How much do AI visibility tools cost?

What AI visibility tools actually cost#

Prefer starts at $24 a month, and as of September 2026 the rest of the market runs from a genuine free tier to about $800 a month. A verified sweep of 11 tools, checked in a rendered browser on 23 August 2026, lays out the range:

• Free. AthenaHQ’s Essential tier is free with 300 credits across five models, and AirOps has a free start that tracks ChatGPT insights only.
• $24 to $29. Prefer’s Starter is $24 (our product, repriced 12 September 2026), and Otterly’s Lite is $29 a month for 15 prompts across four engines (re-verified September 2026).
• About $95 (the full-featured cluster). Peec AI and PromptWatch at $95 sit where most dedicated trackers land. Profound no longer lists a paid brand plan: brands get a free trial or a custom Enterprise quote (checked 18 September 2026).
• $99 to $199 (the SEO suites). Semrush sells its AI Visibility toolkit at $99 a month per domain and bundles AI tracking into its SEO plans from $199; Ahrefs Brand Radar is included with paid Ahrefs plans from $129 a month, and its AI Visibility Index costs $199 a month per platform (both checked 19 September 2026).
• $250 and up (enterprise-leaning). Scrunch’s Core plan is $250 a month (re-verified 5 September 2026 after its second restructure of the summer), AthenaHQ’s action tier is $295, and Evertune’s Pro plan is $800, with custom enterprise pricing above the published tiers.

Why the sticker is not the price#

The meter, what a plan actually rations, sets the real cost, not the number on the pricing hero. Plans that look alike ration completely different things:

• Engines per plan. Profound’s free trial runs on ChatGPT, Gemini and Google AI Overviews; for brands, more engines (up to nine) come with a custom Enterprise quote.
• Models per plan. Peec AI’s $95 plan includes 3 AI models, and each extra model costs $30 a month; PromptWatch’s $95 Essential includes 4 of 11 and no articles.
• Credits. AthenaHQ meters its plans in credits.

Monitoring is cheap. Doing the work is where the price jumps#

The biggest split in this market is not cheap versus expensive, it is report versus act. Most tools under $95 tell you what AI says about you and stop there, which means the content, the schema and the off-page work stay on your team’s plate. That labour is the real cost, and it never appears on a pricing page.

Sorted by what you get rather than what you pay:

• Monitoring-focused, $29 to $95. Otterly, LLM Pulse and Peec AI track and report; Peec’s pricing page (archived 8 September) also lists recommended and agent actions. Budget for a writer on top.
• Monitoring plus execution, $24. Prefer’s Starter includes 15 drafted articles a month alongside tracking on all five engines. This is our product, so weigh that. Other tools that both track and write content start higher: Frase at $49 a month and PromptWatch at $245 for five articles a month. Most tools publish no article allowance at any tier.
• Monitoring plus execution, $199 and up. Semrush bundles from $199, Scrunch is $250, AthenaHQ’s action tier is $295, Evertune is $800.

The gap between the second and third lines is the part worth checking yourself, using your own numbers rather than ours. Whatever you pay per article, multiply it by the number you need each month and compare that against the plan price: if you pay $200 an article and need eight, that is $1,600 a month of writing next to a $24 to $129 subscription. On the execution job the useful comparison is not one tool against another, it is the tool against what the work costs you today. Our AI visibility cost calculator does that arithmetic with your rates, including the time you still spend editing a drafted article.

Comparing entry stickers without the meters is how teams end up surprised at renewal. The honest way to read the market is engines-per-dollar and volume at the tier you can actually afford, not the headline price. For the full table with a source link and a checked date for every figure, see the verified pricing index; for what each tool does beyond the price, see the best AI visibility tools roundup. Prefer’s own plans, and its free audit, are on the pricing page.

Sources

1. A verified sweep of 11 AI visibility tools (checked 23 August 2026) found entry prices ranging from free (AthenaHQ's 300-credit tier and AirOps' free start) through $29 (Otterly Lite) up to $800 a month (Evertune Pro), with a $95 to $99 cluster of full-featured trackers in between. Prefer: AI visibility tool pricing, 11 tools verified
2. Otterly's Lite plan is $29/mo for 15 prompts across four engines (re-verified September 2026), and Ahrefs Brand Radar is bundled with paid Ahrefs plans from $129/mo. (Prefer research note: Otterly, Ahrefs, Yext (2026-09-03), dated research note)
3. Prefer's Starter plan is $24 a month (repriced 12 September 2026) and includes all five tracked engines, 30 tracked prompts and 15 AI articles a month, with no per-engine add-ons and no overage billing. Prefer pricing (our product)
4. Tools that both track AI engines and write content start higher than Prefer: Frase at $49 a month (its own llms.txt, read 19 September 2026: every plan includes AI-visibility tracking and content creation), PromptWatch's first plan with an article allowance at $245 for five a month, Scrunch at $250 and AthenaHQ's action tier at $295. AirOps's free and Solo tiers track ChatGPT only. (Prefer rendered checks (2026-09-19), Frase addendum; price-answer claim boundary (2026-09-12), dated research note)
5. The sticker hides the meter: Peec AI's $95 Starter includes 3 AI models, with each extra model $30 a month, and PromptWatch's $95 Essential includes 4 of 11 models and no articles. Same price, very different plans. Prefer: AI visibility tool pricing, 11 tools verified
6. Across the eleven tools in the verified pricing index, three publish a countable monthly article allowance: Prefer (15 on its $24 Starter), PromptWatch (0 at its $95 Essential tier and 5 at $245) and Evertune (25 at $800). AthenaHQ has a content agent from $295 with no published count. Otterly, LLM Pulse, Peec AI, Scrunch and Profound publish no article allowance at any tier. Prefer: AI visibility tool pricing, 11 tools verified
7. Profound's pricing page, read in a rendered browser on 23 September 2026, lists no paid price for brands: a free Trial (50 prompts run daily for 7 days, on ChatGPT, Gemini and Google AI Overviews) and Enterprise at a custom price (daily tracking, up to 9 answer engines). Its $99 and $399 are agency prices: Agency Growth at $99 a month plus add-ons, and $399 a month per client workspace. A Wayback Machine capture from 14 September 2026 still showed brand plans at $99 (Starter, ChatGPT only) and $399 (Growth, 3 engines). (Prefer research note: How much does Profound cost (2026-09-18), dated research note)
8. Peec AI's pricing page, read in a rendered browser on 16 September 2026: each self-serve plan includes 3 models, and each extra model costs $30 a month on Starter, $70 on Pro and $140 on Advanced. A Wayback copy of the page from 8 September 2026 also lists gap analysis, recommended actions and agent actions under 'Act'. (Prefer research note: Peec AI questions (2026-09-18), sections 0 and 1, dated research note)
9. Ahrefs' Brand Radar and pricing pages, read in a rendered browser on 19 September 2026: paid plans include 5, 10 or 20 tracked AI prompts (Lite $129, Standard $249, Advanced $449); custom-prompt packages start at $50 a month (about 80 prompts daily on one platform); the AI Visibility Index is $199 a month per platform or $699 for all, and covers AI Overviews, AI Mode, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Copilot, while 'Custom Prompts supports all of the above plus Claude'. The page shows 455M+ monthly prompts. (Prefer rendered checks (2026-09-19), sections 3a and 3b, dated research note)
10. Semrush's Enterprise pricing page, read in a rendered browser on 19 September 2026, compares plans: the AI Visibility toolkit (25 to 200 prompts) covers 'ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Google AI Mode, Perplexity, and Gemini'; the Enterprise AI Optimization plan adds MS Copilot, Grok, Claude and Deepseek. The standalone toolkit's Base plan is $99 a month per domain with 25 prompts tracked daily. (Prefer rendered checks (2026-09-19), section 7, dated research note)