Comparison at a glance
| Tool | Starting price (mid-2026) | AI engines tracked | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|
| Lighthouse | Free; Pro $79/mo | 10+ (ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, DeepSeek, more) | Full measurement + automation without enterprise pricing |
| Profound | $99/mo (Starter); $399/mo (Growth); enterprise custom | ChatGPT only on Starter; 6 on Growth; 10+ enterprise | Enterprises and regulated industries |
| AthenaHQ | $295/mo (3,500 credits) | 8 (credit cost varies per engine) | Self-serve all-in-one with content generation |
| Otterly.ai | From €20/mo | Multiple LLMs | Startups and small agencies on a budget |
| Ahrefs Brand Radar | Part of Ahrefs plans | Google AI Overviews focus | Ahrefs customers adding AI Overview tracking |
| Evertune | Not published | 6 | Brand accuracy and misrepresentation monitoring |
| Goodie AI | Not published | Multiple (list not published) | Quick accuracy audits for small teams |
| Writesonic | From $199/mo | ChatGPT, Claude, Google AI Overviews | High-volume content production with mention tracking |
Disclosure: Lighthouse is our product. We've kept every entry the same depth and led with each tool's genuine strengths — a comparison that only flatters its author isn't useful to you and doesn't get cited by AI engines either.
1. Lighthouse
Best for: teams that want enterprise-grade measurement and automation at mid-market pricing.
Lighthouse queries 10+ AI platforms (ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, DeepSeek, Qwen, Grok, and others) with buyer-relevant prompts, then scores visibility, sentiment, citations, and GEO readiness per page. Beyond measurement it ships an agent platform for automated workflows, citation-decay forecasting, bot tracking for 18+ AI crawlers, and full programmatic access via REST API and an MCP server — so AI assistants can query your visibility data directly.
What makes it different: the closed loop — measure, get page-level fixes, re-measure after you ship — plus being the only tool in this list whose own site is agent-native (scan ahoylighthouse.com on Cloudflare's agent-readiness checker).
Limitations:
- No SOC 2 certification yet, which matters for regulated industries
- Smaller prompt-volume dataset than Profound's 200M+ prompt corpus
- No white-label agency reporting yet
Pricing: Free tier with full analysis; Pro $79/mo; Agency $249/mo.
2. Profound
Best for: enterprises and regulated industries that need certified infrastructure and the deepest dataset.
Profound is the best-funded platform in the category and effectively defined it. Its Answer Engine Insights dashboard covers visibility, prompts, query fan-outs, regions, personas, sentiment, and citations; its prompt-volume dataset (200M+ real user prompts) is unmatched; and Agent Analytics ties AI crawler visits to human referral traffic via CDN integrations. SOC 2 Type II and HIPAA certified. Customers include Indeed, DocuSign, and Walmart.
What makes it different: dataset depth and enterprise compliance — no one else publishes prompt volumes at that scale.
Limitations:
- Starter at $99/mo tracks ChatGPT only; multi-engine tracking starts at $399/mo and the full platform is enterprise-priced (agency plans from $1,499/mo)
- Agents run on schedules — no event-driven triggers for sudden visibility drops
- No native citation-accuracy verification (whether AI answers describe you correctly)
Pricing: $99/mo Starter, $399/mo Growth, custom enterprise — as of mid-2026.
3. AthenaHQ
Best for: teams that want one self-serve tool covering tracking, recommendations, and content generation.
AthenaHQ tracks eight engines (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews and AI Mode, Gemini, Copilot, Grok, Claude) on a credit system, with per-prompt mention and citation rates, an action center for on-page and off-page recommendations, and built-in content brief and draft generation. Founded 2024, $2.2M seed.
What makes it different: the breadth-per-dollar of a single self-serve plan that bundles measurement and content generation together.
Limitations:
- Credit economics need watching: analyzing many prompts across all engines burns the 3,500-credit allowance quickly (Claude costs 5 credits per analysis)
- Big jump from the $295/mo self-serve plan straight to custom enterprise
- Younger product — some features (outreach generation, brand guidelines) are early
Pricing: $295/mo for 3,500 credits; enterprise custom — as of mid-2026.
4. Otterly.ai
Best for: startups and small agencies that need multi-LLM tracking at the lowest entry price.
Otterly monitors prompt-level performance across multiple LLMs with real-time audits and simple reporting. It's the cheapest way to get systematic (rather than manual) AI visibility measurement.
What makes it different: the €20/mo entry point — an order of magnitude below most of this list.
Limitations:
- Lighter analytics depth than the platforms above
- No automation/agent layer
- Fewer enterprise features (SSO, compliance certifications not advertised)
Pricing: from €20/mo — as of mid-2026.
5. Ahrefs Brand Radar
Best for: existing Ahrefs customers who want AI Overview visibility inside their current workflow.
Brand Radar tracks brand mentions in Google AI Overviews, backed by Ahrefs' crawl and keyword data. If your team lives in Ahrefs for SEO, it adds an AI lens without a new vendor.
What makes it different: integration with the SEO dataset you already use.
Limitations:
- Google AI Overviews focus — ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Copilot tracking aren't the core
- AEO is a feature of a broader SEO platform, not the product's center of gravity
- No AEO-specific recommendations engine
Pricing: included in Ahrefs plans (which start around $129/mo) — as of mid-2026.
6. Evertune
Best for: brand teams whose main worry is AI saying wrong things about them.
Evertune centers on brand accuracy: monitoring how models describe your brand, flagging misattribution and outdated claims, and benchmarking against competitors, with daily updates across six engines.
What makes it different: accuracy monitoring as the core product rather than a side feature.
Limitations:
- Six engines is the narrowest coverage in this list's top tier
- Exports are basic (CSV) with limited BI integrations
- Pricing isn't published, which makes evaluation slower
Pricing: not published — contact sales.
7. Goodie AI
Best for: small teams that want fast, lightweight accuracy audits without a learning curve.
Goodie detects misinformation and outdated brand data in AI answers through a deliberately simple interface. It's built for quick audits rather than continuous programmatic measurement.
What makes it different: the simplest on-ramp in the category.
Limitations:
- Advanced features (exports, multi-engine depth, integrations) are still maturing
- Not built for complex reporting or agency use
- Pricing and compliance posture aren't published
Pricing: not published.
8. Writesonic
Best for: teams whose bottleneck is producing content, with mention tracking as a bonus.
Writesonic is a content-generation platform first, with AI-mention tracking across ChatGPT, Claude, and Google AI Overviews layered on. If you need volume content production and basic visibility checks in one subscription, it's efficient.
What makes it different: content velocity — it produces drafts at a scale measurement-first tools don't attempt.
Limitations:
- Measurement depth trails the dedicated visibility platforms
- Generated content still needs strong editing to be citable (generic AI content rarely earns citations)
- Fewer engines tracked than Lighthouse, Profound, or AthenaHQ
Pricing: from $199/mo — as of mid-2026.
How should you choose?
Start from your constraint. If it's compliance and depth of data: Profound. If it's budget: Otterly, then graduate. If it's wanting measurement plus automation in one tool at sane pricing: Lighthouse. If it's content production volume: Writesonic. If it's brand-accuracy anxiety: Evertune or Goodie. If it's "we already pay for Ahrefs": Brand Radar. Whichever you pick, run the same test: give it your 20 most important buyer questions and see whether its measurements match what you observe asking the engines directly.