Comparing toolsComparing tools
The best AI visibility tools, and who each one is for
There is no single best tool, because these products measure different things. Here are six, ours included. Every other vendor is described in its own words, read from its own site on 5 September 2026, and ours from the product itself. Beside each is who it suits, and beside ours, where it falls short. They are listed, not ranked.
Which AI visibility tools are worth comparing?
Profound, Peec AI, Scrunch AI, AthenaHQ, Rankscale and Delphi Monitor. They measure different things, and each is described below in its own words.
- Profound (tryprofound.com) describes itself as a full stack marketing platform, built around the Profound Index, prompt volume data and autonomous agents that do the work rather than only report it.
- Peec AI (peec.ai) describes itself as AI search analytics for marketing teams, built on three metrics they name as Visibility, Position and Sentiment.
- Scrunch AI (scrunchai.com) describes itself as a platform for how AI agents consume your site, covering content delivery to agents, agent traffic analytics, site diagnostics, and monitoring and citations.
- AthenaHQ (athenahq.ai) describes itself as a command centre for AI engine optimisation, with cross platform tracking, automated content recommendations, citation source analysis and link building in one workflow.
- Rankscale (rankscale.ai) describes itself as an AI visibility tracker for generative search, tracking brands, products and ads across the engines, with automated technical auditing.
- Delphi Monitor, which is ours. Delphi Monitor puts buying questions for your category to ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity and Grok, works out whether you are the recommendation rather than merely a name in the paragraph, finds the third party pages the assistants cite when they answer, checks the claims they repeat most about you against your own home page, and drafts outreach for the most pressing of those pages it can identify. Whoever runs each page decides whether you appear on it.
How do AI visibility tools differ?
Mostly in what they count and how widely: how many assistants and countries they cover, whether they measure the AI traffic on your own site, and whether they stop at a score or hand over work.
What each vendor says it does that Delphi Monitor does not, with how Delphi compares:
- Profound. Prompt Volumes, which they describe as seeing what millions of people ask AI so strategy can be aligned with demand. Nothing in Delphi estimates how many people ask a question, and Delphi says so rather than guessing. More on Profound.
- Peec AI. A free trial. Delphi has no free level: every level is paid, and the free demo is a request that a person answers. More on Peec AI.
- Scrunch AI. Agent traffic. They analyse the AI traffic that actually reaches your site, which is a server side measurement Delphi does not make at all: Delphi asks the assistants questions and reads the answers. More on Scrunch AI.
- AthenaHQ. Engine breadth. Their site lists eleven or more, naming ChatGPT, Perplexity, AI Overviews, AI Mode, Gemini, Claude, Copilot, Grok, DeepSeek, Meta AI and Mistral. Delphi measures fewer, and publishes which. More on AthenaHQ.
- Rankscale. Engine count. Their site says seventeen or more, including Google AI Overviews and AI Mode alongside the chat assistants. Delphi measures fewer, and publishes which. More on Rankscale.
Which AI visibility tool is right for you?
The one built for the question you need answered. Each vendor's own positioning is the best guide, and the lines below stay close to their words.
- Profound. If you want one platform to find the demand, measure it and then act on it with as little human involvement as possible, that is what Profound says it is for.
- Peec AI. If you want a clean dashboard your team can read on day one, and you want to try it free before you pay, Peec is built for that and Delphi is not.
- Scrunch AI. If your question is what the crawlers and agents are doing on your own property, Scrunch is measuring that and Delphi is measuring what the assistants answer when asked your buyers' questions.
- AthenaHQ. If you want the widest engine coverage and a single place to run the whole optimisation programme, that is what Athena says it is for.
- Rankscale. If you sell in many countries at once, or you need to watch paid placement inside AI answers, Rankscale covers ground Delphi does not.
- Delphi Monitor. Delphi Monitor is for the team that has to explain a number to somebody who will push back on it. It prints a margin of error beside the Delphi Index, and the dashboard says when a movement in it is smaller than that margin.
Where does Delphi Monitor fall short?
It measures fewer assistants than some tools in this category, in one market at a time, once a month on its first level. It has no free level: it starts at $99 a month. It does not estimate how many people ask a question, measure the AI traffic reaching your own site, or track paid placement inside answers.
Those are real limits and some are deliberate. It asks each question more than once because an assistant does not give the same answer twice: across 1,017 cases where one assistant was asked one question more than once, it named an identical set of brands 21.5 per cent of the time, measured most recently on 24 August 2026, in our own study. Measuring less often, and more carefully, is the trade that makes a movement in the Index something it can stand behind.
What do these tools publish about their own accuracy?
Of the 7 vendors whose public pages could be read on 5 September 2026, none published a margin of error, and none published how many prompts a score is built from.
That is a statement about what the category publishes rather than about any one product, and it is the question to ask whoever you buy from, including us. The three questions to ask any vendor set out what a straight answer looks like.
Looking for an alternative to one of them?
Profound and Peec AI each have a page of their own, listing the other tools against that vendor's own positioning.
Related answers
- The three questions to ask any vendorWhat to ask before you buy, and what the public pages of the vendors we could read did and did not answer.
- What AI visibility tracking costsWhat drives the price of a measurement, and what you should expect to pay for.
- How every figure here is worked outThe five steps, how they combine into one Index, and how the band that travels with the Index is drawn.
Which of the five is holding your brand back?
Whichever you choose, ask it the same two questions: how many prompts is a score built from, and what is its margin of error. The answers decide it faster than any list, this one included.