AI Visibility Tools Compared (2026): Real Pricing

Quick answer

AI visibility tools in 2026 fall into three price bands: SEO suites that folded AI tracking into plans you may already pay for, pure-play specialists publishing list prices from about $20 to $999 a month, and an enterprise tier that publishes nothing and routes every buyer through sales. The single most valuable thing you can do before buying is check whether your existing SEO subscription already covers it, because several now do at no extra charge. Every figure below is a published list price read from the vendor’s own pricing page on 6 September 2026.

We already compared the three most-searched specialists head to head in Profound vs Peec AI vs Otterly. This post is the wider market map, and it deliberately includes the category most comparison posts skip: the tools you are already paying for.

Band 1: the SEO suites that bundled it

If you run an SEO program, start here. The economics changed in 2026 when AI visibility stopped being a premium add-on and became a tier feature.

Two notes worth the money they save you. Semrush was acquired by Adobe in April 2026 and restructured its plans as “SEO + AI Search”, so the separately priced AI Toolkit add-on no longer exists as its own line item. And Mangools is the cheapest credible entry point in the entire market at $37.70 a month annually, with 500 monitored prompts across ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, AI Mode, Gemini, Claude, Grok, Mistral, and Llama. For a startup that just wants a baseline, that is hard to beat.

Band 2: the specialists with public prices

These are purpose-built for AI visibility rather than bolted onto a rank tracker. All prices are monthly list unless noted.

Read the engine list before the price. Otterly’s $29 entry covers ChatGPT, AI Overviews, Perplexity, and Copilot, but Claude, Gemini, and Google AI Mode are paid add-ons running from $9 to $439 a month depending on tier. Profound’s $99 Starter is ChatGPT only; Perplexity and AI Overviews arrive at $399, and Gemini, Copilot, Grok, DeepSeek, and Claude only at Enterprise. Peec AI’s self-serve tiers let you pick three models, with up to twelve at Enterprise. A headline price and an engine roster are two different purchases.

Two housekeeping items that will save you a confused search: Goodie now lives at higoodie.com because the original domain is parked and for sale, and Scrunch moved from scrunchai.com to scrunch.com.

Band 3: the ones that will not tell you

This group is genuinely large, and honesty about it is more useful than a made-up number. As of September 2026, none of these publish AI-visibility pricing: Conductor (Essentials, Growth, Enterprise, usage-based), BrightEdge AI Catalyst (stated as included in all platform subscriptions, no figure), seoClarity ArcAI (three tiers, all quote-only, 500-query minimum), Evertune, Brandlight, Bluefish, Daydream, Relixir, and Similarweb AI Search Intelligence.

seoClarity does publish adjacent platform pricing, which gives you a sense of the band: Research and Content from $2,500 a month, Technical SEO from $3,200, Enterprise from $4,500. Budget for a procurement cycle rather than a credit card, and get the engine list and prompt allowance in writing before the demo ends.

The free layer people forget

You can learn a surprising amount for nothing. HubSpot’s AI Search Grader needs no account. AthenaHQ has a permanently free tier with 300 credits. Serpstat’s LLM Brand Monitor gives you ten free checks. Ahrefs runs a free AI Visibility Checker, and Trakkr publishes a free AI Query Scanner and site grader.

The one most teams miss is not a rank tracker at all. Cloudflare AI Crawl Control is included on every Cloudflare plan at no extra cost and shows which AI crawlers are actually reaching your site. That is upstream of everything a visibility dashboard measures: if GPTBot and OAI-SearchBot are not fetching your pages, no amount of prompt tracking will explain why you are absent. Our AEO audit checklist walks through how to read that signal properly.

And the genuinely free baseline still works: pick 20 prompts your buyers ask, run them manually across ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini once a week, and log the results. Our free AI search visibility audit guide has the scoring rubric.

What actually matters when you compare

Prompt volume is the throttle. Every vendor gates it, and it is the number most likely to force an upgrade. It is also the number most teams over-buy: 30 to 50 well-chosen prompts cover most B2B buyer journeys.

Citation source visibility separates useful from vain. Knowing you were mentioned is a metric. Knowing the engine cited a Reddit thread, a competitor’s docs, or a review site is a decision. Weigh this hardest.

Engine coverage should match your buyers, not the vendor’s marketing. Twelve engines is a worse deal than three engines your customers actually use.

Sentiment and accuracy monitoring matter more than they sound. Being cited inaccurately is its own problem class, and it is fixable through different work than being absent. Our post on what to do when ChatGPT recommends your competitor covers that distinction.

The verdict

• Already on an SEO suite? Check Semrush, Nightwatch, or Mangools coverage before buying anything. You may be done.
• Startup wanting a baseline for under $100? Mangools at $37.70 annual, Rankscale at $20, or Otterly at $29 with a clear-eyed look at which engines cost extra.
• Serious about competitor share-of-voice? Peec AI at $95 or Profound at $399 once you need more than ChatGPT.
• Enterprise with a procurement process? Scrunch and Goodie publish prices, which makes them easier to benchmark the contact-sales platforms against.

One thing no tool in any band will do: tell you why you are losing, or what to change. Every platform here reports the symptom accurately and diagnoses nothing. The metric moves when someone restructures content, fixes crawler access, repairs entity signals, and closes the source gaps the engines actually cite. That is the work a GEO Readiness Audit does with the data your tool is already collecting, and what an ongoing GEO retainer keeps moving month to month.

Buy the tool, get the baseline, then fix the cause. In that order.