AI visibility tools: checkers vs trackers, which you need

AI visibility tools come in two kinds. Checkers read your website and tell you whether AI systems can read it; trackers ask AI assistants questions and record whether your business comes up. Most small businesses get more from a checker first, because a tracker can only report on a site that assistants can already read.

We make Kashif, which is a checker. It does not ask any assistant about your business. Below is what each kind can and cannot tell you, with prices only where we confirmed them on the vendor's own page on 11 November 2026. Prices change often, and some pages showed us euros where you may see dollars, so open the link before you pay.

Checkers: tools that read your site

A checker fetches your pages the way a crawler does and reports what it found. Its questions have plain yes-or-no answers. Does your robots.txt let AI crawlers in? Are your name, address and what you sell written as text, not only in pictures? Can an agent tell what each form field is for?

• Kashif reads up to 8 pages. It checks whether robots.txt lets AI crawlers in, whether your facts are in a form a machine can quote, llms.txt, and agent readiness: a WebMCP actions file, named form fields, a layout that does not jump. One full audit of your first site is free; the paid plans are on the pricing page. It does not run JavaScript, so text that only appears after a script runs may be missed.
• Lighthouse, built into Chrome, has a free, experimental Agentic Browsing category. It checks llms.txt, WebMCP tools, the names and labels an agent relies on, and layout shift. It gives a pass ratio, not a score, and needs Chrome 150 or later (Chrome docs).
• seoaraby checks, in Arabic, whether AI crawlers get past robots.txt, plus structured data and how clearly pages answer questions. Its free audit reads up to 12 pages with no account (seoaraby.com).

These checks matter because some of them decide things outright. OpenAI says sites that opt out of its OAI-SearchBot crawler "will not be shown in ChatGPT search answers" (OpenAI's crawler page). A checker sees that rule in your robots.txt; a tracker only sees that you are missing.

Keep llms.txt in proportion. Google says you do not need AI text files to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode, that Google Search ignores them, and that optimising for its AI features is "still SEO" (Google's guide). Lighthouse checks for the file anyway, so it may help other readers. It will not move you in Google.

Trackers: tools that ask the assistants

A tracker sends a set of questions, called prompts, to assistants on a schedule and records whether you are named, whether your site is cited, and how. That is something no amount of reading your site can show, and Kashif does not do it: if this is what you need, pick a tracker. As seen on 11 November 2026:

• Otterly.ai: Lite from €29 a month with 16 prompts. It covers ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, AI Mode, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity and Copilot, though the pricing page is unclear on how many engines the lower plans get. A free trial for new users.
• Peec AI: Starter $95 a month, 50 prompts, three models you pick.
• Scrunch: Starter $250 a month billed annually, or $300 month to month; a 7-day trial with no card.
• Profound: the pricing page shows a free trial that tracks 50 prompts daily for 7 days, and Enterprise plans at a custom price; no self-serve price is shown.
• Semrush AI Visibility Toolkit: $99 a month per domain; tracks ChatGPT and Google AI Mode.
• Ahrefs Brand Radar: the AI Visibility Index starts at $199 a month; prompt tracking comes with Ahrefs plans from Lite.
• SE Ranking: the Core plan includes 25 prompts a day across five AI engines.
• Website Auditor, a connector inside Claude: $10 a month, needed to audit your own site, per its listing in Claude's connector directory. It asks ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude and Gemini, and audits the site too. A free anonymous check runs on website-auditor.io.
• HubSpot AI Search Grader: free and one-time. It scores out of 100 how ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini describe a brand from their training data, with sentiment counting for 40 of the 100 points.

Why Kashif does not ask assistants

What an assistant says changes from one question to the next, and the same question asked twice can get two different answers. Trackers deal with that by asking many prompts, many times, and reporting the pattern. That is a fair method, and it is what you pay them for. One answer on its own is a sample, not a fact about your business.

We chose to measure what you can control: what is on your site, what we saw and the date we saw it, and a re-check after you fix it. The trade-off is real. A strong "Readable by AI" score means your facts can be read. It does not mean any assistant will name you. The method is on how we score.

Which one you need first

Start with a checker. Lighthouse is free, and so is a first Kashif audit or a seoaraby audit. Fix what blocks reading: crawlers shut out in robots.txt, facts that exist only in images, missing titles, a phone number nobody can tap.

A tracker earns its cost later, and only when most of these are true:

• Your site already reads cleanly in a checker.
• You know the questions customers actually ask, in their words and their language.
• You can pay for several months, since one month of answers tells you little.
• Someone will act on what it shows, such as fixing a wrong fact or adding a missing page.

Until then, a free one-off snapshot, such as HubSpot's grader or Website Auditor's free check, is enough to see where you stand. Nobody can make an assistant name your business: not us, and not a tracker. To see what assistants can read on your site today, run the free scan.