First, decide which job you’re hiring for
There is no single best AI visibility tool, because “AI visibility” covers three different jobs. Pick the job first; the tool follows.
- Monitor — see where you appear in AI answers and track it over time.
- Publish — generate content aimed at getting cited.
- Done-for-you — have someone measure, fix, and maintain it all for you.
If the job is monitoring
These tools tell you where you stand. They’re genuinely useful if you’ll do the interpretation and the fixes yourself.
| Tool | Rough price | Best at | Watch for |
|---|---|---|---|
| Local Falcon | ~$25/mo+ | Local geo-grid rank maps; clearest Google Maps picture | No Perplexity or Claude; AI scans don’t claim to match the app |
| Otterly | ~$29/mo+ | Entry-level multi-engine prompt monitoring | Some engines are paid add-ons |
| Knowatoa | ~$59/mo+ | ChatGPT, AI Overviews, AI Mode on the starter tier | All engines need the higher tier |
| Peec | ~$95/mo | Self-serve multi-engine tracking, agency-friendly | Claude typically enterprise-gated |
| Profound | $99/mo+ | The category’s data leader at the top end | Priced and built for larger brands |
The honest limit on every tool in this group: a dashboard tells you you’re invisible; it doesn’t make you visible. The work that earns the citation is still yours. Many also collect from an API rather than the consumer app, which can differ from what your customer sees — we pulled one apart on exactly this point.
If the job is publishing
Automated content tools ($19–199/mo) will produce and publish articles at volume. Be careful here. The cheapest ones explicitly remove the approval step — “no drafts to review” — which means a machine edits the website that is your credibility. And volume is not the lever: search platforms penalize scaled, low-effort content, and a page only earns a citation if it actually answers something with a concrete, quotable fact. If you use one of these, keep a human in the loop and make every page carry a real number or point of view.
If the job is done-for-you
This is where an agency or a productized service comes in — someone measures, fixes, and maintains it so you don’t have to. Agencies run $1,500–30,000/mo and do genuinely deep work, but often behind discovery calls and account managers. This is the slot Cited is built for: we measure all six engines the way your customer sees them, do the fixes, and you approve every change from your inbox — at a price between the tools and the agencies. Our pricing is public.
How to choose in one question
Ask yourself: after a tool shows me I’m invisible, will I actually do the work to fix it? If yes, buy the cheapest monitor that covers your engines and get to work. If no, don’t buy a dashboard you’ll ignore — hire the outcome. Either way, start by measuring, because you can’t choose a tier before you know how far behind you are. If you want the outcome instead of the instrument, here’s how to make your business show up in AI.