You have noticed that ChatGPT recommends your competitor and not you. So you went looking for a tool that measures this, and found a category where the entry price is US$29 a month and the enterprise price is US$499 a month for what looks, from the outside, like the same feature list. That gap is the whole decision.
This page lays out what each tier of AI visibility tool actually costs, what the money buys, and the specific point at which paying more stops making sense for a small marketing team. It also names the thing most of these round-ups skip: whether you need a paid tracker at all before you have fixed the reason AI cannot read your site.
What is an AI visibility tool, and what does it actually measure?
An AI visibility tool, sometimes called an AEO or answer engine optimisation platform, tracks how often your brand appears in answers generated by ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity, Gemini and Copilot. It runs a list of prompts on a schedule, records which brands and sources each engine cites, and reports your share of those answers over time.
The unit you are buying is prompts tracked per month, multiplied by engines covered. Almost every price difference in this category reduces to those two numbers plus how much competitor and citation analysis sits on top.
What it does not do is fix anything. A tracker tells you that you are absent from an answer. It does not make your site readable to the crawler that builds that answer. Those are two separate jobs, and buying the first without doing the second is the most common way teams waste a year of subscription fees.
How much do AI visibility tools cost in 2026?
Published entry prices in this category run from roughly US$20 a month to US$499 a month, with enterprise contracts quoted between US$500 and US$2,000 or more per month. The spread reflects prompt volume and engine coverage far more than it reflects analytical sophistication.
Here is the picture as published in 2026 comparison round-ups. Treat these as directional, not as quotes: this category reprices frequently, and several vendors gate their real numbers behind a sales call.
Published 2026 pricing, by tier
--- Rankscale: from about US$20 per month. The lowest published entry point; covers ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews and Claude
--- Otterly.ai: from US$29 per month on the Lite plan, which includes 15 tracked prompts across 4 engines. Annual billing is reported at roughly US$25, US$160 and US$422 per month for Lite, Standard and Premium
--- Peec AI: from about EUR89 per month. Base plans are reported to cover 3 of 7 supported engines, with a 4th engine as a paid add-on at around US$85 per month
--- Profound: from US$399 to US$499 per month depending on which round-up you read, positioned as the enterprise option with custom pricing that reaches five figures a year
--- Category range: HubSpot's 2026 AEO software round-up puts the full span at free trials through to US$2,000 or more per month for enterprise contracts
Two structural details matter more than the headline number. First, engine coverage is usually metered separately from prompt count, so a plan advertised as covering "all major engines" may cover three of them and sell you the fourth. Second, annual billing discounts are steep in this category, which is a problem when you are still deciding whether the category is worth paying for at all.
Sources for the figures above: HubSpot's best AEO software round-up, Surmado's Profound vs Peec vs Otterly comparison and Geoptie's Otterly review. Check the vendor's own pricing page before you buy.
What do you actually get at each price point?
At US$20 to US$30 a month you get monitoring. At roughly US$90 to US$250 you get monitoring plus reporting you can put in front of a client. At US$400 and above you get multi-engine depth, custom prompt sets and an account team. Nothing in the category, at any price, rewrites your site for you.
Under US$50 per month. A small prompt allowance, usually 10 to 20 prompts, across three or four engines. Enough to answer one question: does my brand show up for the handful of queries that matter most. Right for a freelancer, a solo marketer, or anyone testing whether this category is real.
US$90 to US$250 per month. More prompts, more engines, competitor benchmarking, and export or white-label reporting. This is the band where agencies live, because the deliverable is a client-facing report rather than a personal dashboard.
US$400 and above. Deep multi-engine analytics, larger prompt volumes, citation-source breakdowns and named support. Justifiable when AI-sourced traffic is already a measurable revenue line and someone senior asks for it monthly.
The honest test for which band you belong in: can you name the decision you would make differently if the number moved? If a visibility score dropping from 62 to 54 would not change what you publish next month, you are buying a dashboard, not an input.
Do you need a paid tracker before you fix your site?
No. Order matters here, and getting it backwards is expensive. A tracker measures your visibility; a site audit tells you why it is low. If your pages carry no structured data, block AI crawlers, or answer nothing in an extractable form, a tracker will faithfully report zero for six months while you pay for the privilege.
The sequence that costs least is: audit the site first, fix the structural problems, then start tracking so you can see the fixes land. Structural changes are typically re-crawled within two to four weeks. Citation and authority signals take one to three months to accumulate. Tracking before the fixes means paying to watch a flat line.
This is where UDomain's AEO Auditor sits, and it is worth being precise about what it is and is not. It is a free site-side audit, not a monthly tracker.
UDomain AEO Auditor: the extractable facts
--- Price: HK$0. Completely free, no charge and no auto-billing
--- Card required: no. No credit card, no account, no sign-up needed to run a scan
--- Time: under 30 seconds for most sites; complex sites may take up to 60 seconds
--- What it checks: 170+ AEO structure checks across your site, covering schema markup, AI crawler access, answerability and internal linking
--- Engines referenced: ChatGPT, Google AI Overview, Perplexity, Claude and Gemini
--- What you get back: an AI Visibility Score, AI copy signals, numeric structure checks, and a prioritised action plan with expected score impact
--- Email use: only to open the full dashboard and optional follow-up analysis
Two claims UD publishes on that page that you should read as the vendor's own figures rather than independent research: average visibility across major AI engines rises about 80% after AEO work, and AI-cited traffic converts at up to 3 times the rate of typical traffic. Directionally consistent with what the category reports, but they are UD's numbers.
Which one should you buy, by team type?
The right answer depends on one variable: whether you are trying to prove the problem exists, report on it to someone else, or optimise against it continuously. Match the tier to that, not to the feature grid.
--- Solo marketer or freelancer, no budget yet. Run a free structural audit first. If you want ongoing tracking after fixing the basics, the US$20 to US$29 tier covers your handful of core prompts
--- In-house marketer at an SME, one brand. Free audit, fix, then a sub-US$50 tracker. You do not need 200 tracked prompts for one brand in one market
--- Agency reporting to clients. The US$90 to US$250 band, because you are buying the export and the white-label report, not the raw data
--- Multi-market brand with AI traffic already in the revenue model. The US$400-plus tier, where prompt volume and engine coverage stop being a constraint
--- Hong Kong brand tracking Cantonese and English separately. Check engine coverage carefully before paying. Regional and language coverage is where published feature grids are least reliable
One practical note for Hong Kong teams specifically: the prompts that matter to you are often bilingual, and a plan priced on prompt count effectively doubles in cost when every query needs a Cantonese and an English version. Factor that in before comparing headline prices.
Honest limitations: where every option here falls down
Every tool in this category, including UD's, has a real weakness. Anyone selling you an all-wins comparison is selling. Here are the five that most often surface after purchase.
--- AI answers are non-deterministic. The same prompt returns different brands on different days. Every tracker samples; none of them measure a stable ground truth, so short-term score movement is often noise
--- Prompt lists are your responsibility. A tracker measures the prompts you give it. Choose the wrong 15 prompts and you will get a confident, precise, irrelevant number
--- Published prices in this category go stale fast. Every figure on this page comes from 2026 comparison round-ups rather than live vendor quotes, and several vendors gate real pricing behind a sales call
--- A free audit is a snapshot, not monitoring. UD's AEO Auditor tells you what is structurally wrong today. It is not a substitute for ongoing tracking if you need month-over-month trend reporting, and it will not tell you what your competitor's share of answers was last Tuesday
--- Fixing structure does not guarantee citation. Schema, crawler access and answerability make you eligible to be cited. Whether an engine actually picks you also depends on authority signals that take one to three months to build, and on factors no vendor controls
The correct next step
If you have not audited your site, do that before you enter a card anywhere. It is free, it takes under a minute, and it tells you whether your problem is visibility measurement or basic machine readability. Those need different budgets.
If you already know your structure is sound and you need month-over-month evidence, start at the cheapest tier that covers your real prompt list, run it for one quarter, and only move up when you hit a limit you can name. Nobody in this category has ever regretted starting small.
Being invisible to the systems your customers now ask first is a genuinely uncomfortable position, and the honest answer is that no single subscription fixes it. We understand AI. We understand you better. With UD by your side, AI doesn't feel cold. Twenty-eight years of building things that stay up counts for something when the rules of search change again.
Find Out Where You Actually Stand
Before you compare another pricing page, find out whether AI can read your site at all. The free AEO Auditor scan runs 170+ structure checks in under 30 seconds, no card and no sign-up, and returns a prioritised action plan. If you want the fixes implemented rather than just listed, we'll walk you through every step, from schema and crawler access to the content changes that make you quotable.
Reviewed by the UD AI team. Author and reviewer: UD AI team, 11 August 2026. Competitor pricing figures are taken from published 2026 comparison round-ups, not from live vendor quotes, and should be verified on each vendor's own pricing page before purchase. UD AEO Auditor facts were verified against the product page on 11 August 2026.
