What AI Visibility Tools Actually Cost (and Which Ones Will Not Tell You)
By Ashikur Rahman11 min readQuick answer: AI visibility tools track whether ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Google's AI answers mention your brand, and they are priced by prompt, meaning one tracked question. Read at source on 17 September 2026, Otterly.AI starts at $29 a month for 15 prompts and Semrush's AI Visibility Toolkit is $99 a month billed annually for 25 prompts on one domain. Profound and Peec AI publish no price at all, only a free trial or a sales call, despite the figures other roundups quote for them. The number that decides your bill is not the headline price, it is how many prompts you need and which engines are included rather than sold as add-ons.
What these tools actually do
The category has three names and one job. Whether a vendor calls it answer engine optimization, generative engine optimization, or AI visibility, the product does the same thing: it takes a list of questions your customers might ask an AI assistant, runs them on a schedule, and records whether you were named, who was named instead, and which pages got cited.
That unit, one tracked question, is called a prompt, and it is the meter everything is billed against. Understand that and the pricing stops being confusing. Miscount it and you will buy a plan that cannot cover your business.
This article is about what these tools cost and what the entry tiers actually give you. It is not a guide to getting cited in the first place. That is a separate job and I have written it up in how to rank in AI Overviews and how to get your business cited in ChatGPT.
Half of this category will not tell you the price
This is the first thing worth knowing, and it is not what you will read elsewhere.
I opened the pricing pages of the four best-known tools in this space on 17 September 2026. Two of them publish a full price list. Two publish nothing at all.
| Tool | Publishes a price? | What is actually on the page |
|---|---|---|
| Otterly.AI | Yes, in full | Four tiers with monthly and annual rates, prompt counts, and every add-on priced |
| Semrush AI Visibility Toolkit | Yes | One headline rate, inclusions, and add-on costs |
| Profound | No | A free Trial tier and an Enterprise tier marked custom. No amount anywhere |
| Peec AI | No | Four tier names, Starter to Enterprise. No cost, no prompt counts, no seat limits |
Now compare that against the roundups ranking for this query. Several of them quote confident monthly figures for both Profound and Peec, down to specific starting tiers. Those figures are not on either vendor's pricing page. They may have been true once, or come from a sales call, or been copied from another roundup that copied it from somewhere else. I cannot verify them, so I am not going to reprint them here even to argue with them, because a number in an article travels further than the caveat attached to it.
That sounds like a small thing. It is not. If you are comparing a published $99 against an unpublished $99, you are not comparing anything.
What the published prices actually are
Everything below was read from the vendor's own pricing page on 17 September 2026.
Otterly.AI
| Plan | Monthly | Annual, per month | Prompts |
|---|---|---|---|
| Lite | $29 | $25 | 15 |
| Standard | $189 | $160 | 100 |
| Premium | $489 | $422 | 400 |
| Enterprise | from $1,000 | custom | custom |
Annual billing is a stated 15% discount. Extra prompts are sold in blocks of 100 for $99. A free trial is offered for new users.
Semrush AI Visibility Toolkit
One headline rate: $99 a month, billed annually, per domain. That includes, in Semrush's own words, "Track 25 custom prompts (daily AI rankings)" and "1 domain for Brand Performance analysis", with mentions tracked from ChatGPT, Google AI, Gemini and Perplexity.
Additional users start at $45 a month. There is a Lead Generation add-on at $90 a month, and report add-ons at $10 and $20 a month.
One correction worth making, because it is repeated widely: several posts state that an extra seat on this product costs $99. Semrush's own page says additional users start at $45. If you sized your budget on the higher number, you overestimated.
The three things that actually decide your bill
1. Fifteen prompts is smaller than it sounds
A prompt is one question. Not one keyword, not one topic. One phrasing of one question.
A dental practice wanting to know whether it gets named for "best dentist near me" also needs "emergency dentist", "invisalign cost", "does this practice take my insurance", each in the several ways a real person phrases them, and probably per location. You are through fifteen before you have covered a single service line properly.
So the entry tiers are best understood as a way to find out whether the tool tells you anything useful, not as a plan you run a business on. That is a legitimate thing to buy. Just buy it knowing that.
2. There is no middle tier
Otterly goes from $29 to $189. That is a 6.5x jump, and it buys you 15 prompts to 100. There is nothing in between.
If your honest requirement is forty prompts, the pricing does not care. You pay $189, or you pay $29 and track less than half of what matters. This is the same shape as every software category where the entry tier exists mainly to make the real tier look like a decision you already half made.
3. The engine you care about may be an add-on
This is the one that catches people, and it is specific to this category.
Every paid Otterly tier tracks four engines: ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity and MS Copilot. Claude, Google AI Mode and Gemini are add-ons.
Adding Claude to the Lite plan costs $29 a month. That is the entire price of the plan again. Google AI Mode and Gemini are gentler at $9 on Lite, but the principle holds: the advertised entry price covers a specific four engines, and if your buyers use a different one, your real entry price is higher.
| What you actually want | What it really costs on Otterly Lite |
|---|---|
| The four included engines, 15 prompts | $29 |
| Plus Gemini and Google AI Mode | $38 |
| Plus Claude as well | $67 |
At that point you are paying more than twice the headline price and still tracking fifteen questions.
Work with me
Not sure you need one of these at all?
For a lot of businesses the honest answer is not yet. If almost nothing links to your site and your pages are barely indexed, a tracker will faithfully report that you are invisible every week and charge you monthly for the report.
Send me your domain and the questions your customers actually ask. I will check whether the assistants name you today, and tell you whether tracking is worth buying or whether the money belongs earlier in the chain.
Ashikur Rahman
SEO and AI Search Consultant
The contact links above go to me directly, so I earn from it if you hire me. Nothing else on this page is a paid placement.
If you manage client sites, read the billing unit
Semrush's AI Visibility Toolkit is priced per domain. That is fine for a business watching its own brand and expensive for anyone watching several.
An agency tracking eight client brands is looking at eight subscriptions, which is $792 a month before a single additional seat. Otterly's tiers are priced by prompt volume rather than per domain, which is a different shape and will suit some agencies better, but it is worth checking the current terms yourself rather than assuming, because this is exactly the sort of term that changes.
The general lesson applies well beyond this category, and it is the same one behind choosing a platform you have to maintain for a client: the billing unit matters more than the headline number, because the headline is what you pay once and the unit is what you pay forever.
Do you need one of these at all?
An honest answer, given I sell the service this tooling supports.
If you have no idea whether AI assistants mention you, you can find out for free. Ask them. Open ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini, ask the questions your customers ask, and write down what comes back. It is tedious, it is not tracked over time, and it is completely sufficient to answer the only question that matters at the start, which is whether you appear at all.
Paid tools earn their money on the second question: is it changing, and because of what. That is a tracking problem, and tracking by hand across four engines and twenty questions every week is not realistic.
There is also a free measurement you already own if your site gets search traffic. Search Console now reports AI-surface impressions, and I have written up what a real account's data looks like in Search Console's Generative AI report. Start there before you buy anything, because it costs nothing and it is your own data rather than a sample of prompts someone chose.
How to choose without overbuying
Write your prompts down first. The real questions, in the real phrasings, before you look at any pricing page. That list is your requirement, and it decides the tier. Everything else is shopping.
Check which engines are included, not just supported. Supported can mean available as a paid add-on. If most of your customers use one assistant, that is the one that has to be in the base plan.
Count your domains. Per-domain pricing multiplies quietly.
Treat an unpublished price as information. A vendor that will not show a number before a sales call is telling you the number is negotiated, which usually means it is large and that you will be quoted based on your size. That is not dishonest, but it does mean those tools are not really competing for a small business budget, whatever a roundup says they cost.
Frequently asked questions
What is a prompt in an AI visibility tool?
One tracked question, in one phrasing. It is the unit every tool in this category bills against. Fifteen prompts means the tool will run fifteen specific questions on a schedule and report whether you were named. It does not mean fifteen keywords or fifteen topics, which is why entry tiers run out faster than people expect.
How much does an AI visibility tool cost?
Among tools that publish a price, read at source on 17 September 2026: Otterly.AI runs $29 a month for 15 prompts, $189 for 100 and $489 for 400, with annual billing at a stated 15% discount. Semrush's AI Visibility Toolkit is $99 a month billed annually per domain for 25 prompts. Profound and Peec AI do not publish prices.
Why do Profound and Peec AI not show pricing?
Their pricing pages list tiers without amounts. Profound shows a free Trial and a custom Enterprise plan, and Peec shows four tier names with no figures, directing visitors to start or to talk to sales. A negotiated price usually indicates the product is sold to larger accounts. Figures quoted for these tools elsewhere are not from the vendors' own pages.
Which AI engines do these tools track?
It varies, and the distinction between included and available matters. Every paid Otterly tier covers ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity and MS Copilot, with Claude, Gemini and Google AI Mode sold as add-ons. Semrush's toolkit covers ChatGPT, Google AI, Gemini and Perplexity. Profound's enterprise tier advertises up to nine answer engines.
Is the Semrush AI Visibility Toolkit worth $99 a month?
It depends almost entirely on your domain count and prompt requirement, because it is billed per domain and includes 25 prompts. For a single business tracking one brand against a focused question set it is priced in line with the category. For anyone managing several client domains it multiplies, since eight domains means eight subscriptions.
Can I track AI visibility for free?
Partly. You can ask the assistants your customers' questions yourself and record the answers, which is enough to establish whether you appear at all. Search Console also reports impressions from AI surfaces at no cost, which is your own data rather than a sample. What free methods cannot do is track change consistently over time across several engines.
Do I need an AI visibility tool if I already use Search Console?
Not to begin with. Search Console tells you about Google's AI surfaces using your own site's data. A paid tool tells you about assistants Google does not report on, like ChatGPT, Perplexity and Claude, and tells you who is being named instead of you. Start with the free data and buy tracking when you have a specific question it cannot answer.
What is the difference between paying monthly and annually?
On Otterly, annual billing is a stated 15% discount, taking Lite from $29 to $25, Standard from $189 to $160 and Premium from $489 to $422 per month. The Semrush AI Visibility Toolkit's $99 rate is quoted as billed annually, so the monthly-billing equivalent is not the same figure.
How many prompts does a small business actually need?
More than an entry tier provides, in most cases. Count the distinct questions a customer might ask, across each service you sell and each way people phrase it, before looking at plans. If that list is forty questions and the tiers jump from 15 to 100, the pricing has made the decision for you, which is worth knowing before you pay rather than after.
Are these tools the same as SEO tools?
No. A traditional SEO tool reports positions in a results page. These report whether a generated answer named your brand and which sources it cited, which is a different measurement with no position to occupy. Some vendors now sell both, which is why a bundle can look cheaper than two subscriptions.
Should I buy a tool before fixing my site?
Measurement does not cause citation. If your pages are not indexed, or say nothing a model would want to quote, a tracker will faithfully report that you are invisible every week. Tools are worth buying when you are actively changing something and need to know whether it worked.
Transparency: every price, prompt count and engine list in this article was read from the vendor's own pricing page on 17 September 2026, not from another review. Where a vendor publishes no price, this article says so instead of repeating a figure from a third party. Prices in this category change often, so check before you buy. There are no affiliate or tracking links on this page.
