AI Visibility Tools Are Already Dead
Over the past 18–24 months, venture capitalists have poured tens of millions of dollars into a brand-new category they’re calling AI Visibility tools, GEO Visibility tools, and AIO Visibility platforms. These are the dashboards that claim they can tell you where your brand “ranks” across ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity, and every other LLM.
The pitch decks all sound the same:
“Google Search Console for LLMs.”
“Ahrefs for AI Overviews.”
“Visibility analytics for the agentic era.”
And VCs have been funding them like this is 2014 SaaS all over again.
Here are some of the most heavily promoted and well-funded players:
Visibility.ai – “LLM search ranking analytics.”
PerceptiveRank – tracks brand presence across ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude.
LLMWatch – YC-backed, tracks answer shares and citations.
PromptVista – “AIO visibility engine for marketers.”
AskRanker – product visibility for consumer prompts.
AIOmeter – calculates your AIO “score.”
ChatSight – competitive LLM prompt analysis.
GEOStream – regional LLM visibility deltas.
AnswerBoard – enterprise LLM visibility dashboards.
Profound – another AIO visibility tool tracking brand presence.
SuggestIQ, LLM Radar, AnswerMetrics, EchoScore, QueryHeat, InsightLoop — more clones with slightly different UI skins.
Dozens of tools. Thousands of features. Millions in funding. And here’s the truth nobody in the ecosystem wants to say out loud:
This entire category is already dead. Let me break down the eight reasons why.
1. The Models Move Too Fast for Any Tool to Stay Relevant
This is the technical death blow. The major LLMs: update model weights weekly, adjust retrieval pipelines constantly, change ranking heuristics silently, modify citation attribution often and evolve safety layers daily.
Your “AI Visibility score” today may be meaningless tomorrow because a new checkpoint dropped. Trying to build an “LLM Search Console” is like trying to chart the path of a tornado. It moves too fast, and it changes direction too frequently to be tracked reliably.
2. This Is the SEO Tool Boom All Over Again — Only Worse
We’ve seen this movie before. In the 2010–2020 SEO era, you had a massive explosion of tools:
Ahrefs – link indexing and rank tracking
SEMrush – competitive analysis and keyword research
Moz – domain authority and SEO suite
Searchmetrics – enterprise keyword + visibility platform
SimilarWeb – traffic source and competitor intel
Majestic SEO – backlink graph analysis
BrightEdge – enterprise SEO recommendations
SpyFu – competitor keyword scraping
Hundreds of tools appeared. But only a handful built a real business. None of them venture scale. I know, as I used every one of these tools when I was doing SEO for Fortune 500 brands. Why did I find these tools valuable and not any of the AI Visibility tools of today:
Google actually exposed structured SEO signals you could measure:
Keywords, Backlinks, Rankings, Canonicals, CTR, SERP features, Page speed, Schema markups etc. There was a measurable index. There was transparency. There was a stable substrate you could build against.
The LLM era has none of that. Yet 200+ AIO visibility tools are trying to repeat the SEO tool playbook without the underlying data transparency that made SEO tools viable in the first place. They are trying to build Ahrefs for a world where Ahrefs-style signals don’t exist. It’s a category built on quicksand.
3. There Are 200+ Identical Tools — and Zero Differentiation
This market mirrors the SEO boom except:
the tools are more redundant
the data is less reliable
the signals are nonexistent
and the LLMs shift too quickly for anyone to keep up
Brands don’t need 200 dashboards. Most barely need one. And the switching cost is zero. This category is simply too crowded to sustain even a handful of venture outcomes.
4. These Tools Produce Reports — Not Insights
This is the biggest gap between what these tools promise and what they deliver.
They can show:
where you appear in LLM answers
where you dropped
who outranks you
what prompts you appear in
what citations show up
But they cannot tell you:
why you dropped
what changed inside the model
which signals matter
how retrieval weighted competitors
how to truly fix your authority
These dashboards diagnose symptoms but don’t provide prescriptions. It’s an analytics theater.
Pretty, but not meaningful.
5. LLMs Will Never Share the Data These Tools Depend On
Every AIO visibility startup secretly relies on a fantasy:
“The LLMs will eventually open up prompt logs or ranking signals.”
Absolutely not. OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, and Meta will not expose: prompt logs, ranking logic, retrieval paths, model weight shifts, RAG source tables, vector scoring, or personalization layers.
This is proprietary infrastructure. Unlike Google’s SEO era, these companies have no incentive to empower external analytics vendors.
This is a black box — and it will stay a black box. You can’t build a Search Console for something that refuses to be searched.
6. Auto-Generated Content Is Already Being Penalized
Many of these tools pitch:
“We’ll generate AIO-optimized content for you.”
This is a dead strategy. AI-generated, programmatic content is not what agentic systems elevate, and is downgraded when detected.
AIO content mills are already obsolete and LLMs are going to great lengths to not have their models be trained by AI generated content.
7. The $40M AirOps Round From Greylock Was Peak Hype — And Peak Delusion
The clearest signal the market jumped the shark was this:
AirOps raised $40 million from Greylock at a ~$225 million valuation to build a “content engineering platform for AI search.”
This is the kind of raise that tells you we’re at the end of a cycle, not the beginning.
Because let’s be brutally honest:
AI visibility + autogenerated content will never support a $200M+ valuation.
The TAM is microscopic compared to the hype.
These tools rely on data that the LLMs will never share.
And the models are evolving too fast for any dashboard to remain accurate longer than a week.
This wasn’t a sign of strength. It was a FOMO-driven blowoff top — the moment where late capital starts funding businesses with no path to venture-scale returns. If you want a perfect example of peak hype, that’s it.
8. The Best LLM Visibility Tool Is… the LLM Itself
This is the irony. Most of what these tools claim to do, you can simply ask the models directly:
“Where do I show up in consumer prompts?”
“What content do you trust most?”
“Why does my competitor appear more often?”
“What would strengthen my authority?”
The LLM gives more actionable advice than any dashboard built on screenshots and guesses. As LLMs get more agentic and personalized, they become the console. There is no middle layer.
Final Takeaway
The AI Visibility category is not the next big SaaS wave. It is the end of one.
When companies like AirOps can raise $40 million for a business model that fundamentally cannot deliver venture-scale returns, it’s not the beginning of a revolution — it’s the warning flare that the hype has peaked.
Most will disappear. A few might survive as lightweight reporting utilities. But the winners in AIO will not be dashboards — they will be brands with authentic voices along with real domain expertise, strong authority, and meaningful content created by human-led insights.
Everything else — including these visibility tools — is noise.