1. Prompt trackers
Run a fixed prompt set through AI engines on a schedule and report mentions, cited URLs and competitor share. This is what most people mean by an AI visibility tool.
Updated
Updated What changed on
Fact-checked Every price, plan limit and engine list on this page was re-checked on 14 October 2026 against the vendor's own pages, with two separate fetches that had to agree; the Ahrefs trial line was not re-checked and keeps its July 2026 date. The currency takeaway and the Ahrefs schema test were re-checked against the same 14 October 2026 source checks.
- Profound's $99 Starter and $399 Growth plans have gone, so brands now get a free 7-day trial or a custom-priced Enterprise plan.
- AIClicks now charges extra for Claude, Perplexity, Grok and DeepSeek on Starter and Pro, and Peec has moved Perplexity to a paid extra.
- Positive Surfer's new AI Search Analytics plan tracks 50 prompts daily across five engines for $82 a month billed yearly, down from $182 for the cheapest five-engine plan.
- Rankability dropped credits: Starter is now $97 a month for 100 AI queries across 11 engines, including Claude and Grok.
- Semrush does sell a standalone AI Visibility Toolkit, from $99 a month per domain billed annually, and I could not confirm Claude or Grok on its pricing pages.
- Ahrefs Brand Radar now offers Claude through custom prompts, has paused new Grok data, and its two official pages now carry the same price structure: $199 per AI index or $699 for all on the main pricing page.
- The key takeaways no longer say most tools price in US dollars: from a UK connection, SE Ranking and Semrush showed pounds and the Ahrefs Brand Radar page showed euros.
- The closing offer no longer suggests spending on schema to win AI citations. Ahrefs' May 2026 test of 1,885 pages that added schema found no citation lift in AI Mode or ChatGPT and a small fall in AI Overviews.
AI visibility tools UK buyer guide
AI visibility tools: the headline price is rarely the price you pay.
Every tool on this page advertises an entry tier. Almost none of those tiers do the job you are buying the tool for. Otterly starts at $29 but charges extra for Gemini, Google AI Mode and Claude. Profound no longer publishes a price for brands at all. Surfer's $49 plan tracks zero AI prompts.
So this comparison lists two numbers for each tool: the price on the pricing page, and what it actually costs to track a working prompt set across four or more engines. Every figure was checked against the live vendor page on 14 October 2026.
real_cost_check.json
"cheapest_headline""Otterly $29"
"cheapest_usable""AIClicks $59"
"biggest_gap""AIClicks 3.2x"
"most_prompts""SE Ranking 200"
"gated_engines"[
"Claude",
"Google AI Mode",
"Gemini",
"Perplexity"
]
The 30-second answer
Start free. Run the free AI visibility checker to find out whether your pages are structurally citable, and sample prompts by hand.
When you need a trend line, AIClicks at $59/mo is the cheapest tool whose entry tier genuinely works, as long as you can do without Perplexity and Claude, which cost extra. Otterly at $29/mo is cheaper on paper but excludes three major engines. SE Ranking gives the most prompts per pound if you already pay for it. If you need Claude without an enterprise contract, Rankability at $97/mo tracks it on every plan. Scrunch and Profound are for teams with a named AI visibility owner and a reporting cadence.
Key takeaways
- Entry tiers are engine-limited, not prompt-limited. Coverage is what costs money.
- Claude, Google AI Mode and Gemini are the most commonly gated engines, and Perplexity is now an extra on AIClicks and Peec.
- Refresh frequency matters as much as engine count. In my experience, weekly sampling misses most movement.
- Several products changed materially in 2026: Profound dropped its published brand plans, Sitecore bought Scrunch, Semrush moved under Adobe, HubSpot switched its grader back to the name AI Search Grader, and Surfer became Positive Surfer.
- Ahrefs Brand Radar's two official pages now carry the same price structure, $199 per AI index or $699 for all on the main pricing page, but the product page showed me euros from the UK. Get a quote in writing.
- Several tools show prices in the visitor's local currency, so UK readers may see pounds or euros. On 14 October 2026 SE Ranking and Semrush showed pounds and the Ahrefs Brand Radar page showed euros. Where a tool quotes US dollars, UK buyers carry the exchange rate on top.
// the number that matters
Headline price against working price.
Working price is the cheapest tier that tracks roughly 50 prompts across four or more AI engines, including any add-ons needed to get there. Verified 14 October 2026.
Advertised entry price
Working price for 50 prompts and 4+ engines
Prices are as published by each vendor on 14 October 2026 and are quoted in US dollars, the currency most vendors list them in. From a UK connection, SE Ranking and Semrush showed pounds and the Ahrefs Brand Radar page showed euros. The method, the full dataset and the vendors whose own pages contradict themselves are in the pricing audit. Billing periods differ: Positive Surfer shows billed-yearly prices, the Semrush figure is the annual rate, and the rest are monthly. Profound is not in the chart because it no longer publishes a price for brands. Where a vendor did not state something, this page says so rather than guessing.
// coverage map
Which tool covers which AI engine.
The question every pricing page avoids answering directly. Compiled from live vendor pages on 14 October 2026.
| Tool | ChatGPT | AI Overviews | AI Mode | Perplexity | Gemini | Claude | Copilot | Grok | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Otterly.AI | Four included on every tier; three sold as add-ons | ||||||||
| AIClicks | Choose 3 of 5 at entry; Perplexity, Claude and Grok cost extra below Business | ||||||||
| Peec AI | Choose 3 of 6; Perplexity is a paid extra; Claude and Grok are Enterprise only | ||||||||
| Scrunch AI | Four at Core, nine at Enterprise | ||||||||
| Profound | No paid self-serve plan for brands; up to nine engines on Enterprise, Grok no longer listed | ||||||||
| SE Ranking | Five engines, no per-tier gating; the add-on card lists four | ||||||||
| Semrush | Claude and Grok are not named on the pricing pages | ||||||||
| Ahrefs | Six indexed engines; Claude via custom prompts only; new Grok data paused | ||||||||
| Positive Surfer | Five engines from the $82 AI Search Analytics plan; Standard is ChatGPT only | ||||||||
| Rankability | Eleven engines on every plan, refreshed daily |
Scroll the table sideways to see every engine.
Included at entry tier
Needs a higher tier
Chargeable add-on
Not offered
Not published
Claude is the most gated engine in this table. Peec, Profound and Scrunch put it behind Enterprise, Otterly and AIClicks charge extra for it, and Ahrefs only offers it through custom prompts. I could not find it named on any Semrush pricing page. Rankability is now the outlier that includes it, with ten other engines, on every plan. If your buyers use Claude, that single column narrows the market quickly.
What these tools are actually measuring against
69.5%
of UK Google searches end without a click on anything, the highest rate of the six countries measured and above the United States at 68.0%.
How it was measured: Similarweb mobile and desktop clickstream panel, January to April 2026. Zero-click means no click to anywhere, including to Google's own properties and to paid results. Germany was lowest at 62.1%.
35%
more organic clicks went to a brand cited inside an AI Overview than to one that was not, in Seer's 2025 study (data to September 2025). Treat it as dated: Seer's April 2026 update says cited brands saw lower click-through as impressions more than doubled while clicks stayed flat.
How it was measured: 3,119 search terms across 42 client organisations, 25.1M organic and 1.1M paid impressions, June 2024 to September 2025, so the data is now more than 12 months old. Informational and educational queries only, which are the ones most exposed to AI Overviews, so this is not a whole-market figure. In absolute terms it is 0.70% against 0.52%. Paid click-through was 91% higher when cited.
it partly rebounded
is what organic click-through on AI Overview queries did in January and February 2026, rising from 1.3% in December 2025 to 2.4% in February 2026. Seer warns against forecasting a recovery from two months of data.
How it was measured: 53 brands, 5.47 million tracked queries, 2.43 billion organic impressions and 296.9 million paid impressions, January 2025 to February 2026. Wider than the earlier studies, which covered informational queries only. Seer's own regression model had forecast continued decline and the actuals beat it in both January and February. One dataset and one agency's client base, so treat it as a signal to watch rather than a settled reversal.
"AI visibility tool" covers three different jobs
Most comparison pages rank these tools against each other as if they do the same thing. They do not, and buying the wrong category is the most expensive mistake in this market.
2. Suites with AI bolted on
Existing SEO or content platforms that added AI tracking. Cheaper if you already pay for the suite, weaker on citation depth, and easier to fit into reporting you already send.
3. Free graders
One-off scores. Some measure page structure, some measure what models already believe about your brand. Neither is monitoring. Both are useful before you spend anything.
// category one
5 dedicated prompt trackers, cheapest first.
Built for AI visibility as the primary job. Ordered by entry price, with the catch on each one stated plainly.
| Tool | Entry price | Prompts | Engines at entry | Trial |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Otterly.AI | $29/mo | 15 prompts | 4 included | Free trial, terms not stated |
| AIClicks | $59/mo | 30 prompts | 3 of 5 | 3-day trial on every plan |
| Peec AI | $95/mo | 50 prompts | 3 selectable | Free trial, terms not stated |
| Scrunch AI | $250/mo | 125 prompts | 4 | 7-day trial, self-serve |
| Profound | Custom | Custom | Up to 9 | Free 7-day trial, 50 prompts, 3 engines |
1Otterly.AI
$29/moLite, monthly; $25 on annualBest for: A first paid step on a small prompt set. Cheapest headline price in the category and a genuine four-engine set at the entry tier. 1,000 GEO URL audits a month on Lite. 50+ countries on all tiers.
Watch for: The $29 does not include Gemini, AI Mode or Claude. Adding all three on Lite costs $47/mo on top, so real coverage is about $76/mo. Add-on prices scale hard: Claude alone is $439/mo on Premium.
2AIClicks
$59/moStarter, billed monthlyBest for: The cheapest honest starting point. Starter gives 30 prompts and you pick 3 engines from ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot, AI Overviews and AI Mode. Pro at $189 moves you to 150 prompts and 4 engines. Daily refresh on every self-serve tier, which several pricier tools do not do.
Watch for: The model pool is now 13, but on Starter and Pro, Claude, Perplexity, Grok and DeepSeek are paid extras, and AIClicks does not publish what they cost. Choosing freely from all 13 means Business at $499.
3Peec AI
$95/moStarter, billed monthlyBest for: Teams that want clean reporting at a mid price. Priced mainly on prompt volume, with unlimited users on every tier. Peec's FAQ says countries and languages cost nothing extra, but its plan table caps Starter at 1 country and Pro and Advanced at 3, so check before you plan a multi-market set.
Watch for: Each additional model beyond your three is a separate charge: +$35/mo on Starter, +$85 on Pro, +$165 on Advanced, billed monthly. Perplexity has moved out of the standard choice and is now one of those extras. Claude and Grok are Enterprise only.
4Scrunch AI
$250/moCore, per brand, per monthBest for: Citation-source analysis. Built around which URLs get cited rather than whether the brand appears. Core includes 5 site audits a month, 5 competitors and 5 user licences, but only 1 persona, 1 language and 1 country. More personas and languages mean talking to sales.
Watch for: API, Looker Studio and MCP access are Enterprise only, and so is the annual discount. Sitecore announced on 3 June 2026 that it had bought Scrunch, so check the roadmap before signing a long deal.
5Profound
CustomEnterprise only for brandsBest for: Enterprise reporting with a named owner. Strong platform for source-level citation analysis and board reporting. Brands now get a free 7-day trial (50 prompts a day on ChatGPT, Gemini and AI Overviews, with no history or export) or a custom-priced Enterprise plan covering up to nine engines, including Claude and DeepSeek.
Watch for: The $99 Starter and $399 Growth plans have gone from the pricing page, so there is no published price for brands. Agencies can buy Agency Growth at $99/mo plus $399/mo per client workspace. Get a quote in writing before you plan a budget around it.
// category two
5 suites with AI visibility bolted on.
Worth it when the suite is already in your stack. Rarely worth buying the suite to get the AI module.
| Tool | Entry price | Prompts | Engines | Trial |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| SE Ranking AI Search Toolkit | $89/mo add-on | 200 prompts | 5 | 14-day trial, no card |
| Semrush (AI features in Semrush One) | $165.17/mo | 50 prompts daily | 4 named | 7-day trial plus a free tier |
| Ahrefs Brand Radar | $199 to $699/mo | Metered in checks | 6 | No trial (July 2026 check) |
| Positive Surfer AI Tracker | $82/mo | 50 prompts daily | 5 | Free signup, terms not stated |
| Rankability | $97/mo | 100 AI queries | 11 | 7-day trial, card required |
1SE Ranking AI Search Toolkit
$89/mo add-onOn top of Core at $129/mo monthlyBest for: Teams already paying for SE Ranking. Best prompt volume per pound in this table once you are already a customer: 200 prompts across 5 engines. The free trial includes 20 AI prompts a day. Also gives 5 free AI visibility checks a day on the public tool without an account.
Watch for: Standalone cost is the add-on plus a base plan, so about $218/mo monthly-billed, not $89. If you do not need the SEO suite, SE Visible on its own is $99/mo ($79 billed annually) for 200 prompts across 5 engines. The add-on card on the pricing page lists only 4 engines and leaves out Gemini, while the plan table and toolkit FAQ say 5.
2Semrush (AI features in Semrush One)
$165.17/moStarter, billed annuallyBest for: Teams already committed to Semrush. Easy to fit into reporting you already run. The pricing page names Google Search, ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini "and more", and the free tier includes some AI Visibility features.
Watch for: Claude and Grok are not named on any Semrush pricing page I could open, so do not buy it for those. Semrush also sells a standalone AI Visibility Toolkit: Base is $99/mo per domain billed annually, for 25 daily prompts across ChatGPT, Google AI, Gemini and Perplexity, with no free trial. Semrush now sits under Adobe, which completed the purchase on 28 April 2026.
3Ahrefs Brand Radar
$199 to $699/moOne AI index, or all of themBest for: Upstream brand mention intelligence. Different job from the trackers. Its strength is a prompt index of 475M+ and finding where your brand is mentioned across the web, which is the signal AI engines often learn from. Custom prompt packages start at $50/mo for 2,500 checks.
Watch for: Each AI index is $199/mo and all of them are $699/mo on the main pricing page, but the Brand Radar page showed me euros from the UK (from €179 per index, €654 for all). Claude is only available through custom prompts, at 8 checks per update. Ahrefs' help centre says it cannot collect new Grok data for now. Ahrefs' own pages give different index sizes, from 350M to over 475M.
4Positive Surfer AI Tracker
$82/moAI Search Analytics, billed yearlyBest for: Content teams already using Surfer. Sits next to the content optimisation workflow, which is the reason to pick it. The new AI Search Analytics plan tracks 50 prompts daily across ChatGPT, Perplexity, AI Mode, AI Overviews and Gemini. Pro at $182 gives the same 50 daily prompts and five engines.
Watch for: The $49 Discovery tier tracks zero AI prompts. Standard at $99 tracks ChatGPT only and refreshes weekly, which is too slow to catch anything. Monthly billing exists, but the page shows billed-yearly prices, so expect to pay more month to month. Surfer is now Positive Surfer under Positive Group.
5Rankability
$97/moStarter, billed monthlyBest for: Agencies wanting classic SEO plus AI in one bill. Unlimited clients, team members, API and MCP on every plan, with tiers separated by query volume rather than locked features. That is unusually agency-friendly. Starter tracks 100 AI queries daily across 11 engines, including Claude and Grok.
Watch for: Rankability rebuilt its pricing after July: the credit system has gone, and Agency is now $297 for 300 queries. The page has changed at least once since July, so check it again before you commit. Legacy customers keep their old price.
// category three
4 free checks worth running first.
None of these are monitoring. All of them will tell you whether paid monitoring is worth opening.
AI Search Visibility Tool
Free, no accountScores a URL on entity footprint, schema, extractability, freshness, authorship and citation hooks, then gives you the prompts to test manually.
Limit: Structural readiness, not live engine polling. It tells you why you are not being cited, not whether you were cited yesterday.
HubSpot AI Search Grader
Free, form fill requiredScores brand perception out of 100 across five weighted dimensions: sentiment 40, presence quality 20, brand recognition 20, share of voice 10, market competition 10. Covers ChatGPT (GPT-5.4 mini), Perplexity and Gemini.
Limit: Measures what models already believe about your brand, largely from training data. It is not citation tracking. HubSpot has switched the name back from AEO Grader to AI Search Grader, and the old link redirects. The paid HubSpot AEO tracker is $50/mo ($45 billed annually) for 25 prompts on the same three engines, with a 28-day trial and no card.
SE Ranking free AI check
Free, 5 checks a dayPublic checker on the product page, no signup needed, covers AI Overviews, AI Mode, ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity.
Limit: Five a day is enough to sample, not to monitor. No history, no competitor set.
Ahrefs AI Visibility Checker
Free previewPreview of the Brand Radar dataset for a single brand.
Limit: A shop window for the paid product. Useful as a second opinion, not as a baseline you can repeat.
What these tools actually measure
Engine count is the number vendors compete on because it is easy to print on a pricing page. It is not the number that decides whether the tool is useful. These are the signals that change what you do next.
Signals worth paying for
- Cited URLs, not just mentions. Knowing you were named tells you nothing actionable. Knowing which page was cited tells you what to write more of.
- Competitor citation, at source level. The gap between their cited page and yours is the brief.
- Refresh frequency. Daily catches movement. Weekly, as on Positive Surfer Standard, mostly catches noise.
- AI Overviews separated from AI Mode. They retrieve differently and cite differently: in Ahrefs' September 2025 US data, the two cited the same URLs only 13.7% of the time. One combined Google score hides the difference.
- Answer text stored. Without it you cannot work out why a competitor was chosen.
Signals that sound useful and are not
- A single visibility score out of 100. Fine for a slide, useless for deciding what to change.
- Sentiment as a headline metric. Interesting for brand teams. It rarely changes a content decision.
- Total engine count. Six engines at 15 prompts is worse than three engines at 100.
- Prompt volume you will never use. In my experience, most teams have 20 to 40 prompts that genuinely matter. Paying for 350 is paying for comfort.
How to choose without wasting budget
Write your prompt list before you look at any pricing page. Not keywords, prompts: the questions a buyer would actually type into ChatGPT before they know your name. In my work, most businesses land between 20 and 40. That number decides your tier more than any feature comparison.
Then pick your engines from where your buyers are, not from the vendor's list. My view is that if your market is UK B2B, Google AI Overviews and ChatGPT carry most of it, and paying an add-on for Meta AI coverage is a rounding error. If you sell to developers, I would give Claude more weight, and Claude is the most commonly gated engine in this comparison.
Last, be honest about who reads the output. Founder-led teams can work from a CSV export. Agencies need something a client will open. Enterprise teams need role access and trend lines. That decides platform, and it is the only place where paying enterprise money is defensible.
A tool tells you that you are not being cited. It does not tell you why. That part is content structure, entity clarity and whether anyone else on the web vouches for you, which is the work in GEO consulting.
// questions I get
What clients ask before paying for a tracker.
What is an AI visibility tool?
An AI visibility tool checks whether your brand or content appears in AI-generated answers. The better ones track a fixed prompt set across engines such as ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini, Google AI Overviews and AI Mode, then report brand mentions, cited URLs and competitor share of voice over time.
How much do AI visibility tools cost?
Verified October 2026 entry prices run from $29 a month for Otterly Lite to $250 a month for Scrunch Core, and Profound no longer publishes a price for brands. The headline price is usually not the working price. Once you need about 50 prompts across four or more engines, the tools I priced land between $82 and $250 a month.
What is the cheapest AI visibility tool?
Otterly.AI has the lowest headline price at $29 a month, but that tier covers 15 prompts and excludes Gemini, Google AI Mode and Claude, which are paid add-ons. AIClicks at $59 a month is the cheapest tool whose entry tier tracks a usable prompt set with a choice of engines, though Perplexity and Claude cost extra on that tier.
Do I need a paid AI visibility tool?
Not at the start. Free graders and manual prompt sampling will tell you whether AI answers mention you at all. Pay for a tracker when you need a trend line, when competitors are being cited for queries that drive your pipeline, or when someone has to report on it monthly.
Which AI visibility tools track Google AI Mode?
Verified in October 2026: SE Ranking, AIClicks, Ahrefs Brand Radar, Peec AI, Positive Surfer, Rankability and Semrush track Google AI Mode on named tiers. Otterly charges for it as an add-on. Profound and Scrunch cover it on enterprise plans. AI Mode and AI Overviews cite different sources, so a single combined Google score hides the gap.
Which AI visibility tools track Claude?
Claude is still the most commonly gated engine. Rankability includes it on every plan from $97 a month. Otterly sells it as an add-on from $29 a month. AIClicks charges extra for it below its $499 Business plan. Ahrefs Brand Radar offers it through custom prompts only. Peec, Profound and Scrunch reserve it for enterprise plans. I could not find it named on any Semrush pricing page.
Are free AI visibility tools accurate?
Free tools are accurate for what they measure, which is usually a single snapshot or a structural score. They do not run enough prompt variants to replace paid tracking. Use one to decide whether paid monitoring is worth opening, not as the monitoring itself.
What should an AI visibility tool track?
At minimum: the prompt that triggered the answer, whether your brand was named, which URLs were cited, which competitors appeared instead, which engine produced it, and how all of that moves over time. Refresh frequency matters as much as engine count. In my experience, weekly sampling misses most movement.
Do UK teams pay more for AI visibility tools?
Most tools in this comparison list prices in US dollars, so UK buyers carry the exchange rate and any card conversion fee on top of the listed price. Some pages show local currency: on 14 October 2026, from a UK connection, SE Ranking and Semrush showed pounds and the Ahrefs Brand Radar page showed euros. Budget in pounds against a rate you can live with, and check whether VAT is added at checkout before you commit to an annual plan.
Written by
Jason Burns
Independent UK SEO, GEO and AI consultant. In search since 2007. Portfolio includes 3M, BlackRock, Unilever and E.ON. Owner of SEO Moves Ltd since 2014.
More about Jason →// next step
Not sure which tier you actually need?
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