The Best AI Visibility Tools for Local Businesses (2026): An Honest Comparison

What you are actually buying

Every tool on this list does some version of the same thing: it asks AI engines questions, records the answers, and counts who got named and what got cited. The differences that decide whether the number is useful to you are narrower than the marketing suggests, and there are four of them.

• Which engines. ChatGPT alone is a different product from ChatGPT plus Gemini plus Perplexity, and the cheap tiers are frequently ChatGPT-only.
• How many prompts, and who writes them. A tool with a 15-prompt limit that you populate by hand is a different amount of work from a tool that generates customer-style prompts for your business and city.
• The unit of comparison. A brand against other brands in a category, or a business against the specific competitors a customer in your city is choosing between.
• Whether it does anything after the number. A dashboard tells you that you are invisible; a plan tells you which page to write next. Both are legitimate purchases, but they are not the same purchase.

The nine tools, with prices

Prices below are current as of July 2026. Where a vendor does not publish pricing, the figure is attributed to the third party that reported it and marked as unconfirmed — a number without a source is worse than no number.

• Profound — $99/month Starter (billed annually, ChatGPT only), $399/month Growth (three engines), Enterprise custom (up to ten engines). The deepest enterprise stack in the category: daily tracking, prompt analytics, agent analytics, SOC 2. Built for enterprise brands and the agencies serving them. Brand-first, with no local focus. Detailed comparison: RecoSignal vs Profound.
• Peec AI — approximately €85 starter, €205 pro, €425 advanced. Pricing is not officially published; these figures come from third-party reviews and should be verified with the vendor. Aimed at SMBs and agencies, with a well-regarded interface and multi-country support.
• Otterly.AI — $29, $189 and $489 per month, officially published. Prompt limits of 15, 100 and 400 respectively; Gemini, Google's AI Mode and Claude are paid add-ons. The cheapest genuine entry point in the category, with the trade-off that you build the prompt set yourself.
• Scrunch AI — Core at roughly $250/month according to G2; enterprise and agency oriented. Strong on the machine-facing side: agent traffic, AI readiness of your site, sitemap and crawlability work.
• AthenaHQ — Essential free, Starter $295/month, Enterprise custom. 3,600 credits per month and nine models on Starter. The only tool on this list with explicit verticals for Restaurants, Franchise, Fitness and Location Services — the closest anyone gets to local — though Starter is single-region.
• Evertune — enterprise, pricing not public. ToolRadar has reported approximately $3,000/month; that figure is not confirmed by the vendor. Fortune 500 buyers, ten-plus models, and a consumer panel layered on top of the engine measurement.
• Brandlight — enterprise, no public pricing at all. Fortune 500 and global brands.
• Semrush AI Toolkit — $199 Starter, $299 Pro+, $549 Advanced per month, with prompt limits of 50, 100 and 200 per day. Built for SEO teams, and the obvious choice if your workflow already lives inside Semrush.
• Ahrefs Brand Radar — an add-on at approximately $199 according to third parties; verify with Ahrefs. Its distinguishing asset is scale: an index of 406M+ prompts. A research instrument rather than an action-first product.
• RecoSignal — free Snapshot, $149 one-time Action Plan, Monitor $79/month, Grow $149/month. Three engines, 138 measurements per audit, built around local intent. Our own pricing, listed here for completeness rather than as the conclusion.

Who each one is actually for

The useful version of this page is not a scoreboard. It is a set of conditions under which each tool is the right thing to buy — including the ones that are not us.

• Buy Semrush AI Toolkit if your team already works inside Semrush every day. The AI Toolkit sits next to the keyword and backlink data you already trust, and the integration is worth more than a marginally better standalone dashboard. At $199 to $549 a month with daily prompt limits of 50 to 200, it prices as what it is: an SEO team's add-on.
• Buy Otterly.AI if you want a real measurement for as little money as possible and you are willing to do the thinking yourself. At $29 a month for 15 prompts you get an honest signal, and 15 well-chosen prompts written by someone who knows the business beat a generated hundred that do not. Note the add-on structure: Gemini, AI Mode and Claude cost extra.
• Buy AthenaHQ if you run multiple locations, a franchise system, or a chain of restaurants or gyms. It is the only tool here that treats those as first-class verticals, and the free Essential tier means you can test the fit before the $295 Starter. The constraint to check first: Starter is single-region, which matters if your locations span markets.
• Buy Profound if you are an enterprise brand or an agency serving one. Daily tracking, up to ten engines, prompt and agent analytics, SOC 2. Nothing on this list is deeper, and for a national brand the depth is the point.
• Buy Scrunch AI if your problem is the machine-facing side of your site — whether AI agents can crawl, read and act on your pages at all. That is a real and separate problem from whether the engines name you.
• Consider Evertune or Brandlight only if you are a Fortune 500 with a procurement process, in which case you are not reading a page like this one to decide.
• Use Ahrefs Brand Radar for research rather than for operations. A 406M-prompt index answers questions about what the world asks. It does not tell a clinic what to fix.

The gap all nine share

Every tool above measures brands. That is not a criticism — it is who the category sold to first, and the products are shaped accordingly. But it produces a consistent blind spot, and if you are a local business it is the spot you are standing in.

None of them passes location the way a real customer's device passes it. None of them compares you against the four specific competitors your customers are actually choosing between — they compare you against a category. None of them asks the questions that come immediately before a booking: the urgent one (a chipped tooth tonight), the insurance one (does this practice take my plan), the procedure one (who does this specific thing, and what does it cost). AthenaHQ comes closest with its Restaurants, Franchise, Fitness and Location Services verticals, which is why it is the tool we would point a multi-location client at first.

The consequence is a number that reads fine and means nothing locally. A single-location clinic does not have national share of voice. It has one question, and the question is whether the assistant says its name when someone nearby asks who to go to.

What our own measurement found

We built RecoSignal around the local question, and then measured it, because the alternative is asserting things. In July 2026 we ran three Dallas markets and counted every source the engines cited behind their recommendations.

Dental: 1,085 of 1,367 citations — 79% — were the clinics' own websites. The biggest platforms were nowhere close: Healthgrades 61, Zocdoc 59, Yelp 45 (full benchmark). Medspa: 948 of 1,199 (benchmark). Plastic surgery: 837 of 1,153 (benchmark). Between 73% and 79% across three markets, the same shape each time.

If you assumed AI recommendations were decided by directories — and most local marketing advice still assumes it — that is the number to argue with. In these markets the engines were reading the clinics' own pages, which puts the lever back where a business can actually reach it: the services stated in plain text, the prices a machine can read, the practitioners named with credentials, the insurance question answered on a page rather than on the phone.

One metro, three verticals, one measurement window; the limits are published with the data. It is still primary evidence, and we have not seen its equivalent published by a tool measuring brands.

Where RecoSignal fits

One audit is 138 live measurements: 30 customer-style prompts on each of ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity, with the eight highest-intent prompts asked three times each because the engines are non-deterministic and a single answer is an anecdote. The prompts cover five intents — best-of, near-me with the location passed as a structured parameter where the engine supports one, attribute questions about insurance or device or price, comparisons, and urgent same-day questions. The full method, including the engine weights, the verdict bands and what the score cannot prove, is published here.

The free Snapshot gives a score, your share of recommendations against your actual competitors, and your single biggest gap. The $149 Action Plan turns that into a prioritized list of fixes with an AI-Readiness Scorecard a developer can work from. Monitor ($79/month) re-measures; Grow ($149/month) does the work. Agencies white-label the whole thing (RecoSignal for agencies).

What we do not do, stated plainly so you do not buy the wrong thing: no daily tracking, three engines rather than ten, no SOC 2, no agent analytics. If those are your requirements, Profound is the better purchase, and we would rather say so here than have you find out after paying us.

How to choose in five minutes

If you strip the category down, the decision comes to one question: is your customer anywhere, or is your customer nearby.

• Customers anywhere — a brand, national or multi-market → Profound, or Semrush if you already live in that stack.
• Customers nearby, one location or a few → a local-intent measurement. Start with a free AI Visibility Snapshot or Otterly's $29 tier if you would rather write the prompts yourself.
• Customers nearby, many locations or a franchise → AthenaHQ, with the single-region limit on Starter checked against your footprint.
• You are an agency → the client book decides: enterprise brands point to Profound, local clients point to white-label local audits.
• You are unsure whether AI matters for your business at all → measure once before buying anything. In our Dallas dental benchmark, most tracked practices had never appeared in a single AI answer, which is a cheaper thing to learn from a free scan than from a year of a subscription.

What none of these tools can promise

No tool on this list — ours included — can guarantee that an AI assistant will recommend your business. There is no #1 position inside ChatGPT to buy, the answer changes with the exact question and the competition, and the engines' makers change how they work without notice. A vendor promising a ranking is describing something that does not exist.

What every honest tool here does is count: how often you are named across many realistic questions, who is named instead, which sources the engines cited. From there, closing named, specific gaps raises the probability that the next answer includes you. Probability is the whole claim, and it is enough to work with. The rest of the vocabulary — guaranteed placement, AI ranking, #1 in ChatGPT — is noise.

If you have not measured yet, the sequence that wastes the least money is: measure once, read what the engines cited, fix the largest gap, measure again. How an AI visibility audit works walks through what a real audit contains, and AI visibility vs. local SEO covers what your existing SEO work already buys you here.