Most AI visibility tools measure the same thing and disagree about the answer. That is not a bug in one of them, it is the nature of the metric: ask an assistant the same question twice and it rarely returns the same list of brands. So the useful question when comparing these tools is not who has the most engines. It is whether the number they hand you comes with any indication of how much to trust it.

Here is the short version, then the detail.

LadderFox starts at $0 for a single check and $19 a month to track. It is the only one of these that publishes a confidence interval next to every score and separates questions that name your brand from questions that do not. Smallest and newest of the group.

Promptwatch starts at $95 a month with a free tier. Ten plus engines, and it shows you which AI crawlers visited your pages, which nobody else here does well. No published sampling methodology.

Peec AI sits around $95 a month. Strong on the branded versus unbranded split and it publishes real research, including the finding that ranking first in a cited listicle is worth about 16.5 points of brand visibility.

Profound is enterprise, priced on request. Broadest data, largest company, and the one to shortlist if procurement is involved.

Writesonic bundles AI visibility into a wider content suite, with a verification loop that measures again a couple of weeks after you act.

The axis that actually separates them

SparkToro ran 2,961 AI queries with 600 volunteers and found that two identical runs return the same brand list less than one time in a hundred. Kevin Indig found only 2.2% of ChatGPT citations survive three runs of the same prompt, and that engines replace between 56% and 74% of their cited sources week to week.

That has an uncomfortable consequence. A visibility score of 34 means very little on its own. Ran again an hour later it might read 21, and nothing about your brand changed. Any tool that draws a single line through those readings is inviting you to see movement where there is noise, and any tool that emails you about a 13 point drop is wasting your afternoon.

So when you compare these products, look for three things:

How many times is each question asked? Once is a coin flip. Two or three runs per question per engine is the minimum for a number that holds still.
Is there a range around the score? A confidence interval is the difference between "you appear in 20% of answers" and "somewhere between 6% and 51%, and we only asked ten times".
Are branded and unbranded questions separated? Asking "is Acme any good" and asking "best tools for X" measure completely different things. Mixing them inflates every score, and it inflates yours most.

Almost nobody in this category does all three. That is the honest state of the market rather than a sales point.

LadderFox

Free for one check, then $19, $79 and $199 a month.

Every score carries a 95% confidence interval and the sample size behind it. A change is only reported as a change when the intervals stop overlapping, which means the product will tell you that a 23 point move is statistically indistinguishable from nothing. It also splits unaided from aided, so you can see the common and depressing pattern where an engine describes your product accurately once someone names it and never reaches for it otherwise.

It also joins two halves that are usually sold separately: a server side collector shows which AI crawlers read which pages, and that gets lined up against which of your pages the engines went on to cite. That produces a list most tools cannot produce, which is the pages that get read constantly and quoted never.

Recommendations carry a source. The action plan can only suggest tactics that cite a published study from a vetted registry, so you can check the reasoning rather than take it.

Where LadderFox is the wrong choice. It covers five engines where Promptwatch covers more than ten, so if you need Grok and DeepSeek specifically, this is not the tool. There is no public API and no MCP server yet. There is no agency seat management, so if you are reporting on twenty client brands you will feel it. It is the youngest product here with the shortest track record. And it deliberately does not show estimated prompt volumes, which some buyers genuinely want, for the reason in the last section.

Promptwatch

Free Explore tier, then $95, $245 and $579 a month.

The broadest engine coverage of the self serve options, more than ten including ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, Grok and DeepSeek. Its strongest feature is agent analytics: it detects AI crawlers hitting your pages server side, so you can see whether the engines are reading you at all rather than only what they say. It also tracks citations from Reddit, YouTube and news, has content gap detection, and ships an API and an MCP server.

What is missing is the methodology. Nothing on their site or in the hands on reviews states runs per prompt, sample sizes or confidence intervals. One reviewer ran twenty prompts across ten engines for a week, logged 662 responses, watched citation rank move around, and the product never quantified that movement. It also displays estimated prompt volume, which the same reviewer described as directional rather than an exact figure.

Pick Promptwatch if engine breadth and crawler visibility matter more to you than knowing the error bars, or if you want an API today.

Peec AI

Around $95 a month.

Peec separates branded from unbranded prompts, which puts it ahead of most of the field on the third question above. It also does original research and publishes it, including a study across roughly 200,000 AI responses and eight engines that measured the effect of listicle rank on brand visibility. A vendor that publishes its numbers is easier to trust than one that does not.

Pick Peec if you want the branded split and a European vendor at a mid market price.

Profound

Enterprise, priced on request.

The largest and best funded company in the category. If you have a procurement process, a security review and a budget that starts in four figures a month, Profound is the safe shortlist entry. It is not the tool you evaluate on a Tuesday afternoon with a credit card.

Writesonic

AI visibility inside a broader content and SEO suite.

Its distinguishing feature is the verify loop: after you act on a recommendation it measures again at set intervals so you can see whether anything moved. Useful if you want visibility tracking bundled with the writing tools rather than as a separate subscription and a separate login.

On prompt volumes

Several tools in this category show a search volume style number next to each prompt. Treat those with care. Nobody outside the model providers has access to real prompt frequency, and independent testing has found published figures off by very large multiples. LadderFox does not show them at all, which is a deliberate gap rather than a missing feature, and it is worth asking any vendor where their number comes from before you plan a quarter around it.

How to choose in an afternoon

Run the same three prompts your buyers would actually type through two or three of these tools on the free or trial tier. Then ask each one the same question: how many times did you ask, and how sure are you? The answers will separate these products faster than any feature table, including this one.

Method

Prices and features here were checked in July 2026 from vendor pricing pages and hands on reviews, and prices in this category move. The variance figures come from SparkToro's volunteer study, Kevin Indig's citation persistence work and Ahrefs' analysis of 26,283 cited pages. LadderFox is our own product, which is why its section is the only one with a list of reasons not to buy it.