The AI visibility tooling market consolidated fast in 2026. On June 17, Adobe folded Semrush’s AI search platform into a new enterprise product, Adobe Brand Visibility (Semrush, June 17 2026). Weeks earlier, Sitecore acquired the GEO startup Scrunch for a reported $225M (Adweek, 2026). The signal for Shopify merchants is clear: tracking where your brand shows up in AI answers is now a paid, enterprise-grade category, with entry prices that climbed through the year.
This is a neutral comparison. We sell a tool in this space (Verity Score), and we are placing it on its real, narrow job, not pretending it does everything. The honest takeaway up front: most of these tools measure where you already appear in AI answers; almost none of them fix whether you can appear at all. For a Shopify store, those are two different problems, and you usually solve them in that order.
The one distinction that decides which tool you need
There are two jobs, and they are not interchangeable.
Job 1: Audit the source. Read your own Shopify store the way ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and a buying agent read it. Is the schema.org Product markup present and valid? Are GTINs and prices consistent between the HTML, the structured data, and the feed? Do your robots.txt and llms.txt let AI crawlers in? Is the product description full of verifiable facts an engine can cite, or vague marketing copy it has to skip? This is a snapshot you fix, not a dashboard you watch.
Job 2: Track the citations. Once your store is readable, measure how often your brand (or your competitors) gets mentioned and cited in AI answers, across engines, over time. This is Share of AI Voice. It is a monitoring subscription, and it is what Profound, Peec, Otterly, AthenaHQ, Scrunch, Semrush and Ahrefs Brand Radar all do, with different depth and price.
The trap is buying Job 2 before doing Job 1. If your product pages are missing schema or blocking GPTBot, a tracker will faithfully report that you are nowhere, month after month, and the dashboard cannot tell you why. The fix lives in the source. Audit first, track second. We explain the audit side in detail in our GEO audit guide and the citation side in our Share of AI Voice guide.
The comparison table (verified 2026 pricing)
All prices below were checked against official pricing pages or 2026 third-party reviews in June 2026. AI search tools re-price often, so confirm on the live page before you buy.
| Tool | Type | Engines covered | Entry price (2026) | Best for | Shopify / DTC note |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Verity Score | Site-source audit | Reads store as ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI, buying agents | Free, no email | Shopify merchants who want to know what to fix first | Built for the Shopify product-data layer; audits per product page; does not track citations over time |
| Profound | Citation rank-tracking | 10+ (ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini, Copilot, AI Overviews, AI Mode, Grok, DeepSeek, Meta AI) | From $499/mo (Lite self-serve) | Enterprise and larger brands wanting real-query depth | Strong cross-engine data; no Shopify-specific features documented |
| Peec AI | Citation rank-tracking | ChatGPT, Perplexity, AI Overviews, AI Mode, Copilot, Gemini (Claude and others on request) | From €89/mo (Starter) | Mid-market DTC and agencies on a budget | Unlimited seats; general AI visibility, not Shopify-native |
| Otterly.AI | Citation tracking + light GEO audit | ChatGPT, AI Overviews, Perplexity, Copilot (Claude, Gemini, AI Mode as add-ons) | From $29/mo (Lite) | Solo marketers and small teams starting out | Cheapest entry; no e-commerce-specific features |
| AthenaHQ | GEO/AEO + content optimization | Up to 9 (ChatGPT, Perplexity, AI Overviews, AI Mode, Gemini, Claude, Copilot, Grok) | Free Essential tier, then $295/mo (Self-Serve) | Agencies and brands wanting action, not just data | Shopify integration with revenue attribution on paid tiers |
| Scrunch AI | Citation tracking + audit | 7+ (ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini, AI Overviews, Meta AI, Copilot) | From $300/mo month-to-month ($250 annual) | Enterprise retailers with large catalogs | Product-level visibility; not Shopify-native; some features in beta |
| Semrush AI Visibility Toolkit | Citation tracking + light audit (add-on) | ChatGPT, AI Overviews, AI Mode, Perplexity, Gemini | From $99/mo add-on (per domain) | Teams already living inside Semrush | Brand-level only; not built for product catalogs |
| Ahrefs Brand Radar | Citation/mention tracking (add-on) | 6 (AI Overviews, AI Mode, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Copilot) | Ahrefs base from $129/mo + AI add-on (~$199 to $699/mo) | SEO teams already on Ahrefs | Brand-level; no Claude/Grok; accuracy questioned in 2026 tests |
Tool by tool, honestly
Profound
Profound is the most enterprise-positioned tracker here. Its self-serve Lite plan starts at $499/month (WorkDuo, 2026), with enterprise tiers on custom pricing, after the company raised $20M in 2025 (PR Newswire).
Note on the $99 figure: some third-party blogs list a “$99 Starter.” Treat that with suspicion. Profound’s own self-serve floor is the $499 Lite plan, and publishing the wrong price is exactly how a comparison loses credibility. We use $499.
Strength: it tracks 10+ engines and is grounded in real user prompts, not synthetic test queries, which makes its share-of-voice data more representative. Limitation: the dashboards are data-heavy and the price excludes most SMB and growth-stage DTC brands. There are no documented Shopify-specific features. Profound tells a large brand where it stands across the AI answer landscape; it does not touch your product pages.
Peec AI
Peec AI is the value pick among serious trackers. Starter is €89/month (peec.ai/pricing), and notably includes unlimited seats, which matters for agencies. The base plan covers ChatGPT, Perplexity, AI Overviews, AI Mode, Copilot and Gemini; Claude and additional models come via the Enterprise/API tier.
Strength: clean, focused, affordable, with prompt-level visibility, position and sentiment. Limitation: it is purely a monitoring tool. It shows you the data and leaves the “what now” to you, and full engine coverage can push the effective cost up through add-ons. For a DTC brand at €1M to €20M that already publishes content, Peec is a reasonable first paid tracker. It is not Shopify-native and does not audit your store.
Otterly.AI
Otterly is the cheapest way in. Lite is $29/month (otterly.ai/pricing) with 15 tracked prompts, four core engines (ChatGPT, AI Overviews, Perplexity, Copilot), and unlimited team members. Claude, Gemini and AI Mode are paid add-ons.
Strength: price, simplicity and a free trial make it a low-risk way to start watching your AI presence. It also includes a light GEO URL audit. Limitation: it is monitoring-first with little optimization guidance, data refreshes are slower than daily, and there are no e-commerce-specific features. Good for a solo founder testing the waters, thin for a catalog.
AthenaHQ
AthenaHQ is the most action-oriented of the trackers, and the most commerce-aware. It has a free Essential tier (limited credits, 5 engines) and a Self-Serve plan at $295/month (athenahq.ai/pricing), covering up to 9 engines. It adds content recommendations, AI blindspot detection, and a Shopify integration with revenue attribution on paid tiers.
Strength: broad engine coverage from the start, a genuine optimization workflow rather than a passive dashboard, and the clearest e-commerce story of the trackers. Limitation: the Self-Serve plan is credit-based, so heavy monitoring can run over the base price, and there is a real learning curve. If you want one paid tool that both measures and nudges you toward fixes, AthenaHQ is the strongest pick here, but it is enterprise-leaning.
Scrunch AI
Scrunch tracks citations and adds a site-audit layer, with Starter at $300/month month-to-month, $250/month billed annually (scrunch.com/pricing). It covers 7+ engines and offers product-level visibility for retailers, plus a GA4 integration to tie AI referral traffic to revenue. It was acquired by Sitecore in 2026, which tells you where it sits: enterprise.
Strength: granular segmentation by persona and funnel stage, and product-level shopping visibility for large catalogs. Limitation: its “Insights” and “Site Audits” were still maturing in 2026, the platform is complex, and it is built for enterprise retailers managing thousands of SKUs, not a 200-product DTC brand.
Semrush AI Visibility Toolkit
If your team already lives in Semrush, the AI Visibility Toolkit is a $99/month add-on, per domain (Semrush KB). It tracks brand mentions and shows which of your pages get cited across ChatGPT, AI Overviews, AI Mode, Perplexity and Gemini, with a light crawlability check. As of June 2026, Semrush’s AI search platform is also being offered to enterprises as Adobe Brand Visibility.
Strength: it lives next to your existing keyword and backlink data, so it slots into an established workflow and shows page-level citation. Limitation: you cannot freely pick your competitors (Semrush pre-selects them), the per-domain price multiplies for multi-site brands, and it is brand-level, grafted onto an SEO platform, with no product-level tracking. Not the tool for a Shopify catalog.
Ahrefs Brand Radar
Brand Radar is an add-on, not a standalone product: you need an Ahrefs base plan (from $129/month) plus an AI tracking add-on that ran roughly $199 to $699/month depending on engine coverage in 2026 (AI Peekaboo, 2026). It tracks 6 engines (AI Overviews, AI Mode, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Copilot) and offers historical trend data, which most rivals lack.
Strength: historical trends plus tight integration with Ahrefs’ backlink and keyword tools. Limitation: independent 2026 testing flagged serious under-reporting of mentions, it does not track Claude or Grok, and prompts run on scheduled snapshots rather than continuously. No e-commerce angle. Useful if you are already an Ahrefs shop and want a rough trend line, not a precise commerce instrument.
Verity Score (where we fit, and where we do not)
Verity Score is not a citation tracker, and we will not pretend it is. It does the other job: a free Shopify GEO audit in about 60 seconds, with no email, that reads your store the way ChatGPT and a buying agent read it and tells you, product page by product page, what to fix.
It audits the source: schema.org completeness (Product, Offer, AggregateRating, GTIN, variants), meta and canonical coherence, hreflang, AI crawler access in robots.txt, the presence of llms.txt, sitemap health, server-side rendering, and whether your prices, promos and claims are consistent across the HTML, the structured data and the feed. It checks Perplexity Shopping and ChatGPT/agent readiness specifically for the Shopify product-data layer.
What it does not do: it does not track where your brand appears in AI answers over time, it does not measure Share of AI Voice, and it does not attribute revenue from AI traffic. Those are the trackers’ jobs. Verity Score is the step-one audit you run before paying for any of them, so the tracker has something to measure. If your store fails the audit, the citation subscription is premature. If it passes, the subscription finally has signal.
The honest recommendation
- You run a Shopify store and you have not audited your product data yet. Start with a free GEO audit. Fix schema, prices, crawler access and claims first. This is step one for everyone, and it costs nothing.
- You are a small DTC team that wants to start watching AI mentions cheaply. Otterly.AI at $29/month or Peec AI at €89/month. Peec if you need unlimited seats and slightly deeper engine coverage.
- You want one paid tool that measures and pushes you toward fixes, with a commerce angle. AthenaHQ, free Essential tier to test, $295/month for Self-Serve.
- You are an enterprise retailer with thousands of SKUs. Scrunch AI or Profound, depending on whether you prioritize product-level commerce visibility (Scrunch) or the broadest real-query engine data (Profound).
- You already live in Semrush or Ahrefs. Use their add-on for a brand-level trend line, but do not expect product-level shopping insight from either.
No tool on this list is the whole answer. Trackers tell you where you stand; they cannot make a store readable that an engine refuses to read. The cheapest, fastest move for a Shopify merchant is to fix the source first, for free.
Want to see what AI engines and buying agents actually read on your store, product page by product page? Run a free Verity Score audit (no email, results in about 60 seconds). Then, if you decide to track citations, you will know the trackers have something real to measure.
See also: Perplexity Shopping readiness for Shopify, our full Share of AI Voice guide, and the tool-by-tool comparisons.