The best AI visibility tools in 2026
Tools that tell you whether ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity recommend your business. What each measures, what it costs, and how to do it by hand for free.
This category did not exist three years ago. It exists now because buyers ask assistants for shortlists, and being absent from those shortlists is a loss you cannot see in any analytics tool.
What these tools actually do
All of them do roughly the same four things.
- Ask a set of questions to one or more AI assistants.
- Record which brands appear in each answer.
- Record which sources the answer cited.
- Chart it over time.
The differences that matter are: how many assistants, whether they use the real consumer product or an API, how many questions, how often, and whether they also track your competitors.
Do it yourself first
Before paying anyone, spend two hours on this.
Write twenty questions a buyer would type. No brand names in them. Then ask all twenty in ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity with web search on, and record in a spreadsheet: which businesses were named, and which sources were cited.
You will learn three things immediately. Whether you appear at all. Who does appear. And which handful of third party pages is deciding the answer, because those pages are your actual work queue.
If you never buy a tool, that exercise alone is worth more than most SEO audits.
What to look for in a tool
Multiple assistants. ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity give genuinely different answers. A tool covering one is measuring one.
Competitor tracking in the same run. Your share of answers means nothing in isolation. If your share drops 10% in a week when everyone's did, that is a model update, not your failure. You cannot tell without the comparison.
Source capture. The citations are the actionable part. A tool that records who got named but not what got cited is giving you a scoreboard with no instructions.
Enough questions, often enough. Answers vary run to run. Ten questions weekly averages out more noise than fifty questions monthly.
Honesty about method. Ask whether they use consumer apps or APIs, and which models. A vendor that will not say is a vendor to skip.
The options
The category is young and prices move, so treat specifics as of 19 September 2026 and check before you buy.
Dedicated AI visibility tools have appeared in the last two years, mostly priced between $99 and $500 a month. They vary widely in how many assistants they cover and whether they track competitors. Several use APIs rather than the consumer products, which changes results.
SEO platforms have started adding AI visibility panels to existing subscriptions. If you already pay for one, check whether you have this before buying anything else. The coverage is usually narrower but the marginal cost is zero.
Figo includes it as one of nine channels. Ten buyer questions across ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity every week on Growth at $99 a month, or every two weeks on Starter at $49, with your competitors measured in the same run and every cited source recorded. It is not a dedicated AI visibility platform and does not try to be. It is one panel inside a competitor monitor.
Doing it by hand costs nothing and works. It fails for the same reason all manual monitoring fails.
The questions to ask a vendor
Copy these into the demo.
- Which assistants, and the consumer product or the API?
- Which models specifically, and what happens when they update?
- Do you track competitors in the same run?
- Do you record cited sources, and can I export them?
- How many questions, how often, and what happens if I need more?
- Can I see the raw answer text, or only the scores?
That last one matters more than it sounds. Scores without the underlying answers are unauditable, and when a number moves you will want to read why.
What to do with the result
The number is not the point. The gap is.
If you are named in 5% of answers and your closest competitor is named in 30%, list every source cited across your question set, count them, and go and get into the five that appear most. That is the whole strategy, and it works faster than classic SEO because directories and listicles update in weeks.
Re measure in two weeks. If the share has not moved in eight, you are chasing the wrong sources.
Questions people ask
Can I check AI visibility for free?
Yes. Ask your buyer questions in each assistant yourself and write down who gets named. Twenty questions across four assistants takes about two hours a week.
Why do these tools give different numbers?
Because they ask different questions, use different models, and some use API endpoints that behave differently from the consumer apps. Compare a tool against itself over time, never one tool against another.
Does a tool need to use the real ChatGPT app?
It matters more than vendors admit. API responses and consumer app responses differ, particularly in whether web search fires. Ask any vendor which they use before you buy.
What should I track besides my own brand?
Your competitors, in the same run. Your share of answers on its own tells you nothing without knowing whose names fill the rest of the space.
See it on your own competitors
Figo checks their ads, pages, rankings, reviews and AI answers every week, then tells you what to do in plain words. Set up in two minutes.
Keep reading