You are deciding whether to buy an AI visibility platform. Someone on your team ran a search, discovered your brand is invisible in ChatGPT answers, and now there is a line item request on your desk for something between US$29 and US$489 a month, or a Hong Kong agency retainer between US$2,500 and US$8,000 a month.
Here is what that decision actually turns on, with the real published prices, the engine limits nobody puts on the pricing page, and an honest account of where UD's own tool is the wrong answer.
What does an AI visibility tool actually do?
An AI visibility tool, sometimes called an AEO or GEO platform, tracks whether AI assistants mention or cite your brand when users ask buying questions. It runs a set of prompts against engines like ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews on a schedule, then reports your mention rate, citation sources and competitor share of voice.
The category splits into two things that are often sold as one.
--- Monitoring tells you where you stand and how that changes week to week. It is a measurement product, priced per tracked prompt and per engine.
--- Diagnosis and remediation tells you why AI cannot cite you and what to change on your site. It is an audit and implementation product.
Most buyers think they are purchasing the second and end up paying monthly for the first.
How much do AI visibility platforms cost in 2026?
Three platforms dominate the shortlists. Their published self-serve prices are below, current as of July 2026. Verify before you sign, because this category reprices frequently.
Otterly.AI
--- Lite: US$29 per month, 15 tracked prompts. No API and no MCP access on this tier.
--- Standard: US$189 per month, 100 tracked prompts.
--- Premium: US$489 per month, 400 tracked prompts.
--- Annual billing reduces these to roughly US$25, US$160 and US$422 per month.
--- Gemini and Google AI Mode are billed separately, reported between US$9 and US$149 per month.
Peec AI
--- Starter: US$95 per month, 25 tracked prompts, unlimited seats.
--- Pro: US$245 per month, 150 tracked prompts, 3 projects, multi-country tracking.
--- Advanced: US$495 per month, 350 tracked prompts, 5 projects.
--- Every tier caps you at 3 of 7 engines. A fourth engine is a paid add-on at US$35, US$85 or US$165 per month depending on tier, per additional model.
Profound
--- Starter: reported at US$99 per month, ChatGPT only, 50 tracked prompts.
--- Growth: reported at US$399 per month, three engines, around 100 prompts, daily tracking.
--- Profound does not publish official pricing. As of 2026 its pricing page is demo-led with no public plan ladder and no public free trial, so the figures above come from third-party reviews rather than the vendor.
Hong Kong agency retainers
--- Mid-market AEO retainers in Hong Kong run US$2,500 to US$8,000 per month, with enterprise contracts passing six figures annually.
UDomain AEO Auditor
--- Free. No credit card, no account, no trial expiry.
--- Results in under 30 seconds for most sites, up to 60 seconds for complex ones.
--- 170+ AEO structure checks across the site, an AI Visibility Score out of 100, and a prioritised action plan.
--- Covers ChatGPT, Google AI Overview, Perplexity, Claude and Gemini.
What is the real cost driver in this category?
Tracked prompts and engine coverage, not the headline plan price. A US$95 entry plan with 25 prompts covering 3 of 7 engines is not comparable to a US$189 plan with 100 prompts, and neither is comparable on a per-engine basis once add-ons are counted.
Work the arithmetic before you compare. A 300-person Hong Kong firm tracking 100 buying-intent prompts across five engines lands as follows.
--- Otterly Standard at US$189 plus roughly US$100 in engine add-ons is about US$289 per month, near US$3,470 per year, roughly HK$27,000.
--- Peec AI Pro at US$245 plus two engine add-ons at US$85 each is US$415 per month, near US$4,980 per year, roughly HK$39,000.
--- Profound Growth at a reported US$399 covers three engines at around 100 prompts, near US$4,790 per year, roughly HK$37,000, with no public confirmation of the price.
Those are real but modest numbers for an enterprise. The expensive part is what happens next.
Why do most AI visibility purchases fail to change anything?
Because monitoring is not remediation. The platform tells you your mention rate is 8% and your competitor's is 34%. It does not fix your schema markup, restructure your content into extractable answers, or open your site to AI crawlers.
Three failure patterns account for most wasted spend.
--- Nobody owns the actions. The dashboard is bought by marketing, the fixes are technical, and the engineering backlog never accepts them. Twelve months of subscription produces a chart.
--- Prompt sets are guessed. Teams track brand-name prompts, where they already appear, instead of unbranded buying prompts, where the purchase decision happens.
--- The measurement window is too short. Structural changes are typically re-crawled by AI engines within two to four weeks, but citation and authority signals take one to three months to accumulate. Teams cancel at month two and conclude the category does not work.
Where is UDomain AEO Auditor the wrong choice?
This section matters more than the price table, so it is stated plainly. UD's AEO Auditor is a free diagnostic and scoring tool paired with human implementation, not a continuous monitoring platform. There are buyers it does not serve.
--- If you need daily prompt-level tracking across 400 prompts with historical trend lines and competitor share-of-voice charts, buy Otterly Premium or Peec Advanced. UD's Auditor is not built to replace that reporting cadence.
--- If you need an API or MCP feed to pipe visibility data into your own BI stack, the commercial platforms offer it at the higher tiers and the Auditor does not.
--- If your requirement is procurement-driven and you need SOC 2 Type II documentation on the monitoring vendor itself, Profound holds that certification and is the straightforward answer.
--- If you have an in-house technical SEO team that will action findings without support, a US$29 Otterly Lite plan plus your own engineers is the cheapest credible path.
Two further honest points. UD is a Hong Kong implementation partner, not a reseller of the platforms named above, so this comparison is not a like-for-like feature matrix. And a free scan cannot tell you what a paid analyst would about your specific competitive set.
Which option should you choose?
Match the tool to the constraint that is actually stopping you, not to the size of your budget.
--- You do not yet know if you have a problem. Start with a free audit. Spending US$189 a month to discover your JSON-LD coverage is 40% is an expensive way to learn something a 30-second scan reports for nothing.
--- You know you have a problem and no technical capacity to fix it. An audit plus an implementation partner beats a monitoring subscription. The subscription measures the problem you already know about.
--- You have fixed the structural work and need to prove ongoing progress to a board. Now buy monitoring. Otterly Standard is the best value at 100 prompts; Peec AI Pro if you need multi-country tracking; Profound if enterprise procurement requires the certification.
--- You operate across several markets with contested category terms. Peec AI's competitive intelligence depth is the strongest fit, accepting the per-engine add-on cost.
--- You are an agency managing multiple clients. Otterly Lite at US$29 per client is the accessible experimentation tier.
What should you check before you sign anything?
Five questions separate a useful contract from an expensive dashboard. Ask them in writing.
--- How many engines are included at my tier, and what does each additional engine cost per month?
--- Is my prompt allowance per project or per account, and what happens when I exceed it?
--- Does the tool report Hong Kong or region-specific results, or only a global average?
--- Who on my side will own the remediation actions, and has that person agreed in writing?
--- What is the renewal price after the first term, and is annual billing auto-renewing?
If you want the baseline before that conversation, our companion guide on what a free AEO scan does and does not do sets expectations, and how to check if AI recommends your business covers the manual method.
The correct next step
Audit before you subscribe. It is the only sequence that does not risk paying twelve months of monitoring fees to watch a number that never moves because nobody was resourced to move it.
Run a free scan, get the score and the action list, then decide whether your gap is a measurement problem or an execution problem. If it is measurement, the platforms above are priced fairly and one of them is right for you. If it is execution, a dashboard will not help and you need hands on the site.
We understand AI. We understand you. With UD by your side, AI never feels cold.
Reviewed by the UD enterprise AI team. Prices verified against publicly available vendor and third-party sources in July 2026 and subject to change.
Start with the free scan
Get your AI Visibility Score, 170+ structure checks and a prioritised action plan in under 30 seconds. No credit card, no sign-up. If the report shows execution gaps rather than measurement gaps, we'll walk you through every step, from schema and content structure to citation building and monthly re-scoring. Twenty-eight years of Hong Kong enterprise experience behind every recommendation.
