Alternatives to Frase for AI visibility: the one station on its loop that is read only

Frase sells a loop rather than a tool: listen, research, write, optimise, publish, monitor, fix. Read on 20 October 2026, its pricing page is explicit about which signal that loop repairs by itself. Content Guard watches Google rank and traffic decay, writes the revision and republishes it on your approval. AI Visibility is described in the same table as "Daily monitoring and alerts" with the note "AI Visibility does not auto-fix", and in its own FAQ as a feature that "monitors AI engines and alerts you, and it never touches your content". So inside Frase the Google signal is wired to a repair and the AI signal is wired to a notification. That is the thing to know before buying it as an AI visibility product, and it is also why the alternatives question has a clear answer depending on which half of the loop you actually need. Everything below is from frase.io/pricing and frase.io, read 20 October 2026, HTTP 200 to a Chrome on Windows agent and a Safari on macOS agent, identical responses, bodies saved.

The engine ladder, which is the limit that decides this purchase

Frase publishes its AI Visibility coverage per tier, which is more than most platforms do, and the order the engines arrive in is the part worth reading twice.

Tier, read 20 Oct 2026	AI Visibility engines tracked	AI Visibility prompts tracked	Reporting history
First	ChatGPT, Google AI	50	Current only, with AI Visibility keeping 30 days of its own
Second	ChatGPT, Google AI, Perplexity	200	3 months
Third	ChatGPT, Google AI, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini	500	12 months
Enterprise	All named engines	Custom	24 months

Claude and Gemini arrive together on the third tier. If your buyers ask Claude, the engine coverage and not the prompt count is what sets the plan you need, and the prompt allowance that comes with it is ten times the entry one whether you wanted it or not. That is a normal way to build a ladder and it is the single most expensive assumption a buyer makes in this market, because the engine list is the part people skim.

The other tier limits are published in the same table and are worth lining up against your own usage before a demo: seats at 1, 3 and 5 with extra seats at a published monthly rate from the second tier, domains at 1, 5 and 10, articles a month at 10, 40 and 100, audit pages at 50, 250 and 1,000, Content Guard pages watched at 10, 75 and 300, and API, MCP and CLI requests at 5,000, 20,000 and 50,000 a month. White label reports, a branded client portal, SSO and SAML are Enterprise only. We record limits and do not reproduce any vendor's price figures, including our competitors'.

Where Frase is plainly ahead of us

We make a competing product, so these are the rows we lose, stated on criteria anybody can check on both pricing pages in ten minutes.

• It is automatable from the first tier. An MCP server, a CLI and an API on every plan, with a published monthly request allowance, and its own page says Frase runs from Claude, ChatGPT, Codex, Cursor or a terminal. Our top plan lists a visibility API and we document no MCP endpoint.
• It publishes compliance. SOC 2 Type II and GDPR appear in its page footer. Our pricing page, read the same day, carries no SOC 2 line, no GDPR line, no SSO and no SAML.
• It publishes seats. Three tiers with named roles of Owner, Admin, Editor and Viewer, and a published rate for an extra seat. Our pricing page states one full access login on every plan, and publishes our reason for it, which is that our cost is asking engines and writing rather than headcount.
• It publishes an overage policy and ours does not exist. Pay as you go is optional and off by default, the entry tier simply holds at its limit, and the per unit overage rates are printed on the page.
• It publishes history depth per tier, up to 24 months. We publish no history depth anywhere.
• It publishes white label and a client portal for agencies reselling the work. We publish neither.
• It refuses to promise an outcome, in writing, on a sales page. Its pricing page says that rankings and AI citations build over the weeks after you publish and that Frase will not claim one inside a seven day window. A vendor writing that where a buyer can see it has earned the sentence being quoted back approvingly by a competitor.

Where the shortlist goes, by which half of the loop you need

What you are buying for	Where to look	The question that settles it
Content production with an AI reading attached	Frase, or another content platform with a visibility module	Which engines sit on the tier you would actually buy
The AI reading on its own, with no content plan	A single purpose visibility product, where the meter is prompts and engines rather than articles and audit pages	Whether seats, projects and competitors are billed separately
Repair of the AI signal, not just an alert	Products that write and publish pages as part of the subscription	Who approves a change, and whether anything publishes without you
Agency delivery across client sites	Whichever tier carries white label and a portal, which is usually the top one	What you keep if you leave, and in what format
A reading on Claude specifically	Anything that names Claude on a tier you can afford	Whether Claude costs more per check than the other engines

Frase also publishes three free tools, a GEO Score Checker, an AI Visibility Checker and an Agent Readiness Checker, and it publishes its own comparison pages against seven named rivals including one specialist in our category. A vendor that will put its own product beside a competitor by name is handing you half the research, and taking it is sensible as long as you read it as the vendor's own framing of the contest.

Whichever side of the loop you end up buying, the brief you hand a writer changes once the target is an answer rather than a ranking. How to brief a writer for AI visibility rather than rankings sets that out, and it had no durable inbound link from any body on this site when we counted on 20 October 2026: 3,456 internal links across 2,050 stored bodies against 1,960 live pages, with 911 pages, 46.5 per cent, carrying none.

Questions buyers ask about Frase and AI visibility

Does Frase fix my AI visibility automatically?

No, and its own page is straight about it. Content Guard writes and republishes a fix when a published page loses Google rank or traffic, with your approval as the default. AI Visibility monitors and alerts. Two features, two jobs, and the distinction is printed in the comparison table.

Which tier do I need if my buyers use Claude?

The third one. Read on 20 October 2026, Claude and Gemini both arrive on that tier, and the two tiers below it cover ChatGPT, Google AI and then Perplexity. Check this on the live page before you buy, because an engine list is the line vendors move most often.

Is 50 prompts enough on the entry tier?

It depends on how many engines and markets you multiply it by. Twenty buying questions on two engines is already forty readings, so fifty is one market and one short question list. Write your questions down first and count them, then pick the tier.

Can I buy only the AI visibility part?

Not as a separate product. AI Visibility is a feature of the content plans, so the AI engine list and the article and audit allowances move up together. If you want the reading and none of the content production, a single purpose tool is the straighter purchase.

How much history does it keep?

Reporting history runs current only, 3 months, 12 months and 24 months up the tiers, with a note that AI Visibility keeps its own history from 30 days on the entry plan. History depth is worth asking about everywhere in this category, because a trend is only as long as the data behind it.

Does the trial show the AI side?

Its FAQ says the seven day trial carries the second tier feature set with AI Visibility on ChatGPT and Google AI, capped at 5 articles, 50 audit pages, 25 AI prompts and up to 3 seats, with no card to start. So the trial reads two engines rather than five, which is worth planning your test around.

Read the alert, then ask who writes the page

The interesting thing about Frase's design is that it is honest about where the automation stops, and the gap it leaves is the same gap almost every buyer in this market walks into: an AI visibility alert tells you an engine answered a question without you in it, and the work that changes the answer happens on pages, often pages you do not own. Content Guard proves Frase can close a loop when the signal is one it has measured for a decade. When the signal is an AI answer, the loop is still a human one, and the question to put to any vendor on a demo call is simply this: when the alert fires, what does your product do next, and who does the writing.