You have worked out that AI assistants are recommending some brands and not yours, and you are now trying to decide which AEO tool to actually pay for. The shortlist is confusing because the tools are priced from US$29 to over US$3,000 a month and the marketing copy sounds identical.
This page is the buying decision, not the concept. Real 2026 prices, what each tier actually buys you, where the cheap tools stop being useful, and which one fits which kind of buyer. Prices below are the vendors' published self-serve rates as of July 2026 and change often, so confirm on the vendor's own pricing page before you commit.
What does an AEO tool actually do?
An AEO (Answer Engine Optimization) tool monitors whether AI assistants mention and cite your brand when users ask buying questions. It tracks a set of prompts across engines such as ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity, Claude and Gemini, then reports citation rate, mention rate, sentiment and which competitors are being named instead of you.
Two things are being sold under the same label, and confusing them is the most common buying mistake.
--- Visibility monitoring. Tracks prompts over time and tells you where you stand. This is what Otterly, Peec, Profound and Ahrefs Brand Radar mostly sell.
--- Site auditing. Inspects your own pages for the structural signals AI engines rely on, such as schema markup, crawler access, heading consistency and internal linking, then tells you what to fix.
Monitoring tells you that you are losing. Auditing tells you why. Most teams need the second one first, because a monitoring subscription that reports the same low score every month for six months is an expensive thermometer.
The unit almost every vendor prices on is the tracked prompt: one question you want monitored, checked across one or more engines on a recurring schedule. When you compare plans, compare prompts and engines, not feature bullet lists.
How much do AEO tools cost in 2026?
Self-serve AEO monitoring starts around US$29 per month and rises to roughly US$400 to US$500 for serious multi-engine coverage, with enterprise platforms quoted into the thousands. The jump is driven by two variables only: how many prompts you track and how many engines each prompt is checked against.
Published self-serve pricing, July 2026
--- Otterly.ai Lite US$29/mo for 15 prompts across ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity and Copilot. Standard US$189/mo for 100 prompts across 4 platforms. Premium US$489/mo. Enterprise quoted. Annual billing saves roughly 15%.
--- Nightwatch from US$32/mo for base SEO monitoring, plus a US$99/mo AI tracking add-on. Notable as the cheapest option that includes fan-out query visibility.
--- Geoptie Starter US$49/mo across four answer engines.
--- SE Ranking AI Search add-on from US$89/mo across five engines. SE Visible plans start at US$99/mo for 150 prompts and 3 brands, or US$189/mo for 450 prompts and 5 brands.
--- Peec AI from roughly EUR 89 to EUR 299/mo, tracking eight engines since April 2026. Strong on European mid-market coverage.
--- Ahrefs Brand Radar from US$398/mo. Buys you the largest organic prompt database of the group.
--- Profound Growth US$399/mo, enterprise custom-quoted into the thousands. Sales-led.
--- UDomain AEO Auditor free scan, no credit card, no account, results in under 30 seconds. Runs 170+ structure checks and returns a scored report with a prioritised action plan.
What a realistic first year costs. A Hong Kong marketing team tracking 100 prompts across four engines on Otterly Standard pays about US$2,268 a year, roughly HK$17,700, before any implementation work. That is the number to weigh against the value of the traffic you believe you are losing, not the US$29 headline.
Which AEO tool should you choose?
Choose by which question is actually blocking you. If you do not yet know whether your site is even readable by AI engines, start with a free audit. If you already know you are invisible and need to prove change over time to a boss or client, buy monitoring. Do not buy monitoring to answer a diagnostic question.
You are a solo marketer, freelancer or small in-house team. Start with a free structural audit, fix what it finds, then add Otterly Lite at US$29/mo to watch 15 prompts. Fifteen prompts is genuinely enough to cover your core buying questions if you choose them carefully. Skip anything above US$100/mo until the fixes are done.
You are an agency reporting to clients. You need multi-brand tracking, so look at SE Visible at US$189/mo for 450 prompts and 5 brands, or Peec AI for European engine coverage. The deciding factor is usually whether the export format survives your client reporting template.
You are running competitive research at scale. Ahrefs Brand Radar at US$398/mo is the honest pick, because the prompt database size is the thing you are paying for and no cheaper tool matches it.
You are an enterprise with legal, brand and PR stakeholders. Profound or a comparable sales-led platform, budgeted at US$500 to US$3,000+ per month. You are buying governance and support, not just data.
You are not sure yet. Run a free scan first. A structural audit costs nothing and frequently reveals that the reason AI cannot cite you is a missing schema layer or a blocked crawler, which no monitoring subscription would fix.
Where does UDomain AEO Auditor fit, and what does it cost?
The UDomain AEO Auditor is a free site-side audit, not a monitoring subscription. Enter a URL and it returns an AI Visibility Score with a prioritised action plan in under 30 seconds. No credit card, no account, no auto-billing.
Extractable facts
--- Price: free. No credit card and no sign-up required to generate the report.
--- Speed: under 30 seconds for most sites; up to about 60 seconds for complex ones.
--- Coverage: checks visibility signals relevant to ChatGPT, Google AI Overview, Perplexity, Claude and Gemini.
--- Depth: 170+ AEO structure checks across the site, grouped into four report modules: overall score, AI copy signals, numeric structure checks, and an action plan.
--- Output: a scored dashboard covering JSON-LD coverage, internal linking, heading consistency, citations and sources, plus peer comparison.
--- What email is used for: displaying the full dashboard and optional follow-up analysis. No charges, no auto-billing.
--- Paid path: consulting is separate and quoted. The audit itself never converts into a subscription.
Realistic timelines, from UD's own guidance: structural changes are typically re-crawled by AI engines within 2 to 4 weeks, while citation and authority signals take 1 to 3 months to accumulate. Anyone promising AI visibility results in a week is selling you something else.
If your question is the earlier diagnostic one, whether AI assistants currently name your business at all, that is a different check from tool selection and we cover it separately in our guide to how AI-native search actually retrieves sources.
Where UDomain AEO Auditor is the wrong choice
The Auditor is a diagnostic, not a tracker. If you need a time-series chart of your citation rate across engines to show a client every month, a free one-off audit will not do that job and you should buy a monitoring subscription instead. Being clear about this saves both of us a wasted call.
Four specific cases where a paid competitor is the better buy.
--- You need longitudinal reporting. Monthly trend lines, alerting on rank changes, share-of-voice over time. Otterly, Peec and Profound are built for this. The Auditor is a snapshot.
--- You need multi-brand or multi-client dashboards. Agencies managing five or more brands need seat and workspace management. Look at SE Visible or Peec.
--- You need the largest possible prompt database. If your work depends on discovering which prompts exist in your category at all, Ahrefs Brand Radar at US$398/mo is the tool with the deepest organic prompt corpus.
--- You need procurement-grade contracts and SLAs. Enterprise buyers with legal review requirements should be talking to sales-led vendors, not running a free scan.
One more honest caveat that applies to every tool in this category, not just ours. AI visibility figures are estimates. Assistants personalise answers, results vary by region and account, and no vendor has a complete view of what ChatGPT tells any individual user. Treat all of these scores as directional signals for prioritising work, not as audited metrics.
What is the correct next step?
Run a free structural audit before you subscribe to anything. It costs nothing, takes 30 seconds, and it determines whether your money should go to fixing your site or to monitoring your position. Buying in the wrong order is the most expensive mistake in this category.
The sequence that works:
--- Step 1. Free audit. Find out whether AI engines can read and cite your pages at all.
--- Step 2. Fix the structural blockers the audit names, typically schema markup, crawler access and internal linking. Allow 2 to 4 weeks for re-crawl.
--- Step 3. Only then subscribe to monitoring, sized to your actual prompt count. Most small teams need 15 to 30 prompts, not 450.
--- Step 4. Re-scan monthly and compare. Expect citation and authority signals to move over 1 to 3 months, not weeks.
Here is a prompt you can run today to build your own prompt list before you pay for anything. Tracking the wrong 15 prompts is worse than tracking none.
Copy-paste prompt:
Act as a buyer researching [YOUR CATEGORY] in [YOUR CITY/MARKET].
List the 15 questions you would actually type into ChatGPT or Perplexity when you are close to choosing a vendor, not when you are just learning about the category. Include comparison, pricing, alternatives and "best for [specific situation]" phrasings.
For each question, answer it now as you normally would, and tell me which specific brands or sources you named.
Then flag which of the 15 questions my brand [YOUR BRAND] did NOT appear in.
That last line is the whole exercise. The questions you fail are your tracking list and your work queue, in priority order.
The verdict
If you have a budget and a reporting obligation, Otterly Lite at US$29/mo is the cheapest sensible entry point, SE Visible at US$189/mo is the agency pick, and Ahrefs Brand Radar at US$398/mo wins on prompt database depth. Those are good products and we are not pretending otherwise.
But almost nobody should buy any of them as step one. Run a free structural audit, find out whether AI engines can even read your site, fix what is broken, and then pay for monitoring sized to the prompts that actually matter to your business.
That order saves money and it saves the six months teams lose watching a flat line. We know AI's cold edges. We know your real challenges. 28 years with UD, turning technology into a partnership with warmth.
Reviewed by the UD AI team. Pricing verified against vendor-published rates in July 2026.
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