Best AI visibility tool for a government supplier, ranked on whether you can buy it on an invoice instead of a card

If you sell to government, the question that stops a software purchase is almost never the feature list. It is the payment route. A supplier whose finance function raises a purchase order against an invoice cannot put a monthly subscription on a departmental card, and most of this category is built entirely around cards. Ranked on what each vendor publishes about how you pay, read on 31 October 2026, here is the whole field.

How each vendor publishes being paid

Vendor	Published payment route	Where it sits
Depra AI	Enterprise is invoiced monthly by NEFT, RTGS or UPI, with a GST invoice issued against your GSTIN	On a priced tier, Rs 25,000 a month
Ahrefs	Visa, Mastercard, American Express and UnionPay, and wire transfers on request for Enterprise plans	Wire transfer only at Enterprise, $1,499 a month, annual commitment required
OtterlyAI	Custom payment options and custom terms	Enterprise, unpriced
Rankscale	Additional payment methods	Custom plan, unpriced
Peec AI	Not published; Enterprise is described as custom and annual	Talk to sales
Scrunch AI	Not published	Core is self serve, Enterprise is a demo
Profound	Not published	Enterprise is a demo
Semrush	Not published on either pricing tab; the AI Visibility plan is billed annually	Subscribe, or request a demo at Advanced

Depra is the only vendor in the set that publishes a named invoice route against a published price, so a supplier can take a figure and a payment method to a finance team in one document. Ahrefs is the only one that publishes its accepted card networks and names wire transfer, which is the next most useful thing. Where a vendor publishes nothing, that is reported here as not published rather than as a refusal, and the right move is to ask before you shortlist.

The second gate, which is data handling

A government supplier gets asked where competitive intelligence about public tenders is processed, so the published security lines matter more here than in most verticals. Same date, same pages:

• Ahrefs. At its $1,499 Enterprise tier it publishes SSO and enterprise grade security, access management and an audit log, unlimited historical data and a stated no training on your data. That is the most complete published set in the category and the annual commitment is published with it.
• Profound. Publishes SSO and SAML with SOC 2 compliance at Enterprise, and marks SSO as No on its free trial.
• Scrunch AI. Publishes Google single sign on on its $250 Core plan and SAML or OIDC at Enterprise, which is the only published single sign on on a self serve tier in this set.
• Depra AI. Publishes no single sign on, and publishes an option to run the product on your own server at Enterprise, set up by its team, which answers a data residency question nobody else on this list answers at all.
• Peec AI and OtterlyAI. Both publish single sign on at Enterprise, with OtterlyAI also naming enterprise grade compliance and a quarterly health check.
• Rankscale. Publishes SSO, trainings, custom API, SLA guarantees and additional payment methods together on its unpriced Custom plan.

Two routes answer a procurement security review properly, and they answer different halves of it. Ahrefs answers access control and model training. Depra answers where the software runs. A review that asks both will get one answer from each vendor and no complete answer from either, which is worth knowing before you promise your own compliance team a single supplier.

What the questions look like for this buyer

A government supplier's buying questions are unusually structured, and that affects the plan size rather than the vendor. The questions a bid team wants watched are framework and category shaped: who supplies this category to the department, which suppliers hold a place on the relevant framework, which firms have delivered this kind of programme before. They tend to be few in number and high in value, which is the opposite of an ecommerce catalogue.

So the entry tiers are mostly sufficient. Published allowances, same date: Depra Starter at Rs 1,999 gives 16 prompt slots and 2,000 successful checks. OtterlyAI Lite at $29 gives 15 prompts with unlimited countries. Rankscale Essentials at $20 sold yearly only gives 120 credits and 480 answers across all regions. Peec Starter at $95 gives 50 prompts with 1 country. Scrunch Core at $250 gives 125 prompts, 5,000 responses and 5 user licences in one country. A bid team with twenty questions is served by any of them, which means the payment and security gates above really do decide this purchase.

The one thing worth paying more for here

Your buyer is a public body, and public bodies publish. Which means the sources that decide whether you are named are mostly documents somebody else controls: framework award notices, contract registers, departmental supplier lists and trade press. The published feature that matters most for this buyer is therefore source level reporting, and three vendors publish it specifically. Peec publishes source classification, sorting each cited source into categories such as competitor, editorial, reference or user generated, plus a gap analysis of sources that appear often and name competitors but not you. Rankscale publishes citations analysis and a sources box analysis. OtterlyAI publishes citation source tracking and link citations analysis on every tier including Lite at $29.

A supplier who finds out that one award notice page is carrying the answer has learned something they can act on in a week. That is worth more than a wider engine list.

Where we rank on this page's criterion, which is near the bottom

We sell in this category and on the payment question our published answer is not what a public sector buyer wants. Read on 31 October 2026 our pricing page states that plans are prepaid, one month or one year at a time, that nothing renews on its own, and that a plan is bought by booking a discovery call. It publishes no purchase order route, no invoice terms, no wire transfer and no single sign on at any tier. On the stated criterion of this page, Depra and Ahrefs both rank above us and so, in principle, do OtterlyAI and Rankscale through their custom terms.

What our page does publish is the measurement and the work: all five engines, ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude and Google AI Overviews, on GEO Growth at $299 a month or Rs 11,799 with 100 buyer questions and 1,200 scheduled answers, Claude at a published 3 credits a check against 1 for the others, a credit returned when a check fails, and 20 pages a month written and published to your own site, rising to 300 questions, 3,500 answers, 40 pages and a Visibility API on GEO Scale at $599. For a supplier whose category has no page answering the buying question, that production side is the gap. For a supplier who needs a purchase order, it is not, and the honest answer is the table at the top of this page.

Before buying anything, it is worth seeing how the public sector side of this actually reads in an answer, which our page on how a US city or public agency appears in AI answers measured directly.

Questions a public sector supplier asks about these tools

Which vendor can invoice us

Depra publishes invoiced monthly billing by NEFT, RTGS or UPI with a GST invoice on its Rs 25,000 Enterprise tier. Ahrefs publishes wire transfers on request for Enterprise plans at $1,499 a month. OtterlyAI publishes custom payment options and Rankscale publishes additional payment methods, both on unpriced tiers. The rest publish nothing on payment method.

Can we avoid an annual commitment

Depra publishes monthly billing on all four tiers. Rankscale publishes a monthly and a yearly column on every tier except Essentials, which is yearly only. Ahrefs states annual commitment required at Enterprise and Semrush publishes its AI Visibility Base plan as billed annually, so those two are the ones to read carefully if a twelve month term is a problem.

Which has the strongest published answer on data handling

Ahrefs at Enterprise, which publishes SSO, access management, an audit log and no training on your data in one list. The strongest published answer on where the software runs is Depra's self hosting option at Enterprise.

Is single sign on available without an enterprise contract

Once, at Scrunch, which publishes Google single sign on on its $250 Core plan. Every other vendor in this set puts single sign on behind an unpriced or enterprise tier.

How many questions should a bid team watch

Start with one per category you bid in, one per framework you hold or want, and one per competitor you lose to. For most suppliers that is fifteen to forty, which fits inside the cheapest tier of nearly every vendor here, so pick on payment terms and sources rather than on volume.

What should we ask a vendor that publishes none of this

Three things in writing before a shortlist: whether they will invoice against a purchase order, whether a twelve month term is required, and whether your data is used to train anything. Only Ahrefs publishes an answer to the third one today, so getting it in writing is the point of asking.

How we know this

We read the assistants rather than guessing what they do. In our own audit of 1,260 saved answers from ChatGPT and Gemini across the United States, the United Kingdom and India, 82.0% of every citation landed on a site the business itself owned, and review directories took 0.7%. Counted as one domain per reading, 16,516 of 20,143.

That is the whole asymmetry: the pages you own are the pages an assistant quotes back to a buyer. See the dated readings and the method on our proof page.

Find out whether assistants name your business, on your own domain and your own buying questions.

By Aditya Goel, Founder, AI Knows Us. Reviewed 1 November 2026.