What AI visibility tools actually cost in 2026

Published entry prices for AI visibility tools run from $24 to $300 a month. Otterly.AI Lite is $29, Profound Starter is $99 billed yearly, Scrunch AI Starter is $300, and our own Individual plan is $24. Every figure below was read from the vendor’s own pricing page on 4 August 2026. Two vendors we looked at publish no number at all, and they appear here as unpublished rather than as a guess.

The table

Prices read from each vendor’s public pricing page on 4 August 2026, for the cheapest plan that includes AI answer monitoring, single user, monthly billing unless the row says otherwise. Source links for every row are at the bottom of this page.

Tool	Entry plan	Price a month	What that price includes
Visibility100x	Individual	$24	10 AI questions over 4 runs a month, plus 36 checks a page on 5 sites and 25 keywords tracked weekly
Otterly.AI	Lite	$29	15 search prompts, daily tracking, across ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity and Copilot
Knowatoa	Starter	$59	Quotas not stated on the pricing page
Writesonic	Starter	$79	50 prompts and 50 answers tracked daily, ChatGPT, Gemini and Google AI Overviews. Same price monthly or annually
Profound	Starter	$99, billed yearly	50 prompts tracked, ChatGPT only, 100 agent credits a month. No monthly billing option is shown
Rankscale	Pro	$99	1,200 credits a month, up to 4,800 AI answers, 10 dashboards, unlimited search terms
AthenaHQ	Starter	$295	3,600 credits a month, unlimited topics, unlimited competitors tracked
Scrunch AI	Starter	$300	350 custom prompts, 1,000 industry prompts, 3 user licences, 5 page audits. $250 a month on annual billing
Peec AI	Starter	Not published	Plan names and feature lists appear on the pricing page with no figure attached

Vendor pricing changes without notice, and plan quotas move underneath a price that stays the same. Click through to the source before you decide anything. This table is a snapshot with a date on it, not a live feed.

Two rows are worth reading twice. Rankscale also advertises an Essentials plan starting at $20 a month, which would be the lowest published price in the category, but the page does not state what quota that buys, so it is not in the table. AthenaHQ publishes a free Essential tier carrying $25 of credit, which is the most generous free entry we found.

Where a competitor beats us, and by how much

Otterly.AI’s $29 Lite plan buys roughly nine times more AI answer checks per dollar than our $24 Individual plan. Fifteen prompts at a daily frequency is about 450 checks a month. Ours is 10 questions over 4 runs, which is 40.

That is not a rounding difference and we are not going to write around it. If the only thing you want is to watch a set of prompts move day by day, Otterly is better value than us at that price and the arithmetic is not close. Writesonic’s $79 Starter tracks 50 prompts and 50 answers daily, which is around 1,500 answers a month. That is a bit over three times our price for roughly thirty seven times the answer checks, so on pure monitoring volume it beats us too.

The reason our number is smaller is that a run of ours is not the same unit of work. Each AI question is asked across models, the answer is parsed for whether you are named and what you are named alongside, and the result is stored against the same site record as your crawl, your keywords and your 36 page level checks. We priced for a monthly read on whether you are being recommended, sitting next to the technical reasons you are not. We did not price for a daily prompt ticker, and if that ticker is what you are buying, buy the tool built for it.

Saying so costs us nothing that honesty would not have cost anyway. Anyone who reads both pricing pages finds this in ninety seconds.

Why prompt counts are not comparable across vendors

A prompt is not a standard unit. Vendors differ on how many engines a prompt is run against, how often, and whether the number counts questions asked or answers returned, so two identical prompt counts can differ by an order of magnitude in work done.

Four differences do most of the damage when you try to compare:

Engines per prompt. Otterly’s Lite plan covers four engines and lists Claude, Gemini and Google AI Mode as paid add ons. Profound’s Starter covers ChatGPT only, with three answer engines starting on the $399 Growth plan. A prompt tracked on one engine and a prompt tracked on six are the same word and different products.

Frequency. Daily against fortnightly is a fourteen times difference in data for the same headline count.

Credits against prompts. AthenaHQ and Rankscale meter in credits, not prompts. Rankscale states the conversion on the page, 1,200 credits being up to 4,800 answers on the Pro plan. Where a vendor does not state the conversion, the prompt count on the card is not a number you can do arithmetic with.

Custom against library prompts. Scrunch separates 350 custom prompts from 1,000 industry prompts on its Starter plan. Only the first kind is about your questions.

The practical consequence: pick the two or three tools in your budget, then compare engines times frequency times prompts, not the number printed largest on the card.

The prices that are not on the table

Some vendors in this category sell through a sales team rather than a signup form, so no figure appears on the page at all. That is a legitimate model, and it is also a real cost to you in evaluation time.

Peec AI publishes plan names and feature lists with no numeric price. We dropped Brandlight and Goodie AI from this article entirely because we could not load a public pricing page to verify anything, and a number we cannot source does not go in a table we are asking you to trust. Nearly every vendor here, ourselves excepted, also runs an enterprise tier that is quoted rather than listed.

If you find a specific figure for any of those plans on a comparison site, treat it as somebody’s recollection of a quote until the vendor prints it.

Annual billing is doing more work than it looks

Several headline prices in this category are annual prices displayed as a monthly number, which means the cheapest figure on the card is not the cheapest way in. Profound is the clearest case: its pricing page shows $99 a month for Starter with no monthly billing option displayed at all.

Read that as a $1,188 commitment, because that is what it is. Scrunch is $250 a month on annual billing and $300 month to month, and states both. Writesonic charges $79 either way and is the exception here. Otterly is $25 annual against $29 monthly.

A tool you are trialling on a new channel is exactly the wrong thing to lock up for a year. The right comparison at the evaluation stage is the monthly figure, which is why the table above uses it and flags the row where no monthly figure exists.

What the general SEO suites charge for the same feature

Semrush and Ahrefs both include AI search tracking in their normal plans now, at entry prices well above the specialist tools, because you are buying a full SEO suite alongside it. Both figures below were read on 4 August 2026.

Suite	Entry plan	Price a month	AI visibility included
Ahrefs	Lite	$129	Brand Radar included, 5 tracked AI prompts. Brand Radar AI add on from $199 a month
Semrush	SEO	$139	AI search tracking included, 50 prompts to track daily and 1 domain for AI brand performance. There is no plan named Pro

The two suites are not the same story, and lumping them together would be the easy mistake here. Ahrefs Lite tracks five prompts for $129, which is a token allowance next to Otterly’s fifteen daily for $29. Semrush’s $139 SEO plan states fifty prompts tracked daily, which is more absolute volume than Otterly Lite gives you, on the cheapest plan Semrush sells.

So the honest version is narrower than “suites are the expensive way”. Per dollar spent on AI answer checks, the specialists still win. But if you were going to pay for a suite anyway, Semrush’s included allowance is large enough that adding a second subscription for monitoring alone deserves a hard look first.

Who should buy which

Match the tool to the question you are trying to answer, not to the length of the feature list. Four cases cover most buyers.

You want a daily prompt ticker and nothing else. Otterly.AI at $29, or Writesonic at $79 if you need fifty prompts. Best checks per dollar at the low end of the market.

You want to know why you are not being cited, not only that you are not. That is a technical question about crawler access, rendering and page structure, and a monitoring tool will not answer it. This is the case we built for, and it is what the $24 Individual plan covers alongside the AI questions.

You are an enterprise brand with a category to defend. Profound, AthenaHQ and Scrunch AI are priced and built for that, from $99 billed yearly up to $300 a month before you reach their enterprise tiers.

You already pay for Semrush or Ahrefs. Use the allowance you are already paying for first. On Semrush that is fifty prompts tracked daily from the entry plan, which is a real monitoring capability and not a teaser. On Ahrefs Lite it is five, which is enough to find out whether you have a problem worth spending more on.

Before you spend anything, find out if you have a problem

Check whether you are cited at all before you buy a tool to watch it. That check is free here and needs no card: our AI visibility check asks real questions of real models and reports whether you are named, and the free audit runs 36 checks on any URL.

Every tool in the table above reports its own headline number, and none of them publish how it is calculated, which makes two vendors’ scores impossible to compare. Ours is written out in full in how our AI visibility score is calculated, weights included, along with what a single number of this kind cannot tell you.

The free plan runs 3 AI questions once a month, which is not a monitoring product and is not meant to be. It is enough to learn whether assistants currently recommend you. If they do not, the next question is why, and that is usually a crawler or rendering problem rather than a monitoring problem. Spending $300 a month to watch a number that will not move is the most common expensive mistake in this category.

This article was written to the standard our own engine scores. The answer sits in the first forty words, every section is bounded by a heading a model can chunk on, and every price is a figure read from a named page on a stated date rather than an adjective. You can run that check on this page yourself.

Sources and method

Every price above was read from the vendor’s own public pricing page on 4 August 2026, for the cheapest plan including AI answer monitoring, single user, monthly billing unless the row states otherwise. Where a vendor publishes no figure, this article says so instead of estimating.

• Otterly.AI, pricing.
• Knowatoa, pricing.
• Writesonic, pricing.
• Profound, pricing.
• Rankscale, pricing.
• AthenaHQ, pricing.
• Scrunch AI, pricing.
• Peec AI, pricing, which is the page carrying no numeric price.
• Ahrefs, pricing.
• Semrush, pricing.
• Our own pricing, which is generated from the same configuration as this table’s first row and is always the authoritative figure for what we charge.

Dropped for lack of a verifiable source: Brandlight and Goodie AI, whose pricing pages we could not load on the date above.