About
A test bench for AI search visibility tools
Ask an AI assistant to recommend a business in your category and it will name three or four. If yours is not one of them, a growing share of your future customers never hear about you. A new category of tools promises to track and fix that. The problem: when we researched those tools, almost every "best AEO tools" article we found was published by one of the vendors, ranking itself first.
VisibilityBench exists to be the other kind of source. We buy our own subscriptions, point each tool at a real, operating small business website, and run it for a fixed test period, usually 90 days. We publish the dashboard screenshots, the prompts we track, the changes we make, and the before and after numbers. Then we write a verdict you can check against the evidence.
Why we don't put names on this site
Two reasons. First, our test sites belong to real businesses. Publishing our identities would make those sites easy to find, which would compromise the tests and expose the businesses. We describe test sites generically and blur identifying details in every screenshot. Second, we want the work judged on the data, not on a personal brand. If a claim on this site can't survive without a face attached to it, it shouldn't be published.
How we make money
Affiliate commissions. Some tools we review pay a commission when a reader subscribes through our link. Every page with an affiliate link carries a disclosure above the first link, and our full policy spells out the rest. The short version: we buy our own subscriptions, we review tools that pay us nothing alongside tools that do, and a commission has never turned a bad tool into a good verdict. A review site that burns its credibility for one referral fee has nothing left to sell.
What we cover
Tools that track and improve how brands appear in AI-generated answers: ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity, and the rest. The industry calls this answer engine optimization, generative engine optimization, or AI visibility, depending on who is selling. We focus on the tools a small business can afford, roughly the under-$100-per-month tier, because that's where the least independent information exists.
Corrections
If we got a fact wrong, tell us and we will fix it and note the correction on the page. Reach us at team@visibilitybench.com.