AI visibility monitoring tools and SEO suites compared in 2026

Meltwater, Brandwatch, Talkwalker, Awario, and Mention are media- and social-listening tools. They measure where your brand name appears once someone writes it. GEO tools like Achtung.app measure whether AI models recommend you when nobody has named you. Different question, different data, different category.

Semrush, Ahrefs, and SE Ranking are classical SEO suites. They have added GEO features, but the focus remains keyword data, backlinks, and SERP rankings for Google and Bing. That is why the AI modules of Semrush and Ahrefs have their own table above. Anyone running GEO as a primary discipline tends to compare Achtung.app with Profound, Peec.ai, Otterly.ai, or Conductor.

Profound no longer lists plan prices on its pricing page: there is a free trial (7 days, 50 prompts daily, ChatGPT, Gemini, and Google AI Overviews) and Enterprise on request with up to nine answer engines; a self-serve "Agency Growth" plan for agencies is mentioned without a price. Achtung.app, by contrast, tracks the same four search-grounded providers (ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude) on every plan, at public prices; only the measurement frequency differs, weekly on Lite and daily from Starter up with Claude weekly. The Pro tier (€999) does not expand the search-grounded provider list; it expands brands, keywords, brand portal, and API/MCP. The choice depends on whether you want an individually negotiated Enterprise package or a fixed plan with all four providers from the entry tier.

Four: ChatGPT (OpenAI), Google Gemini, Perplexity, and Claude (Anthropic). These are the providers that answer search-grounded via API, meaning the model runs a live search of the open web per query instead of citing from training data. From the Starter tier up, ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity are tracked daily and Claude weekly due to higher API cost; on the Lite tier all four are measured once a week, with three runs per keyword rather than two. Achtung.app tracks all four on every plan. Additional models can be added on request.

Peec.ai is the closest European peer and covers six selectable surfaces (ChatGPT, AI Mode, AI Overviews, Microsoft Copilot, Gemini, Naver AI) plus AI Shopping, several of which are different surfaces of the same provider. Below Enterprise, three of them are active; further models such as Perplexity cost from €25/month extra. On entry price Peec.ai sits at €85/month, Achtung.app at €69/month on the Lite tier, which measures weekly, and €169/month from Starter up with daily measurement (€154.92 with annual billing). The difference is metering model and measurement depth: Peec.ai counts prompts and projects (Starter: 50 prompts, 1 project, 3 selectable models); Achtung.app counts brands and keywords (Starter: 1 brand, 20 keywords, four fixed providers, two runs per keyword per day; Lite: the same brand and keywords, but once a week with three runs). Repeated runs cost proportionally more but absorb the spread in live web search: two identical queries to the same platform on the same day often do not return the same cited sources. API access is Enterprise-only on Peec.ai; on Achtung.app it ships in the Pro plan (€999/month) along with MCP. Both are credible DACH options; the choice comes down to volume profile and whether entry price or measurement stability weighs more.

LLM Clicks shows up in Achtung.app's own AI data as the second most-cited AI-visibility peer behind Profound, yet it is intentionally absent from the table above: LLM Clicks sells lifetime bundles ($159 one-time on Starter) rather than a recurring license. Comparing it on a pricing axis with monthly SaaS plans would be misleading, because every visibility check incurs real LLM API costs that a one-time price has to absorb differently. By category LLM Clicks belongs alongside Profound, Peec.ai, and Achtung.app; commercially it is a different shape of business.

This table was assembled in June 2026 from the public websites of Profound, Peec.ai, and Conductor, and last re-checked in October 2026. Otterly.ai joined in August 2026: in the own measurement runs of Achtung.app it is the fourth most-cited AI-visibility peer. Its entry price sits below the Achtung.app entry price. A comparison that leaves out the cheaper competitors is not a comparison. For the same reason Semrush and Ahrefs have had their own table since October 2026: AI answers to the question of which tools measure AI visibility name both often. What changed in October 2026: Profound no longer lists plan prices on its pricing page, only a free trial and Enterprise on request. Peec.ai lists Naver AI instead of Perplexity among its selectable surfaces, offers Perplexity as an extra model, and tracks up to 13 rather than 11 models on Enterprise. Achtung.app could not read an annual price off the page during the check, so the table no longer shows one; the pricing page does not mention a trial. Corrections welcome at hello@achtung.app.

Search-grounded means the model performs a live web search on every query and cites the sources it finds. Closed-book means the model answers from training data, whose cutoff is months or years old. Achtung.app calls the providers' search-grounded APIs directly on every query, with fixed sampling parameters (temperature 0 wherever the model accepts it; no provider offers a usable seed on the search-grounded path) and a citation with URL per response. On two providers the web search is forced; on the other two it is offered and the model decides, with each call logging whether it ran. Other tools end up on the same grounding via different paths: Profound and Peec.ai scrape the consumer-facing UIs, so they see whatever the platform routes for that user at that moment (Peec.ai's own docs say so explicitly: "the platform decides whether they perform a web search or not"). The difference is therefore not that no model ever decides at Achtung.app, but that the decision is controlled and logged rather than inherited and unobserved. Conductor uses APIs but does not publicly disclose whether it measures grounded or closed-book. The real difference is therefore less "grounded yes or no" than reproducibility, citation auditability, and independence from UI changes or anti-scraping measures.

Two reasons, one methodological and one legal. First, agents and downstream applications reach AI platforms through the official APIs, not through the consumer web UI. Scraping the UI measures a browser session whose answer can be shaped by account personalization, memory, plan tier (Free/Plus), and A/B test variants. Even with meticulously clean accounts, the result is still a statement about that specific session at that specific moment, not about agentic visibility. Second, the terms of service from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and Perplexity reserve the consumer interface for human users; the intended path for automated access is the API. For that reason Achtung.app uses the vendors' official search-grounded APIs across the board, with live web search enabled on every query, fixed sampling parameters (temperature 0 wherever the model accepts it; no provider offers a usable seed on the search-grounded path), and a citation with URL per response. Methodology details at /en/methodology#search-grounded.