This one has a clean answer, and it starts with a concession most comparison pages won't make: if you already pay for Semrush and run your SEO there, adding its AI Visibility Toolkit is often the cheaper, simpler move, and you should probably just do it. The interesting question is what happens when you don't already live in Semrush. That's where a trades-focused tool like Tibly earns the look. Here's the honest contrast.
What does Semrush's AI Visibility Toolkit do?
Semrush is a general SEO suite that added AI visibility as a module. The toolkit tracks whether AI engines mention your brand for the prompts you feed it, and it sits right next to your keyword rankings and backlink data in one login. As of July 2026, it's priced at $99/month as an add-on that requires a base Semrush plan, so budget for both lines. Check Semrush's page before you commit, because pricing and packaging in this category move often.
When is the Semrush toolkit the right choice?
When your team already lives in Semrush. If you or your agency runs classic SEO there every day, the AI toolkit keeps AI-answer data in the same workflow as everything else, and it's one more panel rather than one more subscription and login to manage. And if you already pay for the base plan, adding the toolkit may genuinely be the cheaper and simpler path than buying a separate tool. We'd rather say that plainly than pretend otherwise.
How is Tibly different?
The core difference is focus. Semrush is a broad SEO suite that grew an AI feature. Tibly is AI visibility built for one industry, the trades. Semrush tracks the prompts you write and maintain. Tibly generates its prompts from a trade plus a list of cities, so a roofer serving five suburbs gets the buying questions for all five without hand-authoring a prompt sheet. As of July 2026, Tibly starts at $49/month. For a wider view of the whole category, our fuller roundup lays out every tool side by side.
Why does prompt coverage matter more than dashboard polish?
Because the engines cite almost entirely different sources, so a thin prompt set on one view misses most of the picture. Profound found ChatGPT and Perplexity overlap on only 11% of the domains they cite, and that Google's AI Overviews and AI Mode agree on just 13.7% of the URLs they surface. If a tool tracks 20 brand-level prompts nationally, it tells a roofer in Tampa almost nothing about whether ChatGPT and Gemini name them for the specific jobs homeowners in Tampa ask about. Coverage of the right questions, on every engine, beats a prettier chart of the wrong ones.
So which one fits a trades business?
If you already own Semrush, add the toolkit and start there; it's the path of least resistance and often the cheaper one. If you don't, and you run a local trades business, Tibly is built for exactly your case: it generates the prompts from your trade and cities, scans them across ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Grok, and Google's AI Overviews, and tracks which companies get named and which sources get cited, from $49/month. Pick the tool that matches how you already work.
