There are two kinds of AI visibility tool, and they answer different questions.
Brand trackers ask ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and the rest a fixed list of questions every day, then count how often your brand is named, where it lands in the answer and which sites got cited. Product checks work one product at a time: either they track which of your products get shown, or they read your product data and tell you which facts are missing. Before you compare prices, decide which question you’d actually act on.
The question you’re paying to answer
A brand tracker answers “When people ask AI about our category, how often do we come up, compared with our competitors?” That’s a marketing question. It’s useful if you report share of voice to a boss or a board, or if your brand name is what people search for.
A product check answers “When a shopper asks for a quiet humidifier for a big room, is this humidifier shown, and if not, what’s stopping it?” That’s an operations question. The answer is usually a fix on the product page: a missing noise level, a vague “runs quietly”, a room size nobody wrote down.
Small Shopify brands mostly have the second problem. Shoppers ask AI assistants for a product that fits a need, not for a brand they’ve never heard of.
The tools, side by side
Here’s what each tool’s own pricing page said when we read them all on the same day. “Prompts” means the questions the tool asks AI assistants for you, usually daily.
| Tool | What it checks | Assistants on the entry plan | Cheapest way in |
|---|---|---|---|
| Peec AI | Brand, plus individual products from your Shopify catalog | Pick 3 of ChatGPT, AI Mode, AI Overviews, Copilot, Gemini, Naver | $95/mo, 50 prompts |
| Profound | Brand; ChatGPT Shopping on Enterprise | ChatGPT, Gemini, AI Overviews on the trial | Free 7-day trial, then custom |
| Otterly | Brand | ChatGPT, AI Overviews, Perplexity, Copilot | $29/mo, 15 prompts |
| Semrush AI Visibility | Brand; multi-product on Enterprise | ChatGPT, Google AI, Gemini, Perplexity | $99/mo per domain, billed yearly, 25 prompts |
| Similarweb AI Search | Brand, plus traffic from AI | Not listed on the pricing page | $129/mo, or $99/mo billed yearly, 150 prompts |
| Scrunch | Brand; products on Enterprise | ChatGPT, Perplexity, AI Overviews, Copilot | $250/mo, 125 prompts |
| AthenaHQ | Brand | ChatGPT, Perplexity, AI Overviews, Gemini, Copilot on free; 11 models on Starter | Free with $25 credit; $295/mo after |
| Evertune | Brand, plus ChatGPT Shopping insights | Up to 5 models | $60/mo, plus 10% of any ChatGPT ad spend it runs |
| Writesonic | Brand; shopping on Enterprise | ChatGPT, Gemini, AI Overviews | $79/mo billed yearly, 50 prompts |
| FoundRate | Your products: asks ChatGPT buying questions, then checks your product data | ChatGPT | Free scan of 5 products; $49/mo for 20 |
| AgentReady | Your store’s data: products, policies, structured data, then fixes it | ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity | Free audit; paid from $9/mo |
| Shopify’s search preview | Your products in Shopify Catalog, with a listing quality bar | None directly: it shows Shopify’s catalog search | Free in your admin |
Two things jump out. Prices are set by the number of questions, not by the number of products. And “products” usually means the top tier.
Most trackers count your brand, and a few now count products
Product tracking has become a feature, but where it sits on the price list varies a lot:
- On every plan: Peec pulls your catalog from Shopify (or a CSV) and reports visibility, position and “win rate” for each product, starting at $95 a month. Evertune lists ChatGPT Shopping insights on its $60 plan too.
- Enterprise only: Profound’s ChatGPT Shopping, Scrunch’s product view, Writesonic’s shopping tracker and Semrush’s multi-product view all sit on custom-priced plans.
- Product-first, built for Shopify: FoundRate and AgentReady start from your products and end in a fix list. They’re the cheapest of the bunch and install as Shopify apps.
So “brand tracker vs product check” isn’t a clean line between vendors any more. It’s a line between plans. Ask the vendor: “Can I see results for one product, not just my brand?” If the answer is “on Enterprise”, that tells you who the tool is built for.
What the numbers can tell you
Every tracker works the same way underneath: it asks a set of questions and counts the answers. Peec does the math right on its pricing page: 50 questions, 3 assistants, every day, makes 4,500 answers a month.
That’s a sample, and a good one for spotting trends. Keep three things in mind when you read it:
- Your customers don’t see the tool’s answers. OpenAI says ChatGPT picks shopping results using the question and the person’s context, such as Memory and custom instructions. A tool asking from a clean account sees one version.
- The questions are the whole game. A tracker with your brand name in half its questions will report great visibility. Write the questions from what customers really ask. Our guide to building a question list shows how.
- Compare a tool with itself, not with another tool. One marketer who tried ten of these tools got the sharpest reply in the thread: did any two give the same number for the same question on the same day? Each tool asks its own way, so watch one tool’s trend over time.
If a tool rolls all of this into one score, read how to check a score before you trust it. We retired our own first score after finding that about 65% of its points came from reviews.
Which one you need
Start with your situation, not the feature list.
You sell a handful of products people buy on a fact (how warm, how quiet, what size). Start free: run Shopify’s search preview on the questions customers ask, try FoundRate’s or AgentReady’s free scan, and do a one-product audit by hand.
Pay for a product check once you want it re-run every week without thinking about it.
You have a marketing team and competitors you track by name. A brand tracker earns its keep, and Otterly at $29 is a cheap way to learn what you’d actually look at.
If product-level results matter too, Peec includes them from its first plan. If you already pay for Semrush or Similarweb, try their add-on before buying another login.
You run a large catalog or several brands. You’re the customer the Enterprise tiers are built for: Profound, Scrunch, Writesonic, Evertune Pro. Get the product-level view in writing before you sign.
You want to know which fact is missing on one product. No tracker tells you that directly. A tracker can say a product wasn’t shown; it can’t tell you your listing says “runs quietly” while the one that was shown says “26 dB”. That’s a job for a product check or an audit.
Try before you buy: a two-week test
Most of these tools have a free trial or a free scan. Use it like this, and you’ll know in two weeks whether a tool is worth its price.
- Pick three products. Your best seller, one that sells on a specific fact, and one you suspect is invisible.
- Write ten questions customers really ask. Take them from support emails, reviews and return reasons. Include two your product should lose, like a big-room question for a bedroom humidifier.
- Load the same questions into every tool you’re trying. Same country, same wording.
- After a week, ask each tool six things:
- Can I see results for each product, not just my brand?
- Can I read the actual answer text, not just a percentage?
- Does it show which sites or listings the assistant used?
- Does it tell me why a product wasn’t shown, in terms I can fix?
- Can I export the raw results?
- Did the numbers stay steady from day to day on questions where nothing changed?
- Make one fix and watch. Change one fact on one product, and see whether the tool notices. Our before-and-after testing guide walks through it.
A tool that passes all six on your products is worth paying for. One that only gives you a share-of-voice chart is a reporting tool. That’s fine, as long as reporting is what you need.
How we checked
On November 4, 2026 we read the public pricing page of every tool in the table, plus the product pages where pricing pages were thin (Profound’s Shopping Analysis announcement and Writesonic’s shopping tracker). Every price and feature above is what those pages said that day, in US dollars before tax. We also re-read Shopify’s agentic storefronts help page and OpenAI’s shopping help page. We didn’t sign up for or run any of the tools.
Your next step
Write down the one question you’d act on this month. If it’s about your brand against named competitors, start an Otterly or Peec trial. If it’s about a specific product, open Shopify’s search preview, type the question a customer asked you last week, and see what comes back.