Agencies Spend $30K/Month on AI Visibility Tools They Say Can't Be Trusted

Marketing agencies and brands are paying between US$1,500 and US$30,000 a month for AI visibility platforms that track where their brands appear in AI chatbot responses, even as agency executives openly admit the tools produce inconsistent results and cannot be verified against real user behavior.

Tools Deliver Inconsistent Data, Agencies Warn

The market concern centers on a fundamental reliability gap. SparkToro research found fewer than one in 100 AI queries produce the same brand recommendations across different AI systems.

Paul Dyer, CEO of AI agency /prompt, put it directly: "If you use three different tools and give them the same prompts, you get three different answers." VML's Chief Discoverability Officer Heather Physioc disclosed that her agency is simultaneously testing 17 different AI visibility platforms, including Profound, Adobe LLM Optimizer, and Evertune, with no single tool standing out as a clear leader.

An investigative report by Codeless.io found that many tool dashboards are "driven by simulated data, not actual visibility," meaning these platforms measure their own manufactured query output rather than real searches performed by actual users.

A Market Built on Fear of Being Invisible

The rapid growth of these tools is driven by a structural shift in how people search online. Zero-click searches now account for 39.2% of US Google queries, according to Bain and Company data. When an AI summary appears in search results, users clicked on a traditional link in just 8% of visits, according to Pew Research Center. Without clicking, referral traffic to brand websites falls.

APAC Brands Are Winning Google—And Losing AI Search

Google AI Overviews now dominate 25% of searches, yet 73% of ranking brands get zero mentions. APAC marketers must shift from click metrics to AI visibility or lose buyers entirely.

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This has created strong demand for tools promising to tell brands how often they appear in AI responses from ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Perplexity. Platforms including Profound, Otterly.AI, Peec AI, AthenaHQ, and Ahrefs Brand Radar have moved quickly to serve that demand.

Pricing varies widely. Profound's entry plan starts at US$499 per month; one agency executive told Digiday the platform can cost up to US$1,000 per month. GEO (generative engine optimization) agency retainers range from US$1,500 to over US$30,000 monthly. Yet Foundation Inc. has stated that GEO ROI is "currently impossible to isolate using traditional attribution models."

Joseph Levi, CEO of Noise Media Group, admitted: "We don't know enough of these companies to be charging what they're charging. But it's extremely early days."

Adobe's US$1.9 Billion Acquisition Signals Market Consolidation

Adobe completed its acquisition of Semrush on April 28, 2026, paying approximately US$1.9 billion. Adobe cited a 269% year-over-year increase in AI-driven traffic to US retail sites in March 2026 as evidence for the deal's rationale. Semrush has 28 million global users and includes an AI visibility toolkit alongside its traditional SEO tools.

The deal represents the largest single transaction in the AI visibility space to date, signaling that mainstream enterprise software companies view the category as strategically important.

APAC Marketers Face the Same Accountability Gaps

For marketing teams in Asia, the measurement problem is compounded by existing gaps in ROI tracking. Nielsen research found 17% of APAC marketers still rely on gut feeling to assess marketing ROI. AI spending across the region has increased 3.3 times, with organizations expecting an average 3.6 times return from AI projects.

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Hershey partnered with Mutinex and Tracer to automate marketing measurement, cutting analysis from months to three weeks. The real bottleneck isn't AI—it's data readiness.

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LLM hallucination rates range from 15% to 52% across 29 leading AI systems, according to MetricsRule. That means brands monitoring their AI visibility may be tracking data that the underlying AI systems themselves have fabricated about those brands.

Agency executives across markets describe the tools as benchmarks rather than sources of truth, a distinction that raises questions about how marketing teams can justify ongoing spend without clearer attribution pathways.