AI Visibility Tools Compared: friendly4AI vs Otterly.AI vs SE Ranking vs Profound

TL;DR

If you want one line: pick the tool that matches your budget and whether you need monitoring, auditing, or both. friendly4AI ($9/mo) pairs an AI-readiness audit with AI Visibility tracking at the lowest entry price. Otterly.AI ($29/mo) is mature, agency-friendly citation monitoring. SE Ranking bolts AI Visibility onto a full SEO suite. Profound is enterprise monitoring with custom pricing.

AI search is now a real channel, not a forecast. Google's AI Mode handles roughly a billion queries a month, and the GEO tools market that grew up around it passed $1B in 2025 with 30-plus products competing. Most of those products do the same core job (query the AI engines on a schedule and report whether you show up), but they differ a lot on price, depth, and who they are built for.

This post compares four of them across the range buyers actually face: friendly4AI, Otterly.AI, SE Ranking, and Profound. I work on friendly4AI, so treat my read on the others as a starting point and check their current pricing pages before you buy. Prices move.

The short comparison

Tool	What it does	Pricing (public)	Best for
friendly4AI	AI-readiness audit (40+ GEO parameters) plus AI Visibility tracking — two scores in one product. Free scan, no signup.	Starter $9/mo; Pro $39/mo; Teams $199/mo	Solo SEOs, freelancers, SMBs, and agencies who want fixes, not just a dashboard, at the lowest entry price
Otterly.AI	AI citation and brand-mention monitoring across multiple engines; keyword/prompt tracking; agency features	Lite listed at ~$29/mo (per its pricing page)	Agencies and marketers who want established, affordable multi-engine monitoring
SE Ranking	Full SEO suite (rank tracking, audit, backlinks) with an AI Visibility module added on	Suite plans from ~$69/mo (per public plans)	Teams that want AI tracking inside the SEO suite they already use
Profound	Enterprise AI Visibility and answer-engine analytics; deep reporting across engines	Custom / enterprise (no flat public price)	Large brands and enterprise teams with budget for deep analytics

Prices verified against public sources as of June 2026. Always confirm on the vendor's pricing page — see Sources.

friendly4AI

friendly4AI scans a site against 40-plus GEO parameters and returns two numbers: an AI-Readiness Score (can AI access and understand your site?) and an AI Visibility Score (does AI actually cite you?). The first scan is free and needs no signup, which is the wedge. You see where you stand before you decide whether to pay.

The thing that sets it apart is the pairing. Most tools in this list monitor; friendly4AI also audits and hands you a prioritized list of fixes. If your AI-Readiness Score is capped because a managed host is blocking GPTBot, the report tells you that in plain language and shows the score you would hit once the block is gone. That "here is the specific fix" layer is the most common gap people report in monitoring-only tools.

Pricing is the other differentiator. Starter is $9/mo, Pro is $39/mo, and Teams is $199/mo. That $9 entry sits below the specialist monitors and well below the full SEO suites. It is positioned for operators — freelancers, indie sites, small businesses, and agencies pricing per client — rather than enterprise procurement.

Where it is not the obvious pick: if you need enterprise-grade reporting, single-sign-on, large seat counts, or deep per-market analytics, friendly4AI is not built for that today. It is a focused, operator-priced tool, not a Fortune 500 suite. If AI Visibility tracking matters most to you, the AI Visibility product page covers which engines it queries and how the score works.

Otterly.AI

Otterly.AI is one of the more established names in AI citation monitoring. It tracks where AI engines mention your brand, follows the prompts and keywords you care about, and has a reputation for a solid agency program, and it reports a large user base, in the tens of thousands.

Its Lite tier is listed at around $29/mo on its pricing page, which makes it an accessible entry into multi-engine monitoring. If your main job is "tell me whether AI mentions us and how that trends over time," Otterly does that job and has done it for a while. It also publishes useful industry research. Its 2026 AI Citations Report is where the widely cited "about 73% of sites have at least one AI crawler blocked" figure comes from.

Where it is a weaker fit: Otterly is monitoring-first. It tracks who cites you well, but it is not built to audit the technical reasons a crawler cannot reach your pages or to hand you a parameter-by-parameter fix list. If you want both the outcome and the cause in one tool, you will feel that gap. And at $29/mo, the entry price is higher than the cheapest options if budget is your main constraint.

SE Ranking

SE Ranking is a full SEO platform — rank tracking, site audits, backlink analysis, keyword research — that added an AI Visibility module as AI search became a buyer requirement. Its public plans start at roughly $69/mo and scale up from there depending on seats and tracked keywords.

The appeal is consolidation. If your team already runs SEO inside SE Ranking, adding AI Visibility tracking inside the same login avoids a second tool and a second invoice. For teams that think of AI search as one more lane of the same SEO work, that is a reasonable way to buy it.

Where it is a weaker fit: you are paying for the whole suite to get the AI piece. If AI Visibility is the specific thing you need and you do not want a full SEO platform, the entry price is several times higher than a focused tool. The AI Visibility depth in a suite that added it as a module also tends to trail tools built around AI search from the start. Confirm the current module scope and price on SE Ranking's plans page before assuming it covers what you need.

Profound

Profound sits at the enterprise end. It offers AI Visibility and answer-engine analytics with deep reporting, and it has raised significant funding. It reached a $1B valuation on a Series C in early 2026. It is built for large brands that want detailed, cross-engine analysis of how AI describes and cites them.

The trade-off is fit and price. Profound uses custom enterprise pricing rather than a published monthly figure, and the product is overbuilt for a solo consultant or a small business. Independent research notes the same pattern across the enterprise tier: a lot of analytical depth aimed at buyers who can staff and pay for it. If you are an enterprise brand with budget and a team to act on the data, that depth is the point. If you are an operator, it is more tool than you need.

I am not going to claim friendly4AI beats Profound on analytics depth — it does not try to. They aim at different buyers.

An honest verdict

There is no single best tool here, because these four are built for different buyers. The useful question is which job you are buying for.

• Cheapest serious entry, plus fixes, plus a free check: friendly4AI at $9/mo. The two-score model (readiness + visibility) and the prioritized fix list are the reasons to pick it, especially if "show me the problem and what to do about it" is what you want.
• Established, affordable monitoring with agency features: Otterly.AI at ~$29/mo. A safe pick if you mostly need citation tracking and trend data from a known name.
• AI tracking inside an SEO suite you already use: SE Ranking from ~$69/mo. Makes sense when consolidation beats price.
• Enterprise depth, budget available: Profound. The right call for large brands; the wrong call for solos.

My bias is obvious; I build one of these. So weight the structural facts, not my framing: friendly4AI is the only one of the four with a free no-signup scan and a paired audit-plus-monitoring model at a $9 entry, and Profound is the only one built for enterprise analytics. Otterly and SE Ranking sit in between on different axes — Otterly on monitoring maturity, SE Ranking on suite breadth.

If you want to see your own starting point before committing to anything, run a free scan at friendly4.ai. You get an AI-Readiness Score and a fix list in a couple of minutes, no signup, and you can use that to judge whether any paid tool in this list is worth it for you.

Related articles

• What is AI Visibility?
• What is GEO? The 2026 Guide
• Why Your Site Is Invisible to AI
• How LLMs Choose Which Websites to Recommend

Sources

• friendly4AI pricing — Starter $9/mo, Pro $39/mo, Teams $199/mo (friendly4.ai pricing page).
• Otterly.AI — Lite tier ~$29/mo (otterly.ai pricing page); AI Citations Report 2026 (May 2026), source of the ~73% AI-crawler-block figure.
• SE Ranking — suite plans from ~$69/mo (seranking.com plans page); AI Visibility added as a suite module.
• Profound — custom/enterprise pricing; $1B valuation on a Series C reported early 2026 (widely covered in industry press).
• GEO market size (~$1.01B in 2025, 30+ products): product/competitive-analysis.md and industry coverage, 2026.

Pricing and features change frequently. The figures above were checked against public sources as of June 2026; confirm current numbers on each vendor's site before buying.