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. Positive Surfer's $49 tier tracks zero AI prompts. In July, Profound's $99 tier tracked ChatGPT and nothing else; by October Profound had no self-serve paid plan for brands at all.
- Vendors keep moving. Between July and October 2026 Rankability and Goodie repriced, Profound withdrew its brand plans, HubSpot's grader went back to its old name, and Semrush was selling a standalone AI Visibility plan that my July audit said no longer existed. Most comparison pages have not noticed.
- You are paying for engine coverage, not prompt volume. Claude is still one of the most gated engines: Profound, Scrunch, Peec and Goodie keep it for Enterprise, and AIClicks charges extra for it on its two cheaper plans.
- In July three vendors could not be priced from their own websites. By October Ahrefs and Rankability had fixed that, while BrandLight still publishes no price and Profound publishes none for brands.
Updated What changed on
Fact-checked The HubSpot, Semrush, Ahrefs, Rankability, Goodie, Geordy.ai, Positive Surfer, Profound and AIClicks facts in this update were re-checked against the 14 October 2026 source checks; other lines in the July sections were not re-checked again and keep their 20 July framing.
- Re-checked every vendor on its own pricing page and added a section near the top listing what changed since July.
- Used HubSpot's current name, AI Search Grader, in the free tools advice, and noted that /aeo-grader now redirects to /ai-search-grader, and pointed the HubSpot link in the July table at /ai-search-grader.
- Noted that Semrush sells a standalone AI Visibility Toolkit from $99 a month per domain, billed yearly, and that its self-serve AI tracking names ChatGPT, Google AI, Gemini and Perplexity, and does not name Claude or Grok.
- Dated the July Ahrefs and Rankability price notes and added their October 2026 prices, and replaced the old Goodie price with its October 2026 Core plan.
- Added the October 2026 Claude changes at Ahrefs, Rankability and Semrush below the July Claude summary.
- Updated the working-price chart: Positive Surfer is now $82 on its AI Search Analytics plan, the Profound bar is marked as July figures, and the AIClicks note shows Claude and Perplexity as extras below Business.
- Corrected the Geordy.ai row: it logs bot requests to the files it serves, it does not read your server logs.
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.
What changed by October 2026#
On 14 October 2026 I opened every pricing page again. Everything after this section is the original 20 July record. Where a July line is now out of date, this table says so, and some of those lines also carry a dated October note.
| Tool | 20 July 2026 | 14 October 2026 |
|---|---|---|
| Profound | $99 a month for ChatGPT only, $399 for 100 prompts on 3 engines | No self-serve paid plan for brands. A free trial runs 50 prompts daily for 7 days on ChatGPT, Gemini and AI Overviews, then Enterprise is custom-priced, with up to 9 engines. Agencies pay $99 a month plus $399 per client workspace. |
| Rankability | $99 for 10,000 credits up to $799 for 200,000. Only ChatGPT named | $97 a month for 100 tracked AI queries, $297 for 300, $497 for 500. All 11 platforms on every tier, Claude, Grok and Copilot included, tracked daily. No credits. 7-day trial, card needed. |
| Goodie | Explorer $399 for 100 prompts on 3 engines, 30-day refund | Explorer and the refund are gone. Core is $354 billed monthly or $295 billed yearly, for 110 prompts on 5 engines, AI Mode included, with a 7-day free trial. The page's own FAQ still says plans start at $399. Claude, Grok, DeepSeek and Meta stay Enterprise only. |
| Positive Surfer | Cheapest route to 50 prompts on 5 engines was Pro at $182 | An AI Search Analytics plan, not in my July record, at $82 a month billed yearly: 50 prompts daily on ChatGPT, Perplexity, AI Mode, AI Overviews and Gemini. The $49 and $182 tiers are unchanged. The FAQ says monthly billing exists, but monthly prices are not printed. |
| Ahrefs Brand Radar | Two pages, two prices ($199 and $398). No Claude at any price. Grok tracked | Both pages now share one structure: $199 a month per AI index, $699 for all of them. The product page showed euros from the UK (EUR 179 and EUR 654). Claude is now tracked through custom prompts only, at 8 checks per update, and custom prompt packages start at $50 a month. Ahrefs' help centre says new Grok data collection is paused. |
| Semrush | Standalone AI Toolkit retired, old URL a 404. Claude included | A standalone AI Visibility plan is on sale at $99 a month per domain, billed yearly, for 25 daily prompts on ChatGPT, Google AI, Gemini and Perplexity. I cannot tell whether it returned after July or I checked a different URL then. Plan prices are unchanged ($117.33 and $165.17 a month, billed yearly). The rendered pricing pages did not name Claude. |
| HubSpot | Grader renamed AEO Grader | Renamed back. /aeo-grader now redirects to /ai-search-grader, titled AI Search Grader. Paid AEO is still $50 a month, or $45 billed yearly, for 25 prompts on ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini, with a 28-day trial and no card. |
| AIClicks | $59 for 30 prompts, choice of 3 from 9 engines, Claude among them | Prices unchanged at $59, $189 and $499. The pool is now 13 models, but on Starter and Pro the included choice is ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot, AI Overviews and AI Mode. Claude, Perplexity, Grok and DeepSeek are paid add-ons there, price not published. Business chooses 6 from all 13. |
| Peec AI | $95, choose 3 of 6 engines, Perplexity among them. No Claude or Grok | Prices unchanged at $95, $245 and $495 a month. The self-serve choice is now ChatGPT, AI Mode, AI Overviews, Copilot, Gemini and Naver AI, with Perplexity as an extra model. Enterprise now lists Claude, Grok, DeepSeek, Qwen, Mistral and Meta. |
| Rankscale AI | Essentials $20 in the compare table. 10 engines | Essentials now shows $17 a month, yearly only, though the page's structured data still lists a $20 monthly offer. A Pro+ tier at $229 arrived on 29 September 2026. The vendor now says 17+ engines. Credit cost per run varies: 0.25 for ChatGPT, 2 for Claude. |
| Nightwatch | EUR 79 a month | EUR 79 is the yearly-billing rate. Billed monthly, Starter is EUR 99 for 50 prompts, 500 keywords and 6 engines. Professional and Agency tiers are also listed. I have not checked whether EUR 79 was the monthly price in July. |
| SE Ranking | $89 add-on on $129 Core, 5 engines | Prices unchanged. The add-on card now lists 4 engines, without Gemini, while the plan table still says 5. Core on its own lists 100 daily prompts on 5 LLMs. SE Visible, sold on its own, is $99, $189 or $355 a month billed monthly for 200, 450 or 1,000 prompts on 5 engines, with Basic at $79 a month billed yearly. The 14-day trial includes 20 AI prompts a day. |
| Scrunch AI | $250 for 125 prompts, 4 engines | Price, prompts and engines unchanged. Core now lists 1 persona and 1 language, and is charged per brand, per month. Sitecore announced it had acquired Scrunch on 3 June 2026, which I did not record in July. |
| Geordy.ai | $39 for 500 file updates. Reads crawler logs | Pro is still $39 a month, but that is the yearly-billing rate; billed monthly it is $49. The unit is now "files". Its bot analytics logs requests to the files Geordy itself serves, not your server's logs, so my July line "reads crawler logs" overstated it. 16 formats in total. |
Scroll the table sideways to see every column.
No change to the figures I use for Otterly.AI ($29 Lite, $47 of add-ons, Claude at $439 on Premium) or Frase ($39 for 50 prompts on two engines). Texavor's prices and credits are the same, and BrandLight still has no pricing page. goodie.ai is still parked and for sale at $150,000.
So three things in the July sections below no longer hold. Positive Surfer's working price is now $82, not $182, and Profound has no published working price. Ahrefs and Rankability can now be priced from their own pages, while Profound joins BrandLight in publishing no price for brands. And the Claude column has moved: Ahrefs now tracks it through custom prompts, Rankability names it on every tier, AIClicks has made it a paid add-on on its cheaper plans, and Semrush's pricing pages did not name it when I re-checked.
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 | Not published | Not offered | Not published |
| 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.
In July, Claude was gated almost everywhere. Ahrefs did not offer it at any price. Peec reserved it for Enterprise. Profound and Scrunch put it behind their top tiers. Otterly charged $29 a month for it on the entry plan and $439 a month on Premium. I recorded only Semrush and Rankscale as including it without a fight.
By October 2026 Ahrefs Brand Radar could track Claude on custom prompts, where each Claude check costs 8 checks. Rankability's $97 Starter plan covers 11 AI platforms, Claude among them. Semrush's self-serve AI tracking names ChatGPT, Google AI, Gemini and Perplexity, and does not name Claude.
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 | In July I recorded the add-on as retired. In October 2026 Semrush sells a standalone AI Visibility Toolkit from $99 a month per domain, billed yearly. Adobe completed its acquisition on 28 April 2026, so Semrush is no longer independently listed. |
| HubSpot | AI Search Grader | In July it was called AEO Grader. By October 2026 it was called AI Search Grader again, and /aeo-grader redirects to /ai-search-grader. |
| 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#
In July, Ahrefs published two different prices. The main pricing page said Brand Radar started from $199 a month as an add-on. The Brand Radar product page said $398 for selected platforms and $699 for all of them. Both pages were live on the same day. By October 2026 both pages agreed: Ahrefs' AI Visibility Index costs $199 a month per AI platform, or $699 for all of them.
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.
In July, Rankability told you the money and not the function. Tiers ran from 10,000 credits at $99 to 200,000 at $799. ChatGPT was the only AI engine named anywhere on the page, and there was no prompt-to-credit conversion published, so you could not work out what 10,000 credits bought before you paid. By October 2026 Rankability starts at $97 a month for 100 tracked AI queries across 11 AI platforms, with no credits.
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; logs bot requests to the files it serves | 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 its Core plan is $295 a month billed yearly ($354 billed monthly) for 110 prompts across five engines (October 2026). 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. HubSpot's AI Search 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?
