The short answer
The fastest way to waste budget on AI visibility tooling is to buy on brand recognition instead of fit. Published list prices now run from $0 to $800 a month, and the honest answer to "which tool?" is a shortlist per buyer situation, not a single winner. Every price in this guide was checked against the vendor's own pricing page in July 2026; several are billed annually, which we flag where it applies.
- No budget yet: HubSpot's AEO Grader, Kalicube's free audit, Frase's GEO Score, and Rankability's checker give you a $0 baseline
- First paid tracker: Otterly Lite at $29/month
- Small team picking one platform: Peec AI at $95, Profound Starter at $99 (ChatGPT only), or Trakkr at $100 for eight-model coverage
- Already paying for Semrush: the $99/month standalone AI Visibility plan
- Growing team or agency: Otterly Standard at $189, Peec AI Pro at $245, AthenaHQ at $295, or Profound Growth at $399
- Enterprise brand measurement: Evertune at $800, or custom Enterprise tiers from Profound and Semrush
Start at $0: free checkers and Google's own reports
Four free checkers give you a defensible baseline in under an hour. HubSpot's AEO Grader runs a free one-time analysis of how ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini present your brand. Kalicube's free audit checks brand authority — its published audit page names Google and ChatGPT; the nine-platform figure is a vendor claim. Frase's GEO Score returns a 0-100 citation-readiness score for any URL, and Rankability's AI Search Indexability & Crawlability Checker tests whether AI crawlers can actually reach and parse a page, scoring it out of 100. Then add one first-party source: Google's Search Console generative-AI performance reports, announced in June 2026 for a subset of sites, break out AI Overviews and AI Mode performance by page, country, device, and date at no cost. None of these monitor over time. They are diagnostics — but they tell you whether you have a visibility problem worth paying to track.
Your first tracker: $29 to $100 a month
This bracket holds six credible options, and they behave very differently despite similar-looking prices: roughly $100 buys you 25 prompts checked daily, 50 prompts on a single engine, or 50 prompts across eight models.
- Otterly Lite — $29/month: 15 prompts across ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity, and Copilot, with a 7-day, 50-prompt trial and no card required
- HubSpot AEO — $50/month ($45/month paid annually): 25 daily-tracked prompts across ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini; trial terms are inconsistently described (confirm at signup) and the product is still labeled beta
- Peec AI Brand Starter — $95/month: 50 prompts, one project, unlimited users — but self-serve plans choose three of its six supported engines
- Profound Starter — $99/month billed yearly: 50 prompts and 1,500 monthly responses on ChatGPT only, one seat, no data export or API
- Semrush AI Visibility Base — $99/month per domain, billed annually: 25 custom prompts checked daily, plus brand-performance data across five surfaces
- Trakkr Growth — $100/month: 50 prompts on one brand across eight AI models, with a 14-day trial — the widest engine coverage in this bracket
Growing teams and agencies: $189 to $495
This bracket buys continuous competitive monitoring plus the reporting and export layer most teams need to justify the spend — and it is where agency-specific packaging lives.
- Otterly Standard — $189/month: 100 prompts, and the current pricing cards show API, MCP, and agent analytics arriving at this tier
- Peec AI Brand Pro — $245/month, Advanced $495: 150 prompts and two projects, rising to 350 prompts across five projects; a separate agency ladder starts at $245 with pooled credits and pitch workspaces
- AthenaHQ Starter — $295/month: 3,600 monthly credits, visibility described across nine models, and a content-action layer; a free Essential tier with 300 credits lets you evaluate before paying
- Profound Growth — $399/month billed yearly: 100 prompts and 9,000 monthly responses across ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews, three seats, CSV/JSON export — still no API
Brand measurement at scale: $800 and up
Evertune Pro costs $800 per month and answers a different question. Instead of curating a small prompt list, it samples at volume: 100,000 prompts analyzed across up to 11 AI models, with unlimited brands, competitors, and users. Founded by former Trade Desk leadership, with $20M raised (vendor-reported), it suits brand and insights teams asking how AI models describe them at scale rather than which of 50 prompts they win this week. Above it sit the custom tiers: Profound Enterprise unlocks up to ten answer engines plus API access and SSO, and Semrush Enterprise AIO adds the Copilot, Claude, Grok, and DeepSeek coverage that no standard Semrush plan includes.
Engine gating: the fine print that changes the math
Almost every vendor in this market gates engine coverage by tier, and the headline price rarely includes the engines you assume it does. Check these before signing anything.
- Profound: Starter is ChatGPT-only; Growth adds Perplexity and Google AI Overviews; the full ten-engine set — including Claude, Grok, DeepSeek, and Meta AI — is Enterprise-only, as are API access and SSO
- Peec AI: six engines supported, but every self-serve plan picks three; a fourth engine costs $35, $85, or $165 per month depending on tier
- Otterly: the base set is ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity, and Copilot — Claude, Gemini, and Google AI Mode are separately priced add-ons
- Semrush: its dataset covers five surfaces, but your own daily prompts run only on ChatGPT Search, Google AI Mode, and Gemini; Copilot, Claude, Grok, and DeepSeek require Enterprise AIO
- AthenaHQ: pricing is credit-metered and one credit equals one collected response, so prompts times engines times locations times run frequency drains Starter's 3,600 credits faster than the plan card suggests
- HubSpot AEO: three engines (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini) with no Claude coverage
- Billing: Profound's self-serve tiers and Semrush's $99 plan are billed annually; Trakkr bills in USD even when its site displays GBP or EUR conversions
How many engines do you actually need?
Engine gating matters less once you know which engines need independent tracking. Semrush's study of 5,000 queries and 150,000 citations found Perplexity cited a domain from Google's top ten in 91% of cases, and Google AI Overviews did in 86% — so your existing rank tracking already predicts much of your visibility on those surfaces. ChatGPT is the outlier: a separate Ahrefs test of 3,311 head terms found only 31.8% domain-level overlap with Google results, and just 10% at the exact-URL level. Muck Rack's May 2026 "What Is AI Reading?" analysis of more than 25 million links across ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini adds that each engine leans on different sources — Wikipedia was the top cited domain in ChatGPT, PubMed Central in Claude, and Reddit in Gemini. The practical read: ChatGPT coverage is the one near-non-negotiable, extra engines are worth paying for when your buyers demonstrably use them, and an all-engines checkbox is not worth a triple-digit premium on its own.
A prompt-first way to decide
Start from the prompts, not the dashboard: write down 50 questions your buyers actually ask before any demo, then spend the free periods running that same list through each finalist — Otterly gives 7 days and 50 prompts without a card, Trakkr 14 days, HubSpot AEO a trial it describes inconsistently (confirm at signup), and AthenaHQ's free tier carries 300 credits. Verify three things. First, that the tool stores the full answer with its citations: a 2026 arXiv preprint that audited 98,020 claims found 11% were unsupported by their attached citations (a provisional, under-review estimate), so you want raw evidence you can check, not just a score. Second, what your real prompt set costs once engines, countries, and refresh frequency multiply the meter. Third, that data exports cleanly so you can leave. Walk away from opaque methodology, missing per-engine breakdowns, and pricing that scales only with seats rather than tracked prompts.
