Key takeaways
- The advertised price is almost never the working price. Otterly's $29 tier excludes three engines that cost $47 a month to add. Profound's $99 tier tracks ChatGPT and nothing else. Positive Surfer's $49 tier tracks zero AI prompts.
- Four vendors changed materially in 2026: Semrush retired its standalone AI Toolkit and completed its Adobe acquisition, HubSpot renamed its grader, Surfer became Positive Surfer, and SE Ranking renamed its tracker and spun out a second product. Most comparison pages have not noticed.
- You are paying for engine coverage, not prompt volume. Claude is the single most gated engine in the category. Ahrefs does not offer it at any price.
- Three vendors cannot be priced from their own websites. Ahrefs publishes two contradictory figures on two live pages, BrandLight has no pricing page at all, and Rankability names only one of the AI engines it tracks.
I spent a day opening the live pricing page of every AI visibility tool I could find, 18 of them, and writing down what it actually said. Not what a comparison post said. Not what the vendor said last year. What the page said on 20 July 2026.
Most published comparisons of these tools are wrong, and not by a little. The full dataset is below, along with the four vendors who changed product this year and the three whose own websites cannot be used to work out a price.
The full dataset#
Everything verified against the vendor's live pricing page on 20 July 2026. Prices in US dollars unless stated, because that is how the vendors list them.
| Tool | Entry price | What that buys | Engines at entry | Free trial |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Texavor | $11/mo | 1,100 AI credits | Not a tracker | Free tier, 350 credits |
| Rankscale AI | $20/mo | Essentials, hidden in the compare table | 10, same on every tier | Yes, terms not stated |
| Otterly.AI | $29/mo | 15 prompts | 4, plus 3 paid add-ons | Yes, terms not stated |
| Frase | $39/mo | 50 tracked prompts | 2 | 7 days, no card |
| Geordy.ai | $39/mo | 500 file updates | Not a tracker | Free tier, 40 updates |
| Positive Surfer | $49/mo | 10 pages, zero AI prompts | 0 | Yes, terms not stated |
| HubSpot AEO | $50/mo | Paid tier; the grader is free | 3 | Yes, plus free grader |
| AIClicks | $59/mo | 30 prompts | 3 of 9 | 3 days, no card |
| Nightwatch | EUR 79/mo | 50 AI prompts, 500 keywords | 6 | 14 days, no card |
| SE Ranking | $89/mo add-on | 200 prompts, plus Core at $129 | 5 | 14 days, no card |
| Peec AI | $95/mo | 50 prompts, 1 country | 3 of 6 | Yes, terms not stated |
| Profound | $99/mo | 50 prompts, 1,500 responses | 1 | Partial, terms not stated |
| Rankability | $99/mo | 10,000 credits | Not published | Not stated |
| Semrush | $117.33/mo | SEO plan; $165.17 adds prompt tracking | 6 | 7 days, plus free tier |
| Ahrefs Brand Radar | $199 to $699/mo | Add-on, metered in checks | 7 | None |
| Scrunch AI | $250/mo | 125 prompts, 5 site audits | 4 | 7 days, self-serve |
| Goodie | $399/mo | 100 prompts, 3,000 responses | 3 | Yes, 30-day refund |
| BrandLight | Not published | Not stated | Not stated | None, demo only |
Scroll the table sideways to see every column.
The advertised price is rarely the price#
Working price below means the cheapest tier that tracks roughly 50 prompts across four or more engines, including any add-ons needed to get there.
The pattern is consistent enough to be a rule: the entry tier is limited by engines, not by prompts. Prompt counts are the number vendors print because it sounds generous. Engine coverage is what they actually charge for.
Which tools cover which engines#
| Tool | ChatGPT | AI Overviews | AI Mode | Perplexity | Gemini | Claude | Copilot | Grok |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Rankscale | Included | Included | Included | Included | Included | Included | Included | Included |
| Semrush | Included | Included | Not offered | Included | Included | Included | Not offered | Included |
| Nightwatch | Included | Included | Included | Included | Included | Included | Not offered | Not offered |
| Ahrefs | Included | Included | Included | Included | Included | Not offered | Included | Included |
| SE Ranking | Included | Included | Included | Included | Included | Not offered | Not offered | Not offered |
| AIClicks | Higher tier | Higher tier | Higher tier | Higher tier | Higher tier | Higher tier | Higher tier | Higher tier |
| Otterly.AI | Included | Included | Paid add-on | Included | Paid add-on | Paid add-on | Included | Not offered |
| Scrunch AI | Included | Included | Higher tier | Included | Higher tier | Higher tier | Included | Higher tier |
| Peec AI | Higher tier | Higher tier | Higher tier | Higher tier | Higher tier | Not offered | Higher tier | Not offered |
| Profound | Included | Higher tier | Higher tier | Higher tier | Higher tier | Higher tier | Higher tier | Higher tier |
| Positive Surfer | Included | Higher tier | Higher tier | Higher tier | Higher tier | Not offered | Not offered | Not offered |
| Rankability | Included | Not published | Not published | Not published | Not published | Not published | Not published | Not published |
Scroll the table sideways to see every engine.
Claude is gated almost everywhere. Ahrefs does not offer it at any price. Peec reserves it for Enterprise. Profound and Scrunch put it behind their top tiers. Otterly charges $29 a month for it on the entry plan and $439 a month on Premium. Only Semrush and Rankscale include it without a fight.
If your buyers are developers or technical founders, people for whom Claude is the default assistant, that single column cuts your options from about ten to three.
The four changes nobody has updated for#
| Vendor | What comparison pages still say | What is actually true |
|---|---|---|
| Semrush | AI Toolkit sold as a priced add-on | Add-on retired. AI visibility is bundled into plans under Semrush One. The old URL is a hard 404. Adobe completed its acquisition on 28 April 2026, so Semrush is no longer independently listed. |
| HubSpot | AI Search Grader | Renamed AEO Grader. The old URL redirects. |
| Surfer | Surfer SEO | Now Positive Surfer, under Positive Group. |
| SE Ranking | AI Visibility Tracker | Renamed AI Search Toolkit. A second standalone product, SE Visible, has been spun out alongside it. |
Three pricing pages you cannot buy from#
Ahrefs publishes two different prices. The main pricing page says Brand Radar starts from $199 a month as an add-on. The Brand Radar product page says $398 for selected platforms and $699 for all of them. Both pages were live on the same day. Get a figure in writing before you commit.
BrandLight has no pricing page at all. The /pricing URL returns a 404 and does not appear in their sitemap. Every call to action is "get a demo". Its engine coverage is only visible in dashboard screenshots on the marketing site, never in a published claim.
Rankability tells you the money and not the function. Tiers run from 10,000 credits at $99 to 200,000 at $799. ChatGPT is the only AI engine named anywhere on the page, and there is no prompt-to-credit conversion published, so you cannot work out what 10,000 credits buys before you pay.
To be fair to all three, unpublished pricing is a legitimate choice for enterprise software. It just means those products cannot be compared on price with the self-serve ones, and any list that ranks them side by side is inventing the comparison.
Half the "GEO tools" market does not measure anything#
This surprised me more than the pricing did. Several products that appear consistently on best-GEO-tools lists do not track your AI visibility at all.
| Tool | Price | Sold as | Actually does | Measures visibility? |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Texavor | $11/mo | GEO tool | Content research, briefs, scoring and publishing into WordPress or Webflow | No |
| Geordy.ai | $39/mo | GEO tool | Generates llms.txt, JSON-LD and markdown versions of your pages; reads crawler logs | No |
| Frase | $39/mo | Content OS for AI search | Content optimiser, with a genuine 50-prompt tracking module attached | Partly |
| Positive Surfer | $49/mo | AI tracker | Content optimisation. The entry tier tracks zero prompts | Not at entry |
There is one twist worth knowing. Frase's visibility module includes 50 tracked prompts on its $39 Starter plan, which undercuts every dedicated tracker at the same prompt count by a distance. It covers only ChatGPT and Google AI at that tier, so it is not a like-for-like replacement. But the cheapest way to track 50 prompts in this entire category is a tool that is not sold as a tracker.
Goodie is not where the lists say it is. Several pages cite goodie.ai. That domain is parked and listed for sale at $150,000. The product lives at higoodie.com and starts at $399 a month. Anyone citing goodie.ai did not open the link.
How to check this yourself in twenty minutes#
You do not need to audit 18 vendors. You need to check the two or three you are considering.
- Find the engine list before you find the price. If you cannot see which engines each tier covers, that tells you how the product is sold.
- Write down what the entry tier includes before you look at the money. Prompts, engines, refresh frequency, competitors tracked.
- Search the page for "add-on". That is where the real cost hides.
- Check refresh frequency. Weekly sampling of a signal that varies run to run is close to useless. Daily is the minimum worth paying for.
- Open the product page as well as the pricing page. They often disagree, and the product page is usually the more expensive truth.
- Write down the date you checked. In this category that is not pedantry.
What I would do with a budget#
If you have never measured, do not buy anything yet. Run a free check and sample ten prompts by hand. You are looking for whether you appear at all, not for a trend line. The HubSpot AEO Grader, SE Ranking's five free daily checks and the free checker on this site all cost nothing.
If you are ready to monitor, write your prompt list before you open a single pricing page. Not keywords, prompts: the questions a buyer types into ChatGPT before they know your name. Most businesses land between 20 and 40, and that number decides your tier more reliably than any feature comparison.
Then pick engines from where your buyers are, not from the vendor's list. For UK B2B that is mostly Google AI Overviews and ChatGPT. Paying an add-on for Meta AI coverage is a rounding error.
Why these pages go stale#
It is worth saying plainly why so much of this is wrong, because it is not laziness in the ordinary sense.
Tool comparison content is written once and monetised forever. There is no editorial trigger to re-check it, and much of it carries affiliate links, which creates a mild incentive to keep the recommendation stable rather than accurate. Meanwhile the vendors ship, rename, get acquired and repackage on a quarterly cycle.
The result is a genre that reads as authoritative and describes a market that no longer exists.
I cannot fix the incentive. What I can do is put the date on it. Everything above was true on 20 July 2026. Some of it will be wrong by October, and when it is, I would rather you knew which parts to distrust than assumed the whole thing still held.
The underlying comparisons, updated as vendors move, live in the AI visibility tools guide, the GEO tools guide and the AI search rank trackers guide.
Frequently asked
How much do AI visibility tools actually cost in 2026?
What is the cheapest AI visibility tool?
Why is AI visibility tool pricing so hard to compare?
Which AI visibility tools track Claude?
Do UK buyers pay more for these tools?
How often does this pricing change?
