Best AI visibility tools for small businesses in 2026: 11 affordable options compared

Many AI visibility tools start at $95 a month or more, which is a lot for a small business that wants to track about 20 questions. The cheapest plans in this list are Otterly.AI at $29 for 20 prompts on 3 engines, Vizible AI, which publishes this guide, at $45 (€39) for 20 prompts with Perplexity included, Meteoria at €75, Qwairy at €79 excluding VAT and SE Visible at $89, and AthenaHQ has a free plan to try first.

Every tool in this list was tested on a paid plan by Louis Foweraker, CEO and founder of Vizible AI. We compared 11 AI visibility tools on what a small business actually pays and gets: the monthly bill, the engines included, the prompts on the first plan, the time it takes to set up, whether the tool tells you what to do next and what its users report. Every price was checked on the vendor's own pricing page on 11 November 2026, with the pages rendered in a browser because several of them load their prices with JavaScript.

Key takeaways

• Best overall for a small business: Vizible AI, from $45 a month ($27 with the launch offer), with a daily task and articles included.
• Lowest monthly bill: Otterly.AI Lite at $29, for 20 prompts on 3 engines.
• Best euro-priced options: Meteoria at €75 for 25 prompts and Qwairy at €79 excluding VAT for about 27 prompts a day.
• Most prompts under $100: SE Visible, 75 prompts for $89, without Perplexity.
• Start for free first: check your site with free tools and a manual test before you pay for anything.

The best AI visibility tools for small businesses at a glance

Each tool in one line: who it suits, the entry price, the trial, the engines and the prompts on the first plan.

Start for free: check where you stand before paying

A small business can learn a lot without a subscription. Two checks take less than an hour and tell you whether a paid tool is worth it yet.

The first is technical: can AI crawlers read your site at all? Vizible AI's free AI Bot Checker reads your robots.txt the way the crawlers of ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and about forty others do and shows which ones are kept out, and its free AI Readiness Checker scores your site from 0 to 100 on llms.txt, robots.txt, structured data and headings, with no signup. If a crawler is blocked, fix that first; our guide to what each AI bot obeys in robots.txt explains the lines that matter.

The second is a manual test: ask ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity the ten questions your customers ask before they buy, and note whether your business is named. It is a good first look, but it stops being reliable fast. When SparkToro and Gumshoe.ai had 600 volunteers run about 3,000 prompts, the odds of getting the same brand list twice were under 1 in 100, so one afternoon of checks can show you named or absent by chance. That is the point where a tool that asks the same questions every day starts to pay for itself, because AI visibility has to be read as a distribution, not a single answer.

If you would rather see a tracker at work before paying, AthenaHQ's free plan includes 300 credits, one per AI answer, on ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, Gemini and Copilot: enough for about five rounds of 20 prompts on 3 engines, by our calculation. Vizible AI, Otterly.AI, SE Visible and Searchable offer free trials instead.

What a small business needs from an AI visibility tool

Small businesses are already moving. In BrightLocal's 2026 Small Business Marketing Report, a survey of 1,002 US owners of local businesses with 1 to 50 employees, 65% said they are working on their AI visibility. What they need from a tool is different from what an agency or an enterprise needs.

A small business does not need hundreds of prompts. It needs the 20 to 30 questions that bring customers, asked every day on the engines its customers use, for a bill it does not have to justify. It needs Perplexity and Google's AI answers in the price, since those are the engines that most often cite web pages. It needs a setup that takes minutes, not a week of configuration. And above all it needs to know what to do next, because nobody on a small team has the time to turn a dashboard into a plan.

How we chose these tools

We kept tools a small business can buy on its own this month, with a public price, a free plan or a free trial, daily tracking, competitor comparison and source analysis. Then we compared them on six criteria.

• Monthly bill: the cheapest plan and what it costs on monthly and annual billing.
• Engines included: whether ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google's AI answers come in the price or as add-ons.
• Prompts on the first plan: enough to cover the 20 to 30 questions that bring customers.
• Next steps: whether the tool turns its data into tasks, content or fixes.
• Setup time: how long it takes to see a first result without help.
• What users report: ratings and recurring praise or complaints on review platforms, and the findings of independent hands-on tests.

We use Vizible AI every day, since it is our product. For the ten others, the facts come from their public pricing pages and documentation as they stood on 25 October 2026, and from what their users and independent testers report: ratings and reviews on G2 and Trustpilot, and hands-on reviews such as Overthink Group's test of seven trackers. Each tool section ends with that feedback and its source, and we say so when a figure is our own calculation. For a wider list, see our guide to the tools that track brand mentions in ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity, and if you run an agency, our comparison of the best AI visibility tools for agencies.

1. Vizible AI

Best for: owners and small marketing teams who want a short list of what to fix, not another dashboard to read.

Vizible AI (our product) starts from your website: you enter it, and it suggests your niche, your competitors and your first prompts, so the first answers arrive within minutes without a setup session. It then asks those prompts every day on the 3 engines you pick among ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Copilot, Google AI Overviews and Google AI Mode, and shows whether you are named, in which position, with which sentiment, and which pages the engines cite instead of yours.

For a small team, the useful part is the daily task. Each morning it prepares one concrete action from your own data, such as fixing a page that AI crawlers cannot read, getting listed on a comparison page where your competitors already appear, or publishing an article on a question where you are absent. Three articles a month are included on the first plan and publish to WordPress, Shopify, Squarespace or Wix in one click, and 15 key pages of your site are scanned every month.

AI traffic from Google Analytics 4, AI crawler log analysis and a read-only MCP connector for Claude and ChatGPT come with every plan.

Pricing: Vizible AI's Starter plan costs $45 (€39) a month for 1 brand, 20 prompts and 3 engines (1,860 answers a month); Growth costs $115 (€99) for 2 brands, 50 prompts and 4 engines; Pro costs $205 (€179) for 3 brands, 100 prompts and 5 engines. Subscriptions taken before 30 November 2026 get 40% off for life, so Starter costs $27 (€23). Annual billing takes 25% off. Starter and Growth start with a 7-day free trial.

Pros

• A prepared task every day and three articles a month on the first plan.
• Perplexity and Google's AI answers available without an add-on.
• First results in minutes, with prompts and competitors suggested for you.

Cons

• 20 prompts on Starter, which covers the core questions but not a long list of products.
• No tracking of Claude, Grok, DeepSeek or Mistral.
• 1 seat on every plan and 90 days of data history.

2. Otterly.AI

Best for: a business that wants the smallest possible monthly bill and can live with 20 prompts.

Otterly.AI's Lite plan tracks 3 engines you pick among ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity, Microsoft Copilot, Google AI Mode, Gemini and Claude every day, with brand visibility, sentiment, citation sources, a GEO audit of your pages and three recommendations a week. Team members, brands, countries and languages are unlimited, which is rare at this price, and the company also publishes free GEO tools such as a query fan-out tool and an AI crawler simulation.

Pricing: Otterly.AI counts usage in credits, one credit per prompt checked once on one engine, and three for a Claude answer. It costs $29 a month for 2,000 credits on Lite, which covers 20 prompts a day on 3 engines, then $189 for 15,000 credits, or 160 prompts, on Standard. Extra credits are not available on Lite; on Standard, 5,000 more cost $65 a month. Annual billing takes 15% off, and a free trial is available.

Pros

• The lowest regular entry price in this list.
• Any 3 of 7 engines from the first plan, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews included.
• Unlimited team members, brands and countries.

Cons

• 20 prompts cannot be extended on Lite: the next step is $189.
• A Claude answer counts as three credits, so tracking Claude cuts the number of prompts.
• Three recommendations a week on Lite, and no AI agent analytics before Standard.

What users and testers say: Otterly.AI is rated 4.7 out of 5 from 54 reviews on G2, where users praise the quick setup and the clean interface, and criticise reports that are hard to customise and the price jump from Lite to Standard. In Overthink Group's hands-on test, updated in January 2026, it scored 2.8 out of 5: strong control over brand names and domains, but reports that filter by one tag at a time.

See Vizible AI vs Otterly.AI for the detail.

3. Meteoria

Best for: French small businesses that want several people and several brands on one fixed price.

Meteoria, a French tool, asks 3 engines chosen among ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, Gemini, Grok, Google AI Mode and Copilot every day, analyses the sentiment behind each mention and connects to Google Analytics or Matomo. Seats, countries, projects and brands are unlimited on every plan, so a business with two shops or two brands does not pay twice.

Pricing: Meteoria costs €75 a month for 25 prompts on Starter and €175 for 100 prompts on Pro, with a free trial and two months free on annual plans.

Pros

• 25 prompts at entry, more than Vizible AI or Otterly.AI.
• Unlimited seats, brands and countries.
• Matomo integration for businesses that avoid Google Analytics.

Cons

• Nearly twice the bill of Vizible AI's Starter plan.
• 3 engines on every plan.
• AI-friendly content only from €175, and log analysis only on the €420 plan.

What users and testers say: Meteoria has no reviews yet on G2, Capterra or Trustpilot, so independent feedback is thin. HubSpot's French blog, which promotes its own tool in the same article, calls it a reference for large and mid-sized French companies and points to the limit of 3 engines at a time.

See Vizible AI vs Meteoria.

4. Qwairy

Best for: small businesses that want to see many engines at once and can spend a few minutes on credit maths.

Qwairy, also French, counts usage in credits: one credit is one prompt on one engine for one run, and its engines are checked through their interfaces, about a dozen of them, Claude and Grok included. Prompts are unlimited; credits decide how many you can run and how often. Its free audit and free start let you see a first result before paying, and data is hosted in the EU.

Pricing: Qwairy costs €79 a month excluding VAT for 1 workspace and 2,500 credits, which covers about 27 prompts a day on 3 engines or about 190 prompts checked weekly, then €199 for 10,000 credits. Annual billing gives two months free.

Pros

• About a dozen engines available, Claude and Grok included.
• Weekly checks stretch the same credits over more prompts.
• EU hosting and unlimited team members.

Cons

• Prices exclude VAT, which matters for a business that cannot recover it.
• Credits need a calculation before you know your real prompt count.
• No daily task: the recommendations stay yours to turn into work.

What users and testers say: Qwairy is rated 4.7 out of 5 from 51 reviews on G2. Users praise the quick onboarding, the support and the wide engine coverage, and find the interface dense; premium engines also use more credits.

See Vizible AI vs Qwairy.

5. SE Visible

Best for: businesses with many products or locations that care most about Google's AI answers and ChatGPT.

SE Visible, from SE Ranking, gives the most prompts for under $100 in this list: 75 prompts tracked daily on ChatGPT, Gemini, Google AI Mode and Google AI Overviews, collected from the engines' interfaces, with unlimited users. It covers seven countries in five languages.

Pricing: SE Visible costs $89 a month for 75 prompts and 5 projects, or $71 a month on annual billing, then $189 for 200 prompts and 10 projects. A 10-day free trial is available.

Pros

• 75 prompts for $89, the most volume at this price.
• Answers collected as users see them.
• Unlimited users.

Cons

• No Perplexity and no Copilot.
• Seven countries and five languages only.
• No daily tasks or content production.

What users and testers say: SE Visible has no reviews yet on G2 or Capterra. Exploding Topics, which belongs to Semrush, likes its sentiment and share-of-voice views for agencies with several domains, and notes that it tracks brand mentions rather than the pages the engines cite.

See Vizible AI vs SE Ranking.

6. Promptwatch

Best for: small software or technical businesses whose customers use Claude or DeepSeek.

Promptwatch tracks every model it supports on every plan, including ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Copilot, Google AI Overviews, Google AI Mode, Claude, Meta's Llama, DeepSeek and Mistral, with an agent chat, country-level tracking and API and MCP access from the first plan. Crawler analytics start on Professional.

Pricing: Promptwatch costs $95 a month for 1 project, 50 prompts and 6,000 responses on Essential, then $245 on Professional, where content writing starts. Essential starts with a 7-day free trial.

Pros

• Every model on the first plan, Claude included.
• 50 prompts at entry.
• API and MCP access for technical teams.

Cons

• More than twice Vizible AI's entry price.
• Content writing only from $245.
• A rich interface that takes time to learn.

What users and testers say: Promptwatch is rated 4.6 out of 5 from 21 reviews on G2. Users like the citation tracking, the MCP and API access and the monthly feature releases, and find the interface dense and slow to learn; one reviewer found that credits run out quickly.

See Vizible AI vs Promptwatch.

7. Peec AI

Best for: small businesses with a marketing lead who wants detailed reports and several people in the tool.

Peec AI measures visibility, position, sentiment and share of voice against competitors, with source analysis, recommended actions and unlimited users on every plan. On Starter you choose 3 models among ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot, Google AI Overviews, Google AI Mode and Naver AI; Perplexity is an extra model.

Pricing: Peec AI costs $95 a month for 50 prompts, 1 project and 1 country on Starter, then $245 for 150 prompts. Perplexity costs from $30 a month extra, billed annually, on Starter. Annual billing takes 15% off. Our list of Peec AI alternatives goes into more detail.

Pros

• Unlimited users on every plan.
• Clean, detailed reporting.
• 50 prompts at entry.

Cons

• Perplexity costs extra.
• 1 country on Starter.
• More than twice Vizible AI's entry price.

What users and testers say: Peec AI is rated 4.7 out of 5 from 21 reviews on G2, where users like the setup and the share-of-voice and citation metrics, and find the recommendations weak. Overthink Group scored it 3.2 out of 5, praising unlimited seats on the entry plan and finding that prompts often need relabelling by hand.

See Vizible AI vs Peec AI.

8. Semrush AI Visibility Toolkit

Best for: small businesses that already run their SEO in Semrush.

Semrush's toolkit adds AI visibility reports, AI competitor analysis, prompt research and an AI readiness site audit to the SEO platform, with mentions from ChatGPT, Google's AI, Gemini and Perplexity.

Pricing: Semrush's AI Visibility Toolkit costs $99 a month per domain, billed annually, for 25 custom prompts tracked daily. Extra users start at $45 a month. Semrush offers a 7-day free trial.

Pros

• AI data next to your SEO data in one account.
• Prompt research built on Semrush's own data.
• 25 prompts, Perplexity included.

Cons

• Billed annually: about $1,188 a year up front.
• Extra seats cost $45 a month each.
• Best value only for existing Semrush users.

What users and testers say: the toolkit has no reviews yet on G2. Overthink Group liked its polished reports and head-to-head comparisons but scored it 2.2 out of 5, with little to drill into and noisy AI insights, and Zapier notes that extra users add to the bill.

See Vizible AI vs Semrush.

9. Searchable

Best for: small businesses that want articles written for them and have a content budget.

Searchable combines tracking, site audits and articles: 20 articles a month on its first plan, with ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews and Perplexity included and the other engines sold as add-ons. Seats and projects are unlimited.

Pricing: Searchable costs $125 a month for 100 prompts per model, 9,000 AI answers and 20 articles on Pro, with a 14-day free trial.

Pros

• 20 articles a month on the first plan.
• Unlimited seats and projects.
• 12 months of data history.

Cons

• The highest entry price in this list.
• Only 3 engines included.
• White-label reports and API only from $400.

What users and testers say: Searchable is rated 4.8 out of 5 from 104 reviews on G2, where users find it easy for non-technical teams and like audits that come with fixes, but 3.8 out of 5 from 17 reviews on Trustpilot, where recent complaints concern the content editor and billing after cancellation.

See Vizible AI vs Searchable.

10. Writesonic

Best for: small businesses that want AI visibility tracking and AI-written articles in one subscription.

Writesonic started as an AI writing tool and now sells AI visibility tracking inside its content platform. Its Starter plan tracks 50 prompts daily on ChatGPT, Gemini and Google AI Overviews, with ads monitoring, 15 AI articles a month and 10 site audits; sentiment analysis starts on Growth, and the full Action Center and all 9 AI platforms come with Enterprise.

Pricing: Writesonic costs $99 a month on Starter, or $79 a month billed annually, for 50 prompts, 15 articles, 1 user and 1 project. Basic costs $199 a month and Growth $399 a month, both billed annually, for 100 and 200 prompts. A free trial is available.

Pros

• 15 AI articles a month on the first plan.
• 50 prompts at entry.
• $79 a month on annual billing.

Cons

• No Perplexity on Starter.
• Sentiment analysis only from Growth, at $399 a month billed annually.
• 1 user on Starter.

What users and testers say: Writesonic is rated 4.7 out of 5 on G2 across more than 2,200 reviews, but most of them cover its writing tool rather than AI visibility tracking. NoGood's review finds the AI visibility insights lighter than those of dedicated trackers, with weak citation monitoring.

11. AthenaHQ

Best for: small businesses that want to try a tracker for free before paying anything.

AthenaHQ counts usage in credits, one credit per AI answer. Its free Essential plan includes 300 credits on ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, Gemini and Copilot, with unlimited users, competitor and source insights and content recommendations. Starter adds Google AI Mode, Claude, Grok, DeepSeek, Meta AI and Mistral, unlimited topics and prompts, country-level tracking and a content optimisation agent.

Pricing: AthenaHQ is free on Essential, with 300 credits, then costs $295 a month on Starter for 3,600 credits, which covers about 40 prompts a day on 3 engines by our calculation. Annual billing takes 17% off. API access and extra credits are paid add-ons, and Enterprise is quoted on demand.

Pros

• A free plan with 300 credits.
• 11 models on Starter, Claude included.
• Unlimited users.

Cons

• $295 a month once the free credits run out.
• 300 free credits cover only a few rounds of checks.
• Credits need a calculation before you know your real prompt count.

What users and testers say: AthenaHQ is rated 4.9 out of 5 from 39 reviews on G2, the highest score in this list. Users praise the Action Center and the gap analysis, and mention a steep learning curve and several days of work to set up the prompt library.

What a small business really pays each month

Take a typical small business: one brand, about 20 questions that bring customers, asked daily on 3 engines that include Perplexity. Here is the cheapest plan that covers it on each tool, by our calculation from each vendor's pricing page.

For a small business, the right tool is the one whose first plan already covers the questions that bring customers, on the engines those customers use.

Annual billing changes the order a little. Vizible AI takes 25% off, SE Visible and Writesonic 20%, AthenaHQ 17%, Peec AI and Otterly.AI 15%, and Meteoria and Qwairy give two months free. Before you commit for a year, run the free trial on your 20 questions and check that the tool names the competitors you actually lose customers to.

How to choose your first 20 prompts

The prompts decide what the tool can show you, so choose them before you choose the tool. Start from the questions a customer asks before buying: "best [your service] in [your city]", "[your product] vs [competitor]", "is [your product type] worth it for [their situation]". Keep most of them non-branded, because a question that already contains your name says little about whether AI recommends you; our guide to branded vs non-branded AI Share of Voice explains the split.

Then track the mention rate on those prompts, the share of answers that name you, rather than a single score, and look at the sources the engines cite when they name a competitor: those pages are where the work is. Our guide to the 7 GEO levers to improve AI visibility explains what to change first.

How to choose the right AI visibility tool for your small business

Start from your budget and your customers, then pick the tool built for them.

• You want a clear daily to-do list: Vizible AI, from $45 a month or $27 with the launch offer.
• You need the smallest bill and 20 prompts are enough: Otterly.AI at $29.
• You pay in euros and want unlimited seats: Meteoria.
• You want many engines, Claude included, on a small budget: Qwairy.
• You have many products or locations to track on Google and ChatGPT: SE Visible.
• Your customers are developers who use Claude: Promptwatch.
• You already pay for Semrush: its AI Visibility Toolkit.
• You need articles written for you: Searchable, or Writesonic from $99 a month.
• You want to try a tracker for free first: AthenaHQ's free plan.

Whatever you choose, run the free checks first and start with the questions that bring customers. A small business that fixes one blocked crawler and gets onto one comparison page often moves faster than one that tracks three hundred prompts.