Ask buyers who have shortlisted, piloted or bought an AI-visibility tool what they would tell their past self, and the answers repeatedly return to what the tools can see and what teams can do with the output: the prompts a platform tracks, the content work its dashboard points at, whether it measures or writes, how the SEO suite's AI module compares with a specialist, how vendors reach the shortlist, and how fast the market moves under a contract.
The six lessons
For prompt-tracking tools, the prompt list is part of the setup
One limit buyers describe repeatedly is structural: much of what these platforms report depends on the prompts being tracked, though buyers describe differences in how vendors source or expand that set. One buyer says Profound “is pretty limited to just prompts that you track. It can't tell you prompts people are searching or broad visibility the same way that SEO tools can.” Buyers split on what to do about it. One walked away from trackers that asked for a fixed set — “I don't trust myself to select those 50 prompts” — while another wants “a more finite, deliberate set of prompts that map a particular patient journey” rather than the wide net their platform casts. A third singles out Profound's panel data of real searches as its strength, because it is “rooted in real customer behavior”. Our recommendation, not a practice buyers describe: draft the prompt set before the trial, and judge each tool on how it helps you build and maintain it.
Named in this context: Profound · Scrunch · Conductor
Buyers often find reporting ahead of actionability
Several buyers describe the platforms as stronger at reporting position than at directing the work. One says of Scrunch that “it kind of stops at providing that level of actionable insights. Going deep is obviously on us.” Another, screening the category, puts the requirement plainly: “you need to move away from only reporting to being actionable.” A buyer who trialled several came away with one message — “they all told us the same story, which is we need to develop more GEO-friendly content” — and deferred buying until that work was done. The work they describe next is content, and some of it sits off their own site: FAQs and structured data on product pages, review sites, Reddit, and publishing through third parties, because, as one puts it, “LLMs look for third-party resources and proof points as their basic source of information.”
Named in this context: Scrunch · Reddit · Trustpilot
Separate the measurement job from the content job
Some buyers draw this line explicitly. One describes the choice in exactly those terms: “Profound has approached it from a measurement and then content generation point of view, whereas Airops was content writing first and then measurement.” Another bought both for that reason, AirOps for its content agents and Profound as “primarily just metric-based”. The content side carries its own caveat: a buyer who rates AirOps highly credits the onboarding rather than the software — “it's not really the product, it's the service package that made the difference. The product itself is really hard to use.” The interviews show that measurement and content production can be separate buying jobs, even when individual platforms increasingly span both.
Named in this context: Profound · AirOps
Judge the SEO suite's AI module separately from the suite
Buyers shopping for AI visibility are not unhappy with their SEO platforms: they rate them at 7.7, level with what every other buyer gives the same tools. Their complaints are about the AI module added on top. One says Semrush “is a great tool for SEO recommendation, keywords, competition landscape, content recommendation. But for GEO, this is where they are lacking”. Another finds Semrush's “implementation of AI prompt tracking has been lackluster”; a third says of Searchmetrics that “the newly added AI visibility functionalities are not super high level compared to dedicated tools”; a fourth says Botify “could have done a much better job of really presenting the AI visibility graphs.” Several buyers treat SEO and AI visibility as connected disciplines — “SEO is the backbone of AEO and GEO” — and some run a dedicated AI-visibility tool beside an incumbent SEO suite rather than replacing it. A few have dropped Semrush or plan to, one because a content-first platform overlaps it, while others trust the incumbent precisely because of its SEO record. The churn side of that story is on Semrush alternatives.
Named in this context: Semrush · Botify · Searchmetrics · BrightEdge · AirOps
Reputation gets vendors shortlisted; some structured evaluations find little separation
Profound is the most-named purpose-built platform in these interviews, and some buyers are candid that reputation helped put it on the shortlist. One team “didn't really evaluate that many other tools just because there was an overwhelming sense that this is the tool that everyone is using. And maybe they're just doing really good marketing.” Another chose it because “it was the one that got better funding”. Some buyers who ran a structured comparison describe a narrow field, decided on price, coverage and interface. After an RFP, one says “there was not a lot of difference between these vendors” and credits scale and pricing; another picked Profound over Scrunch for “strong UI/UX and ability to comprehensively cover all answer engines globally”; a third found Scrunch “the most mature of all of the ones that we spoke with for a reasonable price”. Price appears in several decisions against Profound — one buyer calls it “too much for what I need right now” — and a buyer who used it in an earlier role now prefers Scrunch for the number of prompts it monitors. The implication — ours, not a buyer's — is that reputation can determine who reaches the shortlist even when the eventual evaluation turns on more specific differences such as price, coverage, interface and prompt capacity.
Named in this context: Profound · Scrunch · Bluefish
Many buyers are keeping their commitment flexible
Several buyers expect this category to move faster than a normal contract term, and buy accordingly. One describes “17 different pilots going on right now with many different vendors”; another is “spending 2026 doing research on vendors” before committing to a full strategy; a third wants to settle “what we should be tracking” before investing in more tools. A few skip the vendor and query the models directly, which one says gives “full control of what we want to run and how we want to process the data.” Others are explicitly buying for a longer horizon — one chose its platform so it “won't have to be looking for a tool in the next 12 to 18 months” — so the pattern is not universal. The interviews show buyers using pilots, extended research and flexible architectures while the category changes.
Named in this context: Profound · Bluefish
How buyers rate the tools
Every figure is the average across verified buyer interviews, on published transcripts. Most of the tools buyers use for AI visibility are SEO platforms with an AI module added, so they sit in the same table as the purpose-built platforms. These are overall product ratings from buyers in the corpus, not ratings of AI-visibility functionality specifically. Tools too thinly rated for a number are named without one.
| Tool | Rating | What buyers describe |
|---|---|---|
| Botify | 8 | Enterprise SEO platform adding GEO prompt tracking; one buyer finds its AI-visibility reporting behind the specialists'. Rated by fewer buyers than a decimal needs, so rounded to the nearest half. |
| BrightEdge | 7.9 | Enterprise SEO platform that buyers are extending into LLM visibility; described as priced for enterprise scale. |
| Semrush | 7.7 | The SEO suite AI-visibility buyers most often already run. Its newer AI-tracking module draws the complaints, not the suite. |
| Ahrefs | 7.5 | SEO suite whose AI-visibility features buyers are starting to use — early on GEO for one buyer, more limited for another. |
| Profound | 7.5 | The most-named purpose-built platform. Praised for reporting depth, engine coverage and interface; questioned on price. Rounded to the nearest half. |
| Conductor | 7.5 | SEO platform with prompt tracking. Credited for showing prompts by intent; one buyer finds it carries too much to act on. Rounded to the nearest half. |
| Scrunch | not rated | Monitoring tool one buyer chose as the most mature for its price; another found onboarding confusing. |
| AirOps | not rated | Content-first: AI-search content production with measurement added. Named often, rated by few. |
| Bluefish | not rated | Shortlisted by consumer brands; one chose it through a multi-vendor RFP. |
The stories behind the lessons
The counter-current: some buyers can already see the revenue — in their attribution tools
Most buyers here cannot tie AI visibility to sales, and the measurement gap is real. It is not universal. A retailer's marketing chief says shoppers arriving from AI answers convert at a rate they call “insanely high”. Two direct-to-consumer brands see ChatGPT climbing their referral reports: one through Triple Whale, which also shows “what were the prompts that led the individual to purchase from ChatGPT”, the other through Triple Whale and a customer survey where “ChatGPT shows up constantly as the source in which somebody found us from.” None of those numbers came from an AI-visibility tool. Our read — ours, not a buyer's — is that AI-search revenue measurement may sit outside the AI-visibility platform itself. In these examples, the revenue signal appears in attribution tools and customer surveys rather than in the AI-visibility tool.
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Get my read →What this means for your AI-visibility evaluation
Across these interviews, two recurring evaluation questions are what a platform can see and who will act on its output. Prompt-tracking tools report on the prompts they are given, several buyers find reporting ahead of actionability, and measurement and content can be separate jobs; the SEO suites buyers already run are rated well, while several buyers judge their AI modules behind the specialists. Our recommendation, not a practice buyers describe: write the prompt set and decide who owns the content work before the trial, then run the trial on those prompts rather than on the vendor's demo. For what the category is and how buyers fund it, see What is answer engine optimization?; for the market behind it, The scramble to be the AI's answer; and for the SEO suites, Semrush alternatives, Semrush vs. BrightEdge and Semrush vs. Ahrefs.
For what these tools cost and how buyers pay for the work, see what buyers actually pay for AI-visibility tools.
Common questions
What do buyers wish they had known before buying an AI visibility tool?
Six things recur in these interviews. For prompt-tracking tools, the prompt list shapes what gets measured, so building it is part of the setup. Several buyers find reporting ahead of actionability, and some of the content work that follows sits off their own site. Measurement and content production can be separate buying jobs. Buyers rate their SEO suites well, but several find the suites' AI modules weaker than the specialists'. Reputation helps put vendors on the shortlist, while some structured evaluations found little separation. And many buyers are keeping their commitment flexible while the category changes.
Which AI visibility tool do buyers rate highest?
The interviews do not provide comparable AI-visibility-specific ratings across all of these tools. Profound is the only purpose-built AI-visibility platform with enough ratings to publish a score, at around 7.5 out of 10, rounded to the nearest half. SEO platforms also appear in the ratings — BrightEdge at 7.9, Semrush at 7.7, Ahrefs at 7.5, Conductor at around 7.5 and Botify at around 8 — but those are overall product ratings and should not be read as ratings of their AI-visibility modules. Scrunch, AirOps and Bluefish are named by buyers but rated by too few of them to publish a figure.
Do AI visibility tools replace SEO tools?
These interviews show both. Buyers in market for AI visibility rate their SEO platforms at 7.7, level with what every other buyer gives the same tools, and several describe SEO as the foundation of AI-search work. Their complaints are about the suites' newer AI modules, which several judge behind the dedicated tools, and some run a dedicated tool beside the suite rather than replacing it. A few are dropping Semrush, in one case because a content-first platform overlaps it.
Is Profound or Conductor better for AI search?
These interviews do not settle it: buyers rarely evaluate the two against each other. Where both appear, one buyer runs Conductor for SEO and Profound for answer engines side by side. Profound is the most-named purpose-built platform, at around 7.5 out of 10. Conductor, an SEO platform with prompt tracking, also rates around 7.5; one buyer credits it with showing prompts by intent, while another finds it carries more information than the team can act on.
What is the difference between Profound and AirOps?
Buyers describe them as starting from different jobs. Profound starts from measurement — where a brand appears in AI answers — and adds content generation; AirOps starts from content production and adds measurement. Some buyers run both. Profound averages around 7.5 out of 10; AirOps is rated by too few buyers to publish a figure.
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