A worked example

This is Pearbana's method run start to finish, on a live question — is "AI visibility" a growing market? — so we can publish the whole thing. It is not client work and nothing here is confidential, including the follow-up questions at the end and the answers they got. Read it as a demonstration of what a study looks like, then run one on your own market.

Is AI visibility a growing market? What people search, what a click costs, and who is paying to reach them

What this report answers: whether "AI visibility" is a growing market — measured three ways, because you named three angles. (1) Are businesses searching for it, (2) are the tools that sell it growing, and (3) is it worth adding as a feature to your own market-research tool. It also answers the pitfall you raised in the intake: the category term looks quiet while the brand names grow — how do those two rhyme?

Where the numbers come from. Search counts and click prices are Microsoft Advertising's keyword data for Bing, which carries a minority share of all searches, so the true volumes are larger than shown — read them as a comparison between phrases, not as absolute market size. Advertisers and unpaid results are read from live Google results pages on the dates of this study. Revenue figures are filed with the US securities regulator (SEC). Reddit and YouTube figures are what those platforms report. Six markets were measured: United States, United Kingdom, Germany, France, Canada, Australia — those are the only countries this data source will price.


The finding in one paragraph

The category has almost no vocabulary of its own, and the vendors have all the attention. In the United States, "ai visibility" draws 40 searches a month and "ai visibility tool" 14 — while the tool brands draw far more: Profound 430 a month, rising 54% over the ten months measured, Peec AI 131 (+67%), Scrunch 131 (+51%), Otterly 97. Meanwhile every generic term that describes the *work* — "generative engine optimization" (287), "answer engine optimization" (139), "geo optimization" (84), "ai search optimization" (67) — is measured flat: steady series, no movement in either direction. So the answer to your pitfall is not a contradiction. Demand is real and it is being expressed as brand names and as service words, not as the category label "AI visibility." The money confirms it: "llm seo" costs $23.56 a click on 61 searches a month, "geo agency" $15.56, "answer engine optimization" $9.57, and all of them carry a full block of adverts including Adobe and Ahrefs. Nobody pays $23 a click for a dead category. The single largest measured demand for the category term anywhere is not the US — it is Germany, at 553 searches a month for "generative engine optimization", twice the US figure.


1. The category term is flat. The brands are rising.

United States, average monthly searches on Bing, with the trend verdict over the last ten months.

PhraseSearches/moSuggested bidTrend verdict
ai seo519$0.66too volatile to call (mixed)
generative engine optimization287$1.96flat — measured, not moving
answer engine optimization139$9.57flat
geo seo97$10.17mixed
geo optimization84$6.90flat
ai search optimization67$1.14flat
llm seo61$23.56mixed
ai seo agency46$1.64mixed
ai visibility40$2.21rising +300%*
llm optimization34$8.75mixed
ai search visibility22$6.95mixed
ai visibility checker19$0.99mixed
geo agency15$15.56mixed
ai visibility tool14$2.68mixed
llm visibility13$13.01mixed
ai visibility audit8$1.54mixed
ai visibility platform3$5.10mixed
*(for scale)* seo11,101$1.57mixed

* "ai visibility" moved from a first-half average of 16 searches a month to 64. That is three rounding increments on a base far below the 300-a-month threshold where percentages can be trusted. Treat it as directional at best, not as a 300% market.

A volume you should ignore. "aeo" prices at 2,392 searches a month and looks like the biggest term in the subject. It is not this subject. Expanding it returns "aeo stock", "aeo credit card login", "aeo synchrony bank" and "authorized economic operator" — American Eagle Outfitters and a customs certification. The genuine answer-engine phrase is "answer engine optimization" at 139.

Now the vendors, same market, same period:

BrandSearches/moTrend
Profound ("profound ai")430rising +54% (clean series, low volatility)
Evertune323flat
Conductor ("conductor ai")259flat
Scrunch AI133rising +51%**
Peec AI131rising +67%**
Bluefish AI105flat
Otterly AI97rising +146%**
Gumshoe AI / tryprofound40 / 40mixed / flat
AthenaHQ30mixed
Goodie AI28flat
Ahrefs Brand Radar18flat
RankScale14mixed
Semrush AI Toolkit13mixed
Trakkr / Knowatoa / Am I on AI11 / 8 / 7mixed

** below 300 searches a month, so the percentage is directional only. What makes the rise credible is not any one number but that four independent brand names rose together over the same ten months, each with a low-volatility series and the gain sustained rather than spiking at the end. Profound alone is above the reliability threshold and it rose steadily: 280, 350, 270, 340, 450, 600, 500, 500, 480, 530.

How the two rhyme. Buyers do not have a settled name for the problem, so they search for the supplier or for the service ("geo agency", "ai seo agency") instead of for the category. The r/SEO thread "GEO is just a Buzz Word Marketers Selling to Fools" (53 upvotes) has this exactly, in the top reply at 27 upvotes: *"Clients are demanding it. If you're trying to sell sedans and everyone wants SUVs, you'll go out of business… you can't dismiss it outright, or they'll just find somebody who will sell them what they want."* Demand is arriving through agency conversations and vendor marketing, not through people typing the category into a search box.

2. What a click costs, and where the block is empty

Read live from Google:

Phrase (US)Advert blockAdvertisers seen include
answer engine optimizationfullWritesonic (in every sample), Later, Listicle.com, NeuroRank, thebluebyrd.com, Noble
generative engine optimizationfullWritesonic, Adobe (business.adobe.com), Noble, Gen3Marketing, NeuroRank, usereach.ai
llm seofullAhrefs, Adobe, NeuroRank, Noble, Uberall
ai seo agencyfulltrefoilgroup.com (every sample), usereach.ai, Lumar, Noble, Editorial.Link, One IMS
ai visibility toolno adverts at all

The advert lists are a lower bound: the page-one block is capped, so a full block means competition may be higher than shown.

Two things follow. First, a full block on a phrase drawing 61 searches a month at $23.56 a click means one converted customer is worth a great deal to these companies — this is enterprise-priced software and retainer agency work, not self-serve. Second, "ai visibility tool" — the phrase your own feature would be named after — carried no adverts at all, on a live reading. Zero is a real measurement here, unlike a full block. The generic tool phrase is uncontested because it is barely searched; the contested ground is the service vocabulary and the rivals' brand names.

Every advertiser makes nearly the same promise, which means none of them owns it. Adobe: *"Ensure your content is found, cited, and recommended across AI search experiences."* Gen3Marketing: *"Most brands have zero visibility into AI-generated answers."* NeuroRank: *"See who AI names instead of you."* The one genuinely differentiated pitch is Noble's, which attacks the measurement model itself: *"85% of brand mentions in AI come from elsewhere… Only pay when one is live."*

3. The brand terms are a bidding war — the clearest sign this market is live

Brand term searchedAdvert blockAdvertisers seen include
peec aifullPeec AI itself, Cognizo, Gradial, Writesonic, OpenLens
otterly aifullOtterlyAI itself, Gradial, OpenLens, Semrush
profound aipartialAirOps, Cognizo, Gradial, Peec AI
semrush ai toolkitpartialWritesonic, SE Ranking

Competitors are paying to appear on each other's names, with copy written for it: Gradial runs *"Gradial vs. Profound AI | Gradial vs. Otterly AI — we don't just track, we fix"*, AirOps runs *"Profound AI Alternative"*, Cognizo runs *"They only monitor."* Writesonic's line — *"One global agency moved every client from a $1B-valued competitor to Writesonic"* — is a direct shot at Profound. When rivals bid on each other's names, the brand terms are where the buying intent sits, which is the same conclusion the volume table reached from the other direction.

4. Germany is the largest measured market for the category term

PhraseMarketSearches/moSuggested bid
generative engine optimizationGermany553$1.34
peec aiGermany343
generative engine optimizationUS287$1.96
generative engine optimizationUK126$1.27
peec aiUK102
geo optimierungGermany93$3.32 — rising +66%**
profound aiUK85
ai seoUK73$1.44
generative engine optimizationFrance71$0.00
geo seoFrance106$0.33
generative engine optimizationCanada45$3.78
geo agenturGermany40$5.06
answer engine optimizationCanada16$15.37
generative engine optimizationAustralia18
ki sichtbarkeitGermany11$2.24

Germany searches the category term about twice as often as the US does, and Peec AI — a Berlin company — is searched there more than two and a half times as often as in the US. German-language phrasing is *not* where the volume sits: "ki sichtbarkeit" draws 11 a month and "sichtbarkeit chatgpt" essentially none. Germans search the English term. Despite the small German-language volumes, all three German phrases I checked carried a full advert block, and they are dominated by domestic agencies rather than the US platforms: Evernine, Seybold, IMAOS, Polaris Media, valantic, u+i interact, Evergreen Media, plus SISTRIX (the German SEO tool) advertising an "AI Sichtbarkeitsindex". Evergreen Media's copy is the market's own self-defense: *"GEO ist kein Hype, sondern strategische Markenführung im Zeitalter der KI."*

Australia is close to unmeasurable on these terms — "ai visibility" at 4 searches a month, "geo agency" at 2. Note the anomaly there: a $18.14 suggested bid on those 4 searches. High price, no market.

5. Who competes, and how big they are

Sizes below are modelled from ranking positions, not counted, so they are orders of magnitude. Within the set of sites sharing Peec AI's keywords, Profound's site is the largest by roughly a factor of forty over the rest of the specialist field; the big SEO publishers (Semrush, HubSpot, Backlinko, Surfer) show up in that same overlap because they publish the explainer content this market reads.

CompanyWhat they sell (their own words)Who they say it's forPrice signalsScale
Profound (tryprofound.com)*"Full stack marketing platform for the marketer of the future"* — tracks how ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and Perplexity crawl and describe you; sells "agents" that actEnterprise brands; *"used by the best marketers in the world"*No price published — enterprise salesLargest specialist brand searched (430/mo US, rising); Fortune reported a $35m raise backed by Sequoia in the unpaid results
Peec AI (Berlin)*"Track, analyze, and improve brand performance on AI search platforms"* — prompt tracking, share of chats, sentiment, citationsSEO and content managers, marketing teams, and explicitly agencies (multi-brand, white-label reporting)Tiered by prompts: 50 / 150 / 350 prompts, 1 / 2 / 5 projects, then custom; figures render in-browser and did not come back131/mo US, 343/mo Germany, +67%
Otterly AIAI search monitoring across ChatGPT, AI Overviews, Perplexity, Copilot, with GEO audits and agent analytics*"For solo marketers and small teams"* up through agencies; has a formal Agency Partner programTiers at 15 / 100 / 400 prompts — the clearest small-budget ladder in the set97/mo US, rising
Writesonic*"A GEO platform that acts… agents that close the gaps"**"10,000+ marketing teams"*, agencies; SOC 2 Type II, GDPRFree start, no cardThe most persistent advertiser seen — appeared on the category terms and on rivals' brand names
Adobe (LLM Optimizer)*"Adapt SEO strategies for AI search with content and visibility insights"*EnterpriseEnterpriseFiled revenue USD 23,769 million for FY2025 (10-K filed with the SEC, January 2026). The incumbent is in this auction.
Ahrefs (Brand Radar)*"Audit your AI visibility… monitor AI search mentions"* — a module inside the SEO suiteExisting SEO customersBundledBrand Radar itself draws only 18 searches/mo
Semrush (AI Toolkit)*"Check your AI visibility score… independent data on what drives AI citations"*; their advert claims *"used by 35% of Fortune 500"*SEO teamsBundledFeature name draws only 13 searches/mo. No filed revenue is quoted here: the SEC lookup returned no filing under "Semrush" or "Semrush Holdings", so this source cannot size them — that is a limit of the source, not a statement about the company.
Conductor, Evertune, Scrunch AI, AthenaHQ, Frase, SE Ranking, Bluefish, Goodie, RankScale, Trakkr, Knowatoa, GumshoeMonitoring and optimization platformsMixedMostly unpublishedEvertune 323/mo, Conductor 259, Scrunch 133 (+51%), the rest under 30/mo
Found only in the live advert blocks — Gradial, AirOps, Cognizo, OpenLens, NeuroRank, Noble, Listicle.com, Later, Uberall, Lumar, Editorial.Link, Gen3Marketing, trefoilgroup, usereach.ai, SISTRIX (DE), Evernine (DE), Seybold (DE), IMAOS (DE), valantic (DE)Agencies and newer platformsSMB to enterpriseUnpublishedNone of these appear in the brand-volume table at all — they are buying attention they have not earned organically

The differentiator nobody owns: every platform in this set says it tracks your brand across ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Copilot. The newer entrants have all moved one step past that and now attack monitoring itself — Cognizo (*"They only monitor"*), Gradial (*"We don't just track. We fix"*), Noble (*"placements, not reports"*), Sitefire (*"Most GEO tools only monitor"*). If you were planning to enter on "we track your visibility across the major models", that sentence is already the price of entry, not a difference.

6. The three angles you asked about, answered separately

Angle 1 — is there a market for the tools? Yes, and it is growing, but the growth is in brand names rather than in the category. Four vendor brands rose together over ten months while every generic category phrase was measured flat. The category is at the stage where buyers know suppliers, not concepts.

Angle 2 — should your end-clients focus on AI visibility for their own business? *This data cannot answer that, and I want to be plain about it.* Search volume measures how loudly a service is shopped for; it says nothing about whether optimizing for AI answers moves revenue for a given business. What the measurement does support: agencies and platforms are paying $9 to $23 a click to reach that buyer, and the r/SEO practitioners at 27 upvotes say clients are asking for it whether or not it is distinct from SEO. That is evidence of a budget line existing, not evidence of the work paying back. The skeptical case has weight too, though it carries far fewer upvotes — one commenter in r/SEO_tools_reviews: *"right now, ai visibility scores are mostly vanity metrics for client reports. Because LLM outputs are non-deterministic, a sudden drop in share of voice often just reflects natural response variance."* If you want the returns question answered, it needs client outcome data, not search data.

Angle 3 — is it a feature worth adding to your market-research tool? The search evidence points at *how it would have to be sold*, not at whether to build it. Note what happened to the two incumbents who already shipped it: Semrush AI Toolkit draws 13 searches a month and Ahrefs Brand Radar 18, while standalone Profound draws 430. Bolting the feature onto an existing suite does not create demand for the feature's name — the demand attaches to the standalone brands. Combine that with "ai visibility tool" carrying no adverts and only 14 searches a month, and the conclusion is that this feature cannot be launched through search on its own name. It can be launched as a reason for existing users to stay, or through the service vocabulary ("generative engine optimization", "geo agency") where the auction is already full and expensive. One measured opening does exist: the agency reseller angle. Peec AI and Otterly AI both build explicit agency tiers — multi-client workspaces, white-labeled Looker Studio reports, pitch workspaces for prospects — and "geo agency" at $15.56 a click with a full block shows agencies are the buyer being fought over.

7. Where this market actually discovers things

The unpaid results for "ai visibility tool" and "best ai visibility tools" are owned almost entirely by listicles — Zapier's "The 8 best AI visibility tools", Frase's "10 Best AI Visibility Tools", marketermilk's "18 best AI visibility tools for marketing agencies". No vendor owns the generic term; the reviewers do. On brand terms the vendors do rank first for their own names, but Reddit and review posts sit immediately behind them ("PEEC AI Review — Too Good to be true?", "Profound AI Review: Is It Worth The Investment"). Google's own AI answer for "ai visibility" cites Reddit first.

YouTube is a real channel here but concentrated in existing SEO audiences rather than in tool demos: the top twelve videos on this subject total roughly 189,000 views, and Surfer Academy's "How to Dominate AI Search Results in 2026" alone accounts for 143,000 of them, with Ahrefs' GEO video at 29,000. Individual tool reviews sit in the low thousands (a Profound review at 4,326 views). View counts accumulate over a video's whole life, unlike the ten-month search figures, so these are not the same unit — but the shape is clear: people learn the *practice* from the big SEO channels and then search for a *brand*.


What this report does not establish

The search counts come from Microsoft Advertising's keyword data for Bing, covering the ten months to August 2026, in six markets: the United States, United Kingdom, Germany, France, Canada and Australia. Bing carries a minority of all search, so real volumes are higher; the comparisons between phrases hold, the absolute sizes do not. No other country can be priced by this source, so nothing here should be read as a measurement of the Netherlands, the Nordics, or any market outside those six.

Advertiser lists are read from live Google results pages and show only who appeared in the samples taken. They are a lower bound — a full block is the page-one ceiling, so the true number of bidders is likely higher, and I have not stated advert counts for that reason. Some advertisers on the German phrases are regional agencies (Frankfurt, Baden-Württemberg) and may reflect where the query was sent from rather than national competitors.

Company descriptions, customer counts and claims such as "3,000+ brands", "10,000+ marketing teams" and "used by 35% of Fortune 500" are the companies' own marketing copy, read from their sites and adverts, and are unverified. Peec AI's and Otterly AI's price figures render in the browser and did not come back in the page text, so plan structures are reported without dollar amounts. Traffic and size estimates are modelled from ranking positions rather than counted.

Adobe's revenue is a figure filed with the US securities regulator, in the filer's own currency. That regulator covers US-listed companies and European ones with a US listing; it returned nothing for Semrush under either name searched, and Peec AI, Otterly AI, Profound, Ahrefs, Conductor and the agencies are private or non-US filers, so no filed revenue exists here for any of them. That is a limit of the source and says nothing about their size.

Reddit and YouTube figures are what those platforms report. Thread counts and upvotes are not sample sizes: they show what a market argues about, not how many people hold a view. And the central limit worth repeating: none of this measures whether optimizing for AI answers produces revenue for a business that does it. It measures who is searching, what they are searching, and what companies are willing to pay to be in front of them.


Follow-up discussion

This section is the conversation about the report above, kept with it so the questions raised and the answers given travel with the report.

Question. Interesting. can you find the ad costs for searching on the leading brand names and put them in a table here?

Answer. I have most of those already from the run; let me fill the gaps so the table is complete rather than half-remembered.Here are the suggested click prices on the brand names themselves, United States, alongside the volume so you can see what the price is being paid for. These are Microsoft Advertising's suggested bids — an estimate of what it would cost to show against that search, not what anyone is actually paying.

Brand searchedSearches/moSuggested bidCompetitionLive Google ad block
Otterly AI97$26.96Lowfull — Gradial, OpenLens, Semrush, Otterly itself
Scrunch AI133$6.13Mediumnot checked
Peec AI131$4.22Lowfull — Cognizo, Gradial, Writesonic, OpenLens, Peec itself
Profound ("profound ai")430$3.45Mediumpartial — AirOps, Cognizo, Gradial, Peec AI
Evertune323$0.26Highnot checked
Conductor ("conductor ai")259no bid returnedLownot checked
Bluefish AI105no bid returnedLownot checked
tryprofound40no bid returnedLownot checked
Gumshoe AI40no bid returnedLownot checked
AthenaHQ30no bid returnedLownot checked
Goodie AI28no bid returnedLownot checked
Ahrefs Brand Radar18no bid returnedLownot checked
RankScale14no bid returnedLownot checked
Semrush AI Toolkit13no bid returnedLowpartial — Writesonic, SE Ranking
Trakkr11no bid returnedLownot checked
Knowatoa8no bid returnedLownot checked

Three things worth reading out of that.

"No bid returned" is not "clicks are free." It means Microsoft's data had no priced bid to report for that phrase, which usually happens when almost nobody has bid on it in their auction. It is a weak absence, not a measurement — Semrush AI Toolkit returned no bid, yet Writesonic and SE Ranking were both advertising against it on the live Google page. The four brands that did return a price are the four the market is actually fighting over.

The price does not track the volume, and that is the interesting part. Profound is searched more than four times as often as Otterly and costs an eighth as much per click. The expensive name is the small one. That is what a brand term looks like when rivals have decided its searchers are worth intercepting: Otterly sits at the small-team, published-tiers end of the market, so the person typing its name is a buyer with a budget in hand and no procurement cycle — exactly the click a competitor can convert immediately. Profound's searchers are more likely to be enterprise researchers and journalists, a slower and less convertible click even though there are more of them. Semrush advertising against Otterly's name, not against Profound's, fits that reading.

"Low" competition next to $26.96 is a thin auction, not a cheap one. The competition rating counts how many advertisers crowd the phrase; the bid says what it costs to win. Low competition with a very high suggested bid means a small number of determined bidders, which is the normal shape for a brand term — you are not outbidding a crowd, you are outbidding two or three rivals who have specifically decided to sit on that name.

One caveat on the empty rows: I checked live advertisers on only four brand terms during the study, so "not checked" in the last column means I did not look, not that the block was empty. If it would be useful to know whether Evertune, Conductor and Scrunch are also being bid against — Scrunch in particular, since it carries a real price at $6.13 — that is a quick live read on a handful of names and I can do it here.


Sources

This report was read automatically from the services below on August 15, 2026. Nothing here was written by the language model; it is a record of what was queried and what was read.

Reddit discussion via Apify — read from api.apify.com.

Threads read:

Microsoft Advertising keyword data (Bing) — read from adinsight.api.bingads.microsoft.com.

Queried: “ai visibility”, “ai visibility tracking”, “ai visibility tool”, “generative engine optimization”, “geo optimization”, “answer engine optimization”, “aeo”, “llm seo”, “ai search optimization”, “ai seo”, “chatgpt seo”, “brand visibility in ai”, “ai brand monitoring”, “llm visibility”, “track brand mentions in chatgpt”, “how to rank in chatgpt”, “ai overview optimization”, “seo”, “ai visibility score”, “share of voice ai”, “profound ai”, “tryprofound”, “peec ai”, “otterly ai”, “scrunch ai”, “athena hq”, “evertune”, “goodie ai”, “rankscale”, “semrush ai toolkit”, “ahrefs brand radar”, “brand radar”, “writesonic gsc”, “conductor ai”, “bluefish ai”, “am i on ai”, “knowatoa”, “trakkr”, “gumshoe ai”, “waikay”, “rank in chatgpt”, “chatgpt traffic”, “ai overviews”, “geo agency”, “ki sichtbarkeit”, “sichtbarkeit in ki”, “gpt optimierung”, “ki suchmaschinenoptimierung”, “in chatgpt gefunden werden”, “ki monitoring marke”, “visibilite ia”, “referencement ia”, “optimisation pour chatgpt”, “seo ia”, “etre visible sur chatgpt”, “referencement chatgpt”, “geo seo”, “ai search visibility”, “chatgpt visibility”, “aeo agency”, “ai seo agency”, “llm optimization”, “ai search monitoring”, “brand mentions in chatgpt”, “ai visibility checker”, “free ai visibility checker”, “ai visibility audit”, “ai visibility report”, “geo tools”, “generative engine optimization tools”, “answer engine optimization tool”, “best ai visibility tool”, “ai visibility platform”, “ai visibility agency”, “aeo tool”, “geo agentur”, “geo optimierung”, “ki sichtbarkeit messen”, “generative engine optimization agentur”, “ai sichtbarkeit”, “llm optimierung”, “chatgpt optimierung”, “geo seo agentur”, “sichtbarkeit chatgpt”, “ki suche optimierung”, “aeo agentur”, “geo marketing”, “markenerwähnung ki”, “peec”, “otterly”, “geo tool”.

Live Google results via SerpApi — read from serpapi.com.

Queried: “generative engine optimization”, “answer engine optimization”, “ai visibility tool”, “llm seo”, “ai seo agency”, “geo agentur”, “ki sichtbarkeit”, “profound ai”, “peec ai”, “otterly ai”, “semrush ai toolkit”.

Live Google results via DataForSEO — read from api.dataforseo.com.

Queried: “ai visibility”, “generative engine optimization”, “ai visibility tool”, “answer engine optimization”, “how to rank in chatgpt”, “profound ai”, “peec ai”, “best ai visibility tools”.

DataForSEO Labs (competitor and traffic estimates) — read from api.dataforseo.com.

Queried: “tryprofound.com”, “peec.ai”, “otterly.ai”, “scrunch.ai”, “writesonic.com”, “conductor.com”, “semrush.com”, “ahrefs.com”, “athenahq.ai”, “frase.io”.

SEC EDGAR company filings — read from data.sec.gov.

Queried: “Semrush”, “Semrush Holdings”, “Adobe”.

Web page fetch via ScrapingBee — read from app.scrapingbee.com.

Pages accessed:

Now run it on your market.

Same method, your category: where the openings are, what a click costs, who is already bidding, and what the demand is worth. And when you change the region, the seed terms or your view of who the competitor is, the analysis re-measures on the new premise instead of aging on a slide.

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