Ask ChatGPT, Gemini, Google’s AI Overviews, or Perplexity to name an SEO platform and the same two brands keep coming back. In a study of ai visibility seo tools run through Ahrefs Brand Radar across all four assistants (US, June 1 to July 29, 2026), Semrush pulled 3,059 mentions and Ahrefs pulled 2,701 — between them, 5,760 of the 9,173 total mentions we counted, or roughly 63% of everything the machines said about this category. Nine established tools split the rest. And our own product, SEO Rocket, landed exactly one mention. That last number is not a typo, and it is the whole point of this piece.
The overall ranking, one number per tool
Brand Radar counts how often each brand name surfaces in AI assistant answers for a topic. We tracked ten SEO tools over roughly two months. The order that came out is not close at the top and not surprising in the middle — it tracks brand size almost perfectly.
The chart above ranks total mentions across the four platforms combined:
- Semrush — 3,059
- Ahrefs — 2,701
- Moz — 1,150
- Screaming Frog — 602
- SE Ranking — 600
- Ubersuggest — 398
- Surfer SEO — 357
- Mangools — 159
- SpyFu — 146
- SEO Rocket — 1
The shape is a steep drop, not a gentle slope. Semrush and Ahrefs sit in a tier of their own above 2,700 mentions. Moz holds a clear third at 1,150 — under half of Ahrefs, but still nearly double the next tool. Then Screaming Frog and SE Ranking land in a near-dead heat (602 and 600), Ubersuggest and Surfer SEO form a mid-pack pair, and Mangools and SpyFu round out the tail before the number collapses to a single mention for the newest name on the list.
Why Semrush edges Ahrefs, and why the top two run away with it
Semrush leading was expected; leading on every single platform was the more telling result. It out-mentions Ahrefs on ChatGPT (790 vs 755), on Google AI Overviews (648 vs 508), on Gemini (1,188 vs 1,016), and on Perplexity (433 vs 422). There is no platform where Ahrefs overtakes it. When a brand leads across four independently trained systems, that consistency usually reflects the underlying web — the volume of pages, reviews, comparisons, and citations that mention the brand — rather than any quirk of one model’s training data.
That is also why the top two run away with the category. Large language models answer “what are the best SEO tools” by compressing what the web already says most often. The web says Semrush and Ahrefs, loudly and repeatedly, because both have spent years accumulating branded mentions, backlinks, and third-party comparison content. AI visibility, in other words, is a lagging indicator of brand authority. The assistants are not scoring product quality — they are echoing consensus.
Gemini talks about SEO tools the most
Volume is not spread evenly across the four assistants. Gemini was by far the most talkative about this category, and Perplexity the most reserved.
Summed across the top five tools and the full set, the platforms break down like this: Gemini produced the most total mentions (3,351), ChatGPT was second (2,467), and Google AI Overviews (1,681) and Perplexity (1,674) trailed close behind each other. Gemini alone accounted for more than a third of every mention in the study. If you are deciding where to first measure your own AI visibility, that distribution tells you Gemini and ChatGPT are where the conversation actually happens — a page that never surfaces there is invisible to most of the people asking AI for tool recommendations.
The chart above shows the top five tools broken out by platform. The ranking order barely changes from platform to platform — Semrush first, Ahrefs second on all four — which reinforces the read that these mentions reflect a shared underlying web rather than model-specific taste.
Where the ranking quietly shifts underneath the leaders
The interesting movement is below the top two, where each assistant has a slight personality. Moz is a good example. It sits third overall on the strength of general brand recognition, but its distribution is lopsided: 379 mentions on Gemini and 325 on ChatGPT, versus 314 on Perplexity. Relative to the leaders, Moz punches noticeably harder on Perplexity than anywhere else — on that platform its 314 mentions sit much closer to Ahrefs’s 422 than the overall gap would suggest.
SE Ranking shows the opposite tilt, leaning into the two chat assistants: 217 mentions on Gemini and 203 on ChatGPT, but only 65 on Perplexity. Ubersuggest, similarly, does its best work on Perplexity (150 mentions, its highest of any platform) and Gemini (136). Screaming Frog — the one specialist crawler in the set rather than an all-in-one suite — stays remarkably steady, between 105 and 189 mentions on every platform, which is what you would expect from a tool that gets cited for a specific job (“crawl my site”) rather than as a general recommendation. None of these shifts dethrone anyone, but they show that “AI visibility” is really four different visibilities, and a tool can be strong on one assistant and thin on another.
What actually earns an AI mention
If AI visibility is a lagging indicator of brand authority, then the levers that move it are the same ones that have always moved organic search — just filtered through what a language model can ingest. Three things drive the counts we measured:
- Volume of branded mentions across the web. Every “Semrush vs Ahrefs” comparison, every listicle, every review is a training signal. Brands that show up in thousands of these get echoed thousands of times.
- Citations from sources AI trusts and retrieves. Perplexity and AI Overviews lean on retrieval — they pull live pages and cite them. Being quotable, structured, and present on high-authority pages is what gets you into that retrieval set.
- Category consensus. When the web overwhelmingly agrees on a shortlist, the models reproduce the shortlist. Breaking in means becoming part of the consensus, not just publishing one strong page.
The uncomfortable implication is that you cannot prompt-engineer your way into an AI’s answer. There is no meta tag for it. You earn mentions the slow way — by being talked about — which is exactly why the incumbents lead and newcomers start at zero.
The honest part: SEO Rocket sits at one mention
Here is where a study written by the company being studied has to be careful, so let us be blunt. SEO Rocket registered one mention across the entire dataset — a single hit on ChatGPT, and zero on Gemini, Google AI Overviews, and Perplexity. Against Semrush’s 3,059, that is a rounding error. We are a new entrant, priced at $50/month, without a decade of comparison content and branded links behind us, and the data reflects that with brutal accuracy.
We are publishing that number rather than hiding it because it is the most honest illustration of the problem this study is about. AI visibility is not a vanity metric you either have or ignore — it is a measurable gap between where your brand is mentioned and where your buyers are now asking for recommendations. Ours is wide. Most challenger tools’ gaps are wide. Pretending otherwise would undercut the entire argument for measuring it in the first place.
What a visibility gap actually costs
A one-mention footprint matters because the buying journey has quietly moved. A meaningful share of people evaluating SEO software now open an assistant before they open Google, type “best SEO tools for a small agency,” and treat the three or four names that come back as the shortlist. If your brand is not in that generated answer, you are not losing a ranking position — you are absent from the consideration set entirely, and you never find out, because there is no impression to count in a traditional analytics report.
That invisibility compounds. The tools that get mentioned get clicked, reviewed, and written about, which feeds more mentions back into the next model’s training. Consensus is self-reinforcing. The practical takeaway for any challenger — us included — is that the gap will not close on its own, and you cannot manage what you are not measuring.
How to close the gap — starting with measuring it
The first move is not to chase a mention; it is to track the number honestly over time, per platform, the way this study does. That is precisely the job SEO Rocket’s AI-visibility tracking exists to do: monitor how often your brand — and your competitors’ — surfaces across ChatGPT, Gemini, AI Overviews, and Perplexity, so a gap like ours goes from an anecdote to a trend line you can act on. Watching the number is how you learn whether the content and citations you are earning actually move it.
From there the work is ordinary SEO pointed at a new target. Earn branded mentions and comparison coverage, publish genuinely quotable, well-structured pages that retrieval systems will cite, and build the topical authority that makes a model reach for your name. SEO Rocket’s keyword research and competitor gap analysis run on the same real Ahrefs data behind this study, and its AI article writer ships pages built to be cited rather than skimmed. It is a founder’s playbook proven across 1,000,000+ ranking pages, now aimed at the answer box instead of the blue links. None of it produces a mention overnight — the incumbents’ lead took years to build — but you cannot start closing a gap you refuse to look at.
Methodology and honest limits
The data comes from Ahrefs Brand Radar, tracking brand-name mentions across four AI platforms — ChatGPT, Gemini, Google AI Overviews, and Perplexity — for the US market, over June 1 to July 29, 2026. We counted total mentions for ten named SEO tools and the per-platform split for each. All figures in this article are those raw counts or direct sums of them; nothing is modeled, extrapolated, or rounded beyond the source.
The limits matter as much as the numbers. This is a mention count, not a measure of sentiment or recommendation quality — a brand named as a cautionary example counts the same as one named as the top pick. It captures how often a name appears, not whether the AI advised for or against it. It is US-only and covers a two-month window, so it is a snapshot, not a trend, and AI answers vary by prompt, session, and model update. Brand Radar is also a third-party estimate of a moving target; the assistants themselves do not publish these figures. Read the ranking as a strong directional signal of category visibility, not a precise scoreboard.
FAQ
Which SEO tool has the best AI visibility? Semrush, by mention volume — 3,059 total mentions and the lead on all four platforms, narrowly ahead of Ahrefs at 2,701. Between them they account for about 63% of all the mentions in this study.
Does a high mention count mean the AI recommends that tool? Not necessarily. The study counts how often a brand name appears, not the tone. A high count means high visibility and presence in the conversation; it does not distinguish a recommendation from a passing reference or a warning.
Why does SEO Rocket have only one mention? Because it is a new, low-priced entrant without the years of comparison content, reviews, and backlinks that drive AI mentions. The number is honest, and closing that gap is exactly what AI-visibility tracking is for.
Which AI platform mentions SEO tools most often? Gemini, with 3,351 total mentions in our set, ahead of ChatGPT (2,467), Google AI Overviews (1,681), and Perplexity (1,674).
The takeaway for anyone not named Semrush
This study measures one thing well: which SEO brands the machines already know. The answer is a short, self-reinforcing list, and if your name is not on it — ours barely is — the honest response is not to spin the number but to start tracking it, then do the slow work of earning the mentions. The gap is real, it is measurable, and measuring it is the first step to closing it. That is the entire reason ai visibility seo tools tracking exists, and why we put our own embarrassing figure at the center of the story rather than the footnotes.
