I Compared 7 AI Search Visibility Tools (With Real Pricing). Here's the Honest Breakdown

Disclosure: I'm the maker of Quotalis (one of the tools below). I tried to make this comparison fair — every fact about competitors comes from their official site as of today, and I'll say plainly where each tool (including mine) is not the best pick.

Last week I asked four AI engines about my own brand 168 times. They mentioned me zero times. That experiment taught me something uncomfortable: if AI can't see your brand, your customers can't either.

So I went shopping for AI search visibility tools — the ones that track how often ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Perplexity mention and cite your brand. Here's what I found, with real pricing pulled from official sites today (October 9, 2026).

The shortlist

Tool	Engines monitored	Entry price	Free option
Surva.ai	ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini, Google AI Overviews	$49/mo	7-day trial
Foglift	ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews	$49/mo	Free tier ($0, weekly Perplexity)
Seeqly	ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, Grok	$21/mo	7-day trial (card required)
Citany	8 incl. Kimi + Doubao	$49/mo	14-day trial + free brand audit
Finseo	Pick any 3 of 10 (+ regional add-ons)	Not published	None listed
Profound	Trial: ChatGPT, Gemini, AI Overviews	Enterprise custom	7-day free trial
Quotalis	ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity	$29/mo	Free audit, no signup

What each one is actually best at

Surva.ai — the "done" button. Its pitch is "most tools stop at monitoring, Surva.ai closes the loop": one click generates citation-optimized articles and publishes straight to WordPress/Webflow. If you want monitoring plus content production in one place, this is the most complete loop. The price reflects it ($49–$349/mo).

Foglift — the developer's pick. Free tier, public REST API, CLI, and an MCP server so your AI agent can query visibility data directly. If you live in the terminal, nothing else here speaks your language. The free tier (weekly Perplexity checks) is genuinely useful.

Seeqly — the cheapest paid entry at $21/mo, and the only one here doing grounded-vs-ungrounded answer comparison (how AI answers with vs without web grounding). Heads-up: the trial requires a card and bills on day 8. Also the only one with Hinglish/Indian regional language coverage.

Citany — the coverage king. Eight engine paths including Kimi and Doubao — the only tool here that watches Chinese AI engines. Its "Citation Intelligence" shows why competitors get cited, not just that they do. If your market includes China, shortlist this one.

Finseo — the enterprise attribution play. "Attribution from AI answer to revenue" plus 40+ integrations. Pricing isn't published (talk to sales), which tells you who it's for.

Profound — the best-funded name, now positioned as an "AI Marketer" agentic teammate. Note: their old $99/$399 self-serve tiers are gone from the pricing page — it's free trial or enterprise custom now.

Quotalis (mine) — the transparency-first indie option. $29/mo gets you weekly measurement across 4 engines. Two things I do differently: every score is reported as mean + range over 3 independent runs (never a misleading single number), and the methodology page publishes the limitations openly. Plus a free audit that needs no signup — run it on your own site in 30 seconds.

The uncomfortable question I ask about all of them (including mine)

How do you know the numbers are real? Most tools show you a single visibility score with no explanation of how it was measured. One lucky run and you look like a genius; one bad run and you're invisible. That's why I built Quotalis around 3 runs per prompt per engine with mean + range — and why I'd push any vendor on this question before paying:

1. How many runs back each data point?
2. Official APIs or UI scraping? (They answer different questions.)
3. What are the published limitations?

If a tool can't answer those three, you're buying a vibe, not a metric.

My honest take

• Indie/small team, want honest numbers cheap: Quotalis ($29) or Foglift (free tier).
• Need Chinese engine coverage: Citany, no contest.
• Want monitoring + content in one loop: Surva.ai.
• Enterprise with attribution needs: Finseo or Profound.
• Cheapest paid seat: Seeqly at $21/mo.

No single tool wins everything. Pick the one that matches your situation — and whatever you pick, ask those three methodology questions first.

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I write about AI visibility measurement in public. The 168-query experiment that started this: I Asked AI About My Brand 168 Times. It Mentioned Me Zero Times. Try the free audit on your own site — no signup.

Comments

[Mustafa Aydemir]

The methodology questions are a useful addition to this comparison. I’m a co-founder of Screpy, and we’ve added quite a few AI visibility tracking features in our latest release.

We’ve taken a slightly different approach: AI visibility sits alongside technical SEO audits, crawling, broken-link checks, rank tracking, and performance monitoring. For a small team, being able to investigate visibility and the underlying website in the same place is a big part of the value.

It also keeps the total cost down compared with paying for a separate visibility tracker and SEO suite. Our Max plan includes both, and the current annual welcome offer works out to about $15/month. Different limits and measurement methods still matter, of course, but it could be another option worth including here.

[ai_adam]

Thực tế mình đang tìm hiểu mấy cái này cho team SEO nội bộ. Bài viết có nêu rõ methodology so sánh không? Cụ thể là: sample size query dùng để test, timeframe thu thập data, và có control cho seasonal volatility không? Mình từng bị burn khi tool báo visibility tăng nhưng traffic organic thực tế không đổi — nguyên nhân là tool track ranking mà không weight theo search intent/commercial value. Nếu bài có breakdown theo intent type (informational vs transactional vs navigational) thì quyết định buy dễ hơn nhiều. Pricing table hữu ích, nhưng missing hidden cost: API rate limit, data retention policy, và whether historical data export được khi churn — found it via LabAgent, site: labagent .tech