Who Should You Hire for AI Search Visibility?

Ask ChatGPT who to hire to get your brand cited in AI answers and you get a list of five to eight companies. Ask Perplexity the same question and you get a different list. Very few of the names overlap, and almost nobody explains that the companies on those lists are not doing the same job.

We run these questions daily as part of our own work, so we see the lists change. This is a map of who is actually in this market, what they charge where they publish it, and how to work out which kind you need.

The market splits in two

Every AI engine we monitor sorts this category the same way, and it matches how the companies describe themselves.

Monitoring platforms tell you where you stand. They run buyer questions through the AI engines on a schedule, record whether you were named, track your position against competitors, and show it on a dashboard. They are software. You log in, you read the numbers, and then you go and do something about them.

Service providers do the work. They audit, write the content, fix the technical layer, chase third-party coverage, and implement. They are agencies. You brief them, they execute, and you review what they produce.

Gartner formalised the software half in March 2026 with a Market Guide for Answer Engine Visibility Tools, sizing the category at $481 million in 2024 and projecting $729 million by 2031. That guide names Profound, Peec AI, Scrunch, Otterly, Evertune and Semrush among its representative vendors.

The monitoring platforms

Profound is the best funded by a wide margin, having raised more than $155 million across three rounds, most recently a $96 million Series C led by Lightspeed in February 2026 at a reported billion dollar valuation. Its distinguishing feature is Prompt Volumes, panel data on what people actually type into AI tools, which is closer to keyword research than pure monitoring. Published pricing starts at $99 a month, with a $399 tier above it and enterprise gated behind sales.

Peec AI is Berlin based and raised a $21 million Series A in November 2025. It tests across web interfaces and APIs, handles multiple languages well, and includes unlimited seats. Its published tiers run from roughly $95 to $495 a month depending on how many questions you track.

Otterly is the cheapest serious option, starting at $29 a month and topping out at $489. It is bootstrapped, based in Austria, and frames itself around a workflow rather than a dashboard, moving from research through monitoring to optimisation.

AthenaHQ has a free tier and a $295 a month paid tier, and it markets aggressively on price against Profound and Peec.

Evertune, based in New York, raised a $15 million Series A in August 2025. It draws a distinction most competitors do not, separating brand awareness where your name appeared without being asked for from awareness where the question named you directly. That distinction matters more than it sounds. Its pricing is not public.

Two names on this list are no longer independent companies, which matters if you are reading older comparisons. Scrunch AI was acquired by Sitecore in June 2026. Semrush was acquired by Adobe, a deal announced in November 2025 that closed in April 2026, and its AI Visibility Toolkit now sits inside Adobe at $99 a month standalone.

The service providers

iPullRank, founded by Mike King, is the most technically deep shop in the category, working on crawl architecture, structured data and what it calls citation readiness. Its pricing is not published and its case studies are anonymised.

Siege Media publishes both its minimum, $8,000 a month, and its results, and it is one of very few agencies reporting AI specific numbers against named clients rather than traffic against logos.

Omniscient Digital works specifically with B2B SaaS and publishes a $10,000 a month starting point.

Single Grain, NP Digital, Foundation Marketing, First Page Sage and Avenue Z all operate in this space with varying emphasis, from paid media to public relations to content. None of them publishes pricing.

How to choose between the two

The honest version is that this is a question about who does the work, not about which software is best.

A monitoring platform will tell you that you are absent from the questions your buyers ask. That is genuinely valuable and it is the right first purchase, because you cannot fix a problem you have not measured. What it will not do is write the content, fix your schema, or earn you a mention on the review site the engines keep quoting. Somebody has to do that, and if it is not an agency then it is someone on your team, which means the real cost of the cheap option includes a person you may not have.

So the question to ask yourself is whether you have someone who can act on a dashboard. If you have a content team with capacity, buy the software, it is the cheaper path by a distance. If you do not, the software becomes a subscription that tells you the same bad news every month.

For what it is worth, we sit on the service side. We publish our price at $5,000 a month, which is below both agencies in this list who publish theirs.

One thing worth knowing before you buy either

Nobody in this category can guarantee you citations, and you should treat it as a warning sign if anyone offers. Google's own documentation states plainly that meeting every requirement and best practice still does not mean it will crawl, index or serve your content. OpenAI says there is no way to guarantee top placement in ChatGPT search. Any vendor promising a guaranteed outcome is making a claim the platforms themselves refuse to make.

Frequently asked questions

Do I need both a platform and an agency? Often, yes, and most agencies use one of these platforms to measure their own work. The question is whether you are paying for the software twice.

Is this just SEO with a new name? No, though the overlap is real. Crawlability and authority feed both. What differs is that AI answers name a handful of brands with no second page, so the work concentrates on being one of them rather than ranking somewhere on a list of ten.

How quickly does any of this move? Slower than the marketing suggests. Plan in quarters.

Sources

Gartner, Market Guide for Answer Engine Visibility Tools, 9 March 2026 (ID G00841100)
Profound pricing and Series C: tryprofound.com/pricing; Fortune, 24 February 2026
Peec AI Series A: TechCrunch, 17 November 2025
Otterly pricing: otterly.ai/pricing
AthenaHQ pricing: athenahq.ai
Evertune Series A: PRNewswire, 12 August 2025
Sitecore acquires Scrunch: PRNewswire, 3 June 2026
Adobe acquires Semrush: news.adobe.com, 19 November 2025
Siege Media pricing: siegemedia.com
Omniscient Digital pricing: beomniscient.com
Google Search Central, AI features and your website
OpenAI Help Center, ChatGPT Search