Here is a Saturday-afternoon experiment worth an hour of any brand owner’s time: take your own company, run it through five free AI visibility checkers, and compare what comes back.
The results teach you more about how ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity treat your brand than a month of guessing, because the tools disagree in instructive ways. Each one catches something the others do not, and the gaps tell you what each was actually built for.
The exercise matters because AI answers now carry real purchase decisions, and they are strange in ways a Google-trained brain does not expect.
A July 2026 study by Honeyb that ran identical buyer questions three times each across four engines found ChatGPT agreeing with itself on only 42% of the brands it named between runs.
Any tool that checks once and hands you a verdict is reporting a coin flip. Keep that in mind as the rubric below weighs repeated sampling heavily.
The rubric
Four questions, applied to every tool: what does the check actually test, does it sample repeatedly or look once, does it show you the evidence behind its verdict, and what does it tell you to do next. Price matters less than buyers assume, because every tool here has a free way in.
1. Honeyb
The AI visibility checker tool from Honeyb runs the widest first check of the five: how the major engines describe and recommend the brand, plus a test nothing else on this list attempts, whether AI crawlers can physically connect to your site.
That second half catches a failure that stays invisible in every analytics tool you own, a CDN or firewall quietly refusing GPTBot while your site looks perfect in a browser.
The paid platform is where the category’s most unusual feature lives: a daily ranked recommendation that says what to fix and why, with a content engine that can draft the fix. Plans start at $29 a month, with a trial. The caveat is specialisation; classic rank tracking is not its job.
2. Semrush AI toolkit checker
The free checker attached to Semrush’s AI module benefits from the suite’s data plumbing and is the natural first stop for anyone already paying for Semrush.
It reports brand presence in AI results cleanly. What to verify before relying on it: whether the module behind it samples on a schedule at your tier, because a one-off appearance and a tracked share of voice are different claims, and the toolkit’s recommendations remain classic SEO advice rather than AI-answer work.
If what you are really weighing is a whole-suite move rather than a checker, that is a different comparison, closer to the Search Atlas alternatives question than to anything on this list.
3. AthenaHQ free audit
AthenaHQ’s ten-minute audit is one of the more generous free looks in the category and reads like a consultant’s first pass: where you appear, where you do not, and how you compare in your category.
The full product (around $295 a month) is a capable mid-market monitor. It reports rather than acts, so what happens after the audit depends entirely on your team’s bandwidth.
4. Otterly.AI trial
Otterly’s trial shows its character quickly: define the prompts you care about, and it checks them across AI surfaces on a schedule. At $29 a month it is the lightest serious monitoring in the field, and the trial is a fair preview.
The depth ceiling is real, and there is no action layer, but as a running pulse on a handful of important questions it earns its price several times over.
5. Peec AI trial
Peec’s trial is worth running specifically if your buyers ask questions in more than one language, because per-language answers genuinely differ and almost nothing else on this list treats that seriously. From around $89 a month.
English-only brands will find the differentiator wasted on them; multilingual brands will find it nowhere else at this price.
What the comparison teaches?
| Tool | Free way in | Unique catch | After the check |
|---|---|---|---|
| Honeyb | Free check + trial | Crawler reachability failures | Daily ranked recommendation; content engine drafts |
| Semrush checker | Free checker | Suite-integrated context | Classic SEO recommendations |
| AthenaHQ | Free 10-min audit | Category comparison framing | Reports |
| Otterly.AI | Trial | Cheapest scheduled prompts | Reports |
| Peec AI | Trial | Per-language answers | Reports |
Pricing and trials from public pages, checked July 2026; confirm before buying.
Three things to watch for while you compare
Agreement is not accuracy. When two checkers disagree about your presence, the instinct is to trust the flattering one. The correct move is to trust neither single reading and prefer the tool that shows how many samples sit behind its number, because the engines themselves disagree with their own previous answers constantly.
The free tier reveals the paid product. A checker that shows its evidence free will show it paid; a checker that returns an unexplained score free will charge you for more unexplained scores. The free run is a preview of the vendor’s whole philosophy, which is exactly why running all five is so informative.
Note what happens the day after. Every tool here can tell you something is wrong. Write down, for each one, what it proposes you do about it on Monday morning. For most of the list the honest answer is “read the report again”, and that single column predicts which subscriptions survive the year.
Run all five and a pattern emerges: the checks agree on roughly the brands you expect and disagree at the margins, which is the volatility problem made visible.
The practical conclusion is to pick one tool that samples daily and shows its evidence, treat the others as occasional second opinions, and pay most attention to the tool that ends with a next step rather than a chart. On that last criterion, Honeyb is currently the only one of the five playing that game at all.
