Two things you can pay for — and what each one actually gets you.
One buys you a place on a page someone else owns. The other changes a page you own. They cost roughly the same and they behave completely differently the moment the other side rewrites, de-indexes or drops the piece. Below is what each one gets you, and which to pick first.
Why there is no ranking here
Ordering vendors from best to worst needs a judgement we can't make for you. "Best" depends on your budget, how much of your own site you can change, and how long you can wait for a result. A ranking would hide all three assumptions behind a number.
What we can publish without guessing is narrower and more useful: what your money buys, whose asset the result lands on, and whether the effect can decay. Those three are facts about the mechanism, not opinions about the vendor.
Including what the other product does that we do not. Every comparison page here states plainly what the other side sells, including the part we do not compete on. A comparison that only says the author wins is advertising wearing a table.
Two ways to become citable — not variations of each other
You pay to appear on a page someone else owns
- The result lives on the publisher's site, under their editorial control
- If they rewrite, de-index or drop the piece, your placement goes with it
- You can verify the page exists; you cannot verify the engine will keep citing it
- Useful when you need reach now and cannot change your own site quickly
You pay to change a page you own
- The result lives on your site, under your control
- Nothing anyone else publishes or removes can take it away
- You can re-run the check yourself and see the same result
- Slower to show up, and it only helps pages you actually control
There is a third option, and it is a real one: do nothing yet. If your site is small or new, a page-level fix is usually cheaper than any placement, and the placement budget is better spent later, when there is something worth placing.
Comparisons we have written
Kollavo vs AI Citation Tools
Kollavo is a marketplace that gets your brand placed on the pages AI already cites. Where the two mechanisms differ, and the four situations where Kollavo is the better buy.
Profound vs AI Citation Tools
Profound tracks what AI answers say about your brand and publishes no price for any paid tier. What you can and cannot plan around that.
Peec AI vs AI Citation Tools
Peec AI is AI search analytics from $95 a month. One is a subscription to a reading; the other is a one-time edit. Which you are actually buying.
Otterly AI vs AI Citation Tools
Otterly AI is $29 a month and beats us on price per month. We say so on the page, and then explain why that is not the whole sum.
AthenaHQ vs AI Citation Tools
AthenaHQ is the closest overlap on this site: $295 a month, eleven models, and it already manages robots.txt and llms.txt. Where it is genuinely better.
Scrunch AI vs AI Citation Tools
Scrunch AI is $250 a month for 125 prompts, 5,000 responses and five site audits. It audits at scale; we fix one page and show the receipt.
More comparisons are added when we have something checkable to say about the other side — not on a publishing schedule.
Start with the part that is free
free · no signup · we fetch the page once
Questions about this page
Is this a ranking of AI visibility tools?
No. Ordering vendors from best to worst needs a judgement we cannot make for you, because best depends on your budget, how much you can change your own site, and how long you can wait. A ranking would hide those assumptions behind a number.
Do you include what the other product does that you do not?
Yes. Every comparison page here states what the other side sells and where we do not compete. If a comparison only says the author wins, it is advertising wearing a table.
Can I pay to appear higher on this page?
No. There is no order here for money to move. The pages on this site that are ordered by a number are ordered by measurement, and payment cannot change them.