeared beside you, and which sources were cited.
- Quantify the uncertainty. AI answers are volatile — independent tracking finds 40–90% of the domains an engine cites can change when the same question is re-asked. A number with no error bar sends you chasing noise.
- Diagnose. Which sources name your rivals and not you, and whether the engines' crawlers can reach your site at all.
- Tie it to money. For a store: per-product visibility connected to real revenue, not a brand-level score.
How to evaluate one: the five things to compare
Category roundups converge on the same shortlist, and buyer complaints on the same three frustrations: opaque pricing, no genuine free entry, vague engine coverage. Use these five axes.
1. Engine coverage — and coverage at your price
Your buyers do not all use the same assistant, so a tool watching one engine leaves the rest dark. The trap is that coverage is usually metered. Otterly's Lite plan is $29/mo (verified on their pricing page) but covers only 15 prompts and 4 engines, with Gemini/Claude/AI Mode as paid add-ons; the genuinely usable Standard plan is $189/mo. Peec AI's entry tier is reported to cover 3 of 7 engines on entry; more cost extra. Profound's cheapest reported tier is ChatGPT-only on the cheapest reported tier. Ask not “how many engines?” but “how many engines on the plan I will actually buy?”
2. Prompt limits
The second meter. Semrush's AI Visibility Toolkit is $99/mo per domain (verified) for 25 prompts and 4 engines, with a 7-day trial; it's an add-on bolted onto Semrush's legacy SEO suite. Otterly.ai's cheapest plan allows 15. If you sell more than one thing to more than one kind of customer, a 15–25 prompt cap is a demo, not a programme — and Athena HQ's reported credit model means heavier use costs more, not the same. Count the prompts you need before comparing headline prices.
3. Statistical honesty
Most dashboards show visibility as a single confident percentage — a point estimate dressed as a fact, given how much the same prompt moves run to run. The honest form is an interval: 42% ±3 points is a finding; 42% ±10 points is a coin flip. steek reports a 95% confidence interval on every metric, and its alerts are CI-gated, so you are only pinged when a change is statistically real. If a tool cannot tell you how uncertain it is, you cannot tell whether last week's drop happened.
4. Price transparency
The category's sore point. Profound publishes no public pricing. Third-party reports suggest a ~$99/mo ChatGPT-only starter and a ~$399/mo growth tier, with enterprise plans commonly cited in the $2,000–$5,000+/mo range. All figures are secondhand — Profound routes buyers through a demo. Peec's Starter plan is reported at around €89/mo (some reviews list ~$95) and covers only 3 of its 7 engines; extra engines are paid add-ons. Peec hides exact amounts on its pricing page, so treat these as publicly-reported figures. A price you cannot read before a sales call is not a price; it is a negotiation — which is why so much pricing here circulates secondhand through reviews. Every figure on this page is either verified on the vendor's own pricing page or marked as reported.
5. A way in that isn't a sales call
“Free” means several different things here: a checker you can run with no account, a trial with no card, and a trial that wants your card first. Athena HQ is reported to offer no free trial; Profound has no self-serve trial — demo-gated. Ahrefs Brand Radar publishes a free AI Visibility Checker alongside its $398–$699/mo paid tiers. steek has no free tier: self-serve signup isn't open yet, so the way in is founding early access, €9.90 for the first year — with the price and the method published, and a money-back guarantee instead of a demo call.
How the category compares on those axes
| steek.ai | Otterly.ai | Semrush AI Toolkit | Peec AI | Profound | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Entry price | from €19/mo | $29/mo (Lite, verified) | $99/mo per domain (verified) | ~€89/mo (Starter, reported) | No public pricing (reported ~$399+/mo for a usable tier) |
| Engines at that price | ✓ All 4 it covers | 4 engines on Lite; more are add-ons | 4 engines, 25 prompts at base | 3 of 7 engines on entry; more cost extra | ChatGPT-only on the cheapest reported tier |
| Price published on-site | ✓ Yes | ✓ Yes (verified) | ✓ Yes (verified) | Opaque (reported) | None (demo-gated) |
| Getting started | ✓ Founding access, €9.90 first year | Limited | 7-day trial | Trial exists but is gated | No self-serve trial — demo-gated |
| Confidence intervals | ✓ 95% CI on every metric | — | — | — | — |
How steek measures AI visibility
steek treats each engine as a measurement surface, not a screenshot. It runs your buying-intent prompts, re-samples each because answers vary, and records mentions, recommendations, competitor co-mentions and cited sources the same way for every engine — so the numbers are comparable across them.
- Every major engine at one price. ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini & Google AI Overviews — all included at the flat price.
- A 95% confidence interval on every metric, using a Wilson interval — the honest number, never a single noisy run.
- Real monthly search volume behind each tracked prompt, not a 1–5 bar, so you work on demand that exists.
- Co-mention gap analysis — the exact sources your competitors are cited in that you are absent from, ranked by opportunity.
- Per-SKU AI Shopping visibility tied to real revenue through GA4 attribution, for stores that need product-level answers.
- AI-crawler and robots.txt checks — if GPTBot cannot reach you, no amount of content work will help.
- An auto-written verdict, CI-gated alerts, shareable reports and an MCP-first API.
- EU-hosted and GDPR-aligned, operated by BSI OÜ in Estonia, with the price published and no demo call.
No day-one historical index (rivals like Ahrefs Brand Radar backfill months of past data). Not built for enterprise-scale agent analytics or huge prompt volumes (that's Profound's turf). If a day-one backlog of history is what you are buying, Ahrefs Brand Radar is the honest recommendation; for enterprise-scale agent analytics, Profound. steek covers the four engines that matter for smaller businesses and prices them flat — that is the trade.
What it costs
steek is €19/mo billed annually, or €29.90 month-to-month, cancellable any time. Every engine is included at that price — no per-engine add-ons, no seat maths — with a money-back guarantee: if your first session doesn't show where you stand across every engine, with confidence intervals, it's free. While early access lasts there is a founding offer of €9.90 for your first year. Detail on the pricing page.
Where to go next
For the category ranked rather than one product, read the best AI visibility tools, or the best GEO tools for small business. For continuous cross-engine measurement, see the AI visibility tracker, with detail per engine for ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Google AI Overviews. For the discipline behind the numbers: what GEO is, answer engine optimization and AI brand monitoring. And before you buy anything, the free manual version — does AI recommend your business? — will tell you whether this is a problem you have.
FAQ
What is an AI visibility tool?
An AI visibility tool measures how often AI assistants — ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Google AI Overviews — mention, cite and recommend your brand when people ask them the questions your buyers ask, and shows you what to change. It runs those prompts against each engine on a schedule, records whether your brand appears and which sources the engine cited, and tracks how that share moves. It is not a rank tracker: it measures your presence inside a generated answer, where there may be no ranked list at all. steek.ai is one, built for small businesses and online stores, from €19/mo with every major engine included.
What should an AI visibility tool measure?
Six things, per engine and over time: mention rate (how often you appear at all), recommendation share (how often you are actually recommended rather than just named), share of voice against named competitors, the sources the engine cited when it answered, sentiment, and — if you sell products — per-SKU visibility rather than brand-level mentions only. Each of those numbers should carry a confidence interval, because AI answers vary run to run and a single reading can look like a trend when it is sampling noise.
Is there a free AI visibility tool?
Barely. Ahrefs publishes a free AI Visibility Checker alongside its paid Brand Radar, and that is close to the whole list. Most of the category works differently: Athena HQ is reported to offer no free trial at all, and Profound publishes no pricing and routes buyers through a demo. steek.ai is not free either — it is from €19/mo, with founding early access at €9.90 for the first full year — but the price and the method are published rather than gated behind a sales call. A free checker gives you a rough baseline; continuous sampling across every engine is what you pay for.
How much does an AI visibility tool cost?
Roughly $29/mo to several hundred — and the sticker rarely tells the whole story, because engines and prompts are usually metered separately. Otterly's Lite plan is $29/mo (verified) for 15 prompts and 4 engines, with the usable Standard plan at $189/mo; Semrush's AI Visibility Toolkit is $99/mo per domain (verified) for 25 prompts and 4 engines; Ahrefs Brand Radar runs $398–$699/mo (verified). steek.ai is from €19/mo billed annually (€29.90 month-to-month), every engine included, no per-engine upcharge. Judge cost by what a complete plan costs, not the entry number.
Do I still need an AI visibility tool if I already do SEO?
Yes, because the two surfaces do not overlap as much as people assume — Ahrefs found only about 37.9% of AI-cited URLs also rank in Google's top 10. Your rank tracker tells you where a page sits on a results page; it cannot tell you whether ChatGPT names you when someone asks it for a recommendation. Those are different measurements of different surfaces, and AI answers frequently resolve with no click at all, so they never show up in your normal analytics either. If AI discovery matters to your buyers, it needs its own measurement.
Which AI visibility tool is best for a small business?
There is no universal winner — match the tool to your segment. For small businesses and ecommerce, steek.ai is built for exactly that: every major engine at a flat €19/mo, a 95% confidence interval on every metric, real monthly search volume behind each prompt, per-SKU AI Shopping visibility tied to revenue in GA4, and a published price with no demo wall. If you need a deep day-one historical index, Ahrefs Brand Radar is the honest answer; for enterprise-scale agent analytics, Profound.
Run an AI visibility tool on your own site
No demo call, no sales gate — steek shows where you stand across every engine, with the interval on every number.