What Do AI Visibility Tools Actually Cost in 2026?
Published entry prices run from US$29 a month to roughly US$400 a month, and the number of AI engines covered is what moves the price, not the number of features. An AI visibility tool tracks whether ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Google AI Overview mention your brand when someone asks a buying question.
Here is the buying decision, stated plainly. You have noticed that people ask ChatGPT for recommendations instead of Googling. You want to know whether your brand comes up. There is now a category of tools that will tell you, and they range from a rounding error to a real line item.
The trap is paying for continuous monitoring before you have fixed the reasons AI cannot read your site. Monitoring tells you that you are invisible. It does not make you visible.
So the honest sequence is: audit the structural problems first, fix them, then decide whether ongoing tracking is worth a subscription. This page covers what each option costs and who each one is genuinely for.
How Much Does Each AI Visibility Tool Cost Per Month?
Otterly.AI starts lowest at US$29 a month, Peec AI and Profound both start near US$95 to US$99, and serious multi-engine tracking lands between US$200 and US$500 a month. Prompt allowance and engine count are the two variables that drive every tier.
Extractable facts: published pricing as of September 2026
--- Otterly.AI Lite: US$29 per month, 15 tracked prompts, roughly 1,000 GEO audits a month. About HK$226.
--- Otterly.AI Standard: US$189 per month, 100 prompts, API and MCP access, agent analytics, around 5,000 URL audits.
--- Otterly.AI Premium: US$489 per month.
--- Peec AI: roughly US$95, US$245 and US$495 per month (around EUR85, EUR205 and EUR425) for 50, 150 and 350 prompts, three engines included, unlimited seats.
--- Profound Starter: US$99 per month, annual billing only, ChatGPT only, 50 prompts, one seat.
--- Profound Growth: US$399 per month, annual billing only, three engines.
--- UD AEO Auditor: free, no credit card, no account. Full report generated in under 30 seconds.
Two details in that list matter more than the headline numbers.
Profound's US$99 entry tier is annual-only and watches ChatGPT alone, so the true first-year commitment is roughly US$1,188 for single-engine coverage. That is a different purchase from a US$29 monthly rolling plan you can cancel in week two.
And once a second engine matters, the cost-per-engine maths inverts. Otterly Standard at US$189 or Peec's middle tier at roughly US$245 cover more engines per dollar than Profound Growth at US$399.
Which AI Visibility Tool Should You Choose?
Choose by how many engines you must prove coverage on and whether anyone will read the report. Solo practitioners and small teams get most of the value from Otterly's US$29 tier. Agencies reporting to clients need white-label output. Enterprises with a brand team need multi-engine breadth and will pay Profound rates for it.
Verdict by buyer type
--- Freelancer or solo marketer, one brand: Otterly Lite at US$29 a month. Fifteen prompts is enough to cover your core buying queries. Run the free UD AEO Auditor scan first so you are not paying to watch a problem you could have fixed.
--- Two to five person in-house marketing team: Peec AI's entry tier. Unlimited seats matters more than it sounds when three people want to check the dashboard, and per-seat pricing elsewhere punishes that.
--- Agency reporting to clients: a tool with white-label reporting and analytics integration. Otterly Standard at US$189 buys API and MCP access, which lets you pull the data into your own client reports instead of screenshotting someone else's dashboard.
--- Enterprise brand team, 10-plus engines: Profound Growth or above. This is the tier where breadth and prompt volume justify the annual commitment, and where a US$399 monthly cost is smaller than one week of the team's time.
--- Anyone who has not yet audited their own site: none of them yet. Run a free structural audit, fix what it finds, wait four weeks, then buy tracking.
Why Run a Free AEO Audit Before Buying a Tracker?
Because trackers measure outcomes and audits diagnose causes. If AI crawlers cannot parse your page structure, your schema is incomplete, or your copy is not written in extractable form, a monitoring subscription will faithfully report zero mentions every month while you pay for it.
The UD AEO Auditor exists for that first step. It runs 172 structural AEO checks against your site and returns four modules: an overall AI visibility score, AI copy signals, numeric structure checks, and a prioritised action plan. It is free, needs no credit card and no account, and finishes in under 30 seconds for most sites.
What that produces is a fix list, not a dashboard. Typical findings are missing or incomplete JSON-LD, H1 inconsistency, weak internal linking, and copy that states claims without the citations AI engines look for when deciding what to quote.
Timing matters for the sequencing argument. Structural changes are usually re-crawled by AI engines within two to four weeks. Citation and authority signals take one to three months to accumulate. So there is a real window where a paid tracker would show you a flat line that has nothing to do with your work.
If you want to see what the scan surfaces before running it, UD's walkthrough of a 30-second AI visibility audit covers the output field by field.
What Are the Honest Limitations of Each Option?
Every option in this category has a real gap. The free UD audit does not do continuous multi-engine rank tracking. Otterly's cheap tier caps you at 15 prompts. Peec covers three engines, not ten. Profound's entry tier is annual-only and single-engine. Knowing which gap you can live with is the whole decision.
Where UD AEO Auditor is the wrong tool
--- It is a point-in-time structural audit with an action plan, not a daily prompt-tracking dashboard. If your job requires a month-over-month share-of-voice chart against three named competitors, you need a paid tracker as well.
--- The deeper AEO implementation work is a consultant engagement priced by quote, not a published subscription. If you need a number before you talk to anyone, that is a genuine friction point.
Where the paid trackers fall short
--- Otterly Lite's 15 prompts sound generous until you realise a single product line can absorb all of them. Teams routinely outgrow this tier in month two and face a jump to US$189.
--- Peec's clean reporting is also its ceiling. Several 2026 reviews describe it as strong at showing you the numbers and thin on telling you what to change.
--- Profound's annual-only billing on the Starter tier removes the ability to test cheaply, which is exactly what a first-time buyer in an unproven category wants to do.
--- All of them measure mentions, and mentions are not orders. The link between AI citation and revenue is still poorly instrumented across the whole category, so treat any single tool's attribution claims as directional.
How Do You Test Your Own AI Visibility Today Without Paying?
Ask the AI assistants directly, using the phrasing a real buyer would use, then record whether you appear. This is a manual version of what the paid tools automate, and ten minutes of it tells you whether the category is worth a subscription for you at all.
Run this prompt in ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini separately. Do not mention your own brand in the prompt, because naming it guarantees it appears and destroys the test.
Try this prompt:
I run a [3-person marketing team] at a [Hong Kong B2B software company]. I need to choose a [customer onboarding tool] and I want a shortlist.
Budget is [under HK$2,000 per month]. Must-haves are [Cantonese support and Xero integration]. Deal-breakers are [annual-only contracts].
Recommend 3 specific named vendors, rank them, and for each one tell me the single reason a team like mine would reject it. Then list the sources you used for each recommendation.
The last sentence is the useful part. The source list shows you which pages the model is actually reading to form its recommendation, which is the same thing a paid tracker charges you to summarise.
Repeat it with three or four variations of how a buyer might phrase the same need. If your brand appears in none of them, you have a structural problem to fix, not a monitoring problem to subscribe to. If you appear in some and not others, you have a coverage gap worth tracking, and now a US$29 subscription is a reasonable purchase.
That is the whole decision in one sentence. Audit first because it is free and it tells you what to change, then pay for tracking only once you have something worth watching move. We understand AI. We understand you better. With UD by your side, AI doesn't feel cold.
Reviewed by the UD AI team.
Find Out Whether AI Can Read Your Site
Before you subscribe to anything, get the free diagnosis. The UD AEO Auditor runs 172 structural checks and returns your AI visibility score, your copy signals, and a prioritised fix list in under 30 seconds. No credit card, no account.
And when you are ready to act on the report, we'll walk you through every step, from schema and internal linking to the copy changes that make AI engines quote you.
