14 min read
Nine AI visibility tools compared on what they actually cost: entry prices, cost per prompt, a year of monthly checks, and which ones give a real report for free.
Find what's hurting your SEO and what to fix first. Free to start, no credit card.
Run IvaBot →The short answer.
The cheapest monthly subscriptions with real multi-engine tracking start at about $22 to $29: Rankscale at EUR 20 and Otterly AI at $29, with LLMrefs at $79 buying a far larger prompt allowance.
The cheapest way to check at all is not a subscription. IvaBot charges per run, which works out at about $2.28 a month for 30 prompts across three engines, because nothing is charged on the days you do not check.
Disclosure: IvaBot is my own tool. It is on this page because it fits the brief, it is marked in every table, and every figure about it can be checked on the pricing page.
The cheapest cost per prompt belongs to LLMrefs at roughly $0.16, not to the tools that advertise the lowest monthly price.
Every free AI visibility checker gives a snapshot rather than history, which is enough to find out whether a brand appears at all.
No AI visibility tool on this page gives Google keyword positions, backlinks or an on-page fix list, so a startup running one still needs an SEO tool underneath it.
The category goes by several names and they all describe the same thing: AI visibility tracking tools, AI visibility monitoring tools, AI brand visibility tracking tools and AI search visibility tracking tools. This page uses them interchangeably.
| Question | Answer |
|---|---|
| Cheapest subscription | Rankscale, EUR 20 a month |
| Cheapest per prompt | LLMrefs, about $0.16, because $79 buys 500 prompts |
| Largest prompt allowance under $100 | LLMrefs, 500 prompts |
| Largest allowance at any price | Peec AI Scale, about 722 prompts a month at $675 |
| Best for AI visibility overall on a small budget | Otterly AI, the only tool here that gives a full report without a card |
| Best for one small site | pay per run, or Otterly AI if the check happens daily |
| Best for an agency with several clients | Peec AI agency tiers: unlimited client seats, 3 to 25 projects, credits shared across clients |
| Best if you already pay for Semrush or Ahrefs | their own add-on, before buying anything separate |
| Best for enterprise depth | Profound AI, for crawler data and real query volumes |
| Best free option | the Ahrefs checker, because it needs no signup |
| Most expensive per prompt | Semrush AI Visibility Toolkit at about $3.96, and Semrush One at about $3.98 |
Short answer: mentions and citations are available free from several checkers, and prompt-level tracking is the part that always costs money.
The free checkers answer the first question well. Enter a brand and they return whether AI platforms mention it, which platforms mention it, and which domains get cited alongside it. That is a real answer and it costs nothing.
What none of them give away is prompt-level tracking: your own list of questions, run on a schedule, with the answer text kept so one week can be compared against the next. Every tool on this page puts that behind a payment, and in both cases tested here the payment screen arrived before any of that data appeared.
The signup findings behind several of these figures, including what each tool shows before payment, are written up separately in How can I check AI visibility for free.
| Tool | Entry price | Prompts included | Engines | Free entry |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Rankscale | EUR 20/mo | 120 credits, up to 480 AI responses | 8 | trial |
| Otterly AI | $29/mo | 15 | 4 included, Gemini and Google AI Mode extra | 7-day trial, no card, full report |
| LLMrefs | $79/mo | 500 | all supported, no engine fees | 7-day trial |
| Peec AI | $95/mo | 50 | 3 of 7, fourth costs $35 to $165 | 7-day trial, card required |
| Profound AI | about $99/mo | about 50 | ChatGPT only at that tier | none |
| Semrush AI Visibility Toolkit | about $99/mo per domain | 25 | ChatGPT, AI Overviews, Perplexity, Gemini and more | free checker |
| Ahrefs Brand Radar | about $199/mo per engine index | by tier | 6 | free checker, no signup |
| Scrunch AI | about $250/mo | not published | multiple | trial |
| IvaBot | pay per run, credits $5 to $60 | 1 credit covers the audit plus 5 prompts, then 10 more per credit | ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI | three free credits, no card |
Monthly price on its own says very little, because each plan sells a different amount. Divide it and the ranking changes.
| Plan | Price | Prompts | Cost per prompt per month |
|---|---|---|---|
| LLMrefs | $79 | 500 | $0.16 |
| Peec AI Advanced | $495 | 350 | $1.41 |
| Peec AI Pro | $245 | 150 | $1.63 |
| Peec AI Starter | $95 | 50 | $1.90 |
| Otterly AI entry | $29 | 15 | $1.93 |
| Profound AI Starter | about $99 | about 50 | about $1.98 |
| Semrush AI Visibility Toolkit | $99 | 25 | $3.96 |
Two things fall out of this table.
The tool with the lowest monthly price is not the cheapest. Otterly AI at $29 costs twelve times more per prompt than LLMrefs at $79.
The most expensive per prompt is the one attached to an SEO platform, because those 25 prompts are priced as an add-on to a subscription you are already paying for.
Tracking 30 prompts, checked once a month, for twelve months:
| Tool | Plan needed | Yearly cost |
|---|---|---|
| IvaBot | 4 credits a month | about $27 |
| Rankscale | entry | about EUR 240 |
| Otterly AI | a tier up, since the entry plan caps at 15 prompts | about $348 and above |
| LLMrefs | entry | about $948 |
| Peec AI | Starter | about $1,140 |
| Semrush AI Toolkit | add-on plus the base plan | about $1,188 plus the platform |
| Profound AI | Growth | about $4,788 |
This comparison is only fair for that pattern. A subscription buys daily re-checking whether it is used or not, so a team watching movement every morning gets value the monthly checker does not. A startup that checks after each release, and not otherwise, pays for days it never uses.
Engines sold separately. Peec AI includes three of seven on self-serve tiers, and a fourth costs $35 to $165 a month, which is $420 to $1,980 a year. Otterly AI charges separately for Gemini and Google AI Mode. Profound AI's entry tier is ChatGPT alone.
Seats. Peec AI includes unlimited seats on every tier. Profound AI gives one on Starter and three on Growth. For a team of five that difference outweighs the headline price.
Countries and languages. Profound AI limits its $399 Growth plan to one country and one language. For anyone selling in two markets the real entry point is the Enterprise conversation.
Annual billing. Several self-serve tiers in this category are billed annually, so the monthly figure is a commitment rather than a trial.
API access. Profound AI keeps the API for Enterprise, so it is not in the $399 plan.
Worth running before paying anything.
| Free option | What it gives | What it does not give |
|---|---|---|
| Ahrefs free AI visibility checker | brand checks across six engines, no signup | limited to the top results per section |
| Semrush free AI search visibility checker | mentions and citations across ChatGPT, Gemini, AI Mode and AI Overviews | history and custom prompt sets |
| HubSpot AEO Grader | one-time snapshot, no signup | history, custom prompts |
| Knowatoa free audit | analyzer output before paying | monitoring, which starts around $59/mo |
| Google Search Console | impressions in Google AI features, for your own site | clicks, prompts, anything outside Google |
The pattern is the same everywhere: free tools answer whether you appear at all, paid tools answer whether it changed. If the answer to the first question is no, there is nothing to track yet, and the money is better spent on the content that would get you mentioned.
Each entry below says what the tool is genuinely good at, because that is what decides the choice. The prices and limits sit in the tables above.
Rankscale. The cheapest genuine subscription in the category at EUR 20 a month. Credit-based rather than prompt-based: the entry tier buys 120 credits, which it describes as up to 480 AI responses a month, plus two brand dashboards and ten page audits. Tracking fifteen prompts across four engines uses sixty responses per run, so that allowance covers roughly eight runs a month rather than daily tracking. Best for: the lowest monthly commitment, as long as the response count is checked against how often the tracking needs to run.
Otterly AI. The pick of this list for AI visibility, and the only tool tested here that handed over a complete working report without a card. Fifteen prompts, brand coverage against named competitors, share of voice, sentiment, and the list of domains and pages the models cite for those prompts, which is the single most useful screen in the category. The price rises once Gemini and Google AI Mode are added, and the dashboard is dense: brand coverage, domain coverage, citation changes, a visibility index and agent analytics all at once. Someone who works in SEO will find their way around it, someone who does not will get lost. Best for: an SEO who wants depth on AI visibility and will not be put off by a busy interface.
LLMrefs. The best value per prompt by a wide margin, with no separate engine fees, which makes it the cheapest serious LLM visibility tool on this list. Best for: tracking a large prompt set on a fixed budget.
Peec AI. Clean interface, unlimited seats, 115 or more languages, and a hard cap of three engines on self-serve tiers. Best for: an agency or a team that needs a report a client can read.
Semrush AI Visibility Toolkit. Sits inside a platform you may already pay for, which is the whole argument for it. The 25-prompt allowance is small and extra prompts are sold in blocks. Best for: existing Semrush users.
Ahrefs Brand Radar. Strong when AI visibility needs to sit next to backlinks and site authority, priced per engine index on top of a base plan. Best for: existing Ahrefs users.
Profound AI. The enterprise benchmark, with crawler-level analytics and a dataset of real queries. Its price is not published and its entry tier covers one engine. Best for: funded programmes with a compliance requirement.
Scrunch AI. Persona-based analysis at an entry price around $250. Best for: teams segmenting by customer type.
IvaBot. Pays per run rather than per month, and combines AI visibility with keyword positions, backlinks and article drafting in one place. On the AI side each tracked prompt shows which engines mentioned the brand, the sentiment of that mention, the competitors named in the same answer, which page was cited, and the answer itself: the text the model returned, opened per engine, with the date, the model name and whether web search was on. Best for: one person running one site who checks when there is something to check. Not built for daily tracking, agency client reporting or large teams.
Every tool on this page measures AI visibility and stops there. None gives Google keyword positions, backlinks, an on-page fix list or article drafts, with the exception of the two SEO platforms whose AI tracking is an add-on, and IvaBot, which was built around that gap.
For a startup this matters more than the monthly price. A dashboard showing that a competitor appears more often does not say what to publish next, and the work that changes the answer is content, mentions and the sources the models read.
One more gap worth checking before paying for any of them: whether the tool keeps the answer, not just the score. A percentage cannot be shown to a sceptical client and cannot be re-read later to see how the wording changed. Most of these tools report the number and drop the text behind it.
Daily means a subscription. Monthly means pay per run.
Count the engines your plan includes, not the ones the vendor supports.
Seat limits move the real price more than the headline does.
A score you cannot open is impossible to defend to anyone.
If yes, check its AI add-on first. If no, pick something that covers both rather than starting two subscriptions.
On price, Rankscale and Otterly AI. On depth, Profound AI. On value per prompt, LLMrefs. On a report a client can read, Peec AI. There is no single best, because the plans sell different units.
Rankscale at EUR 20 a month by subscription price, LLMrefs at about $0.16 by cost per prompt, and a pay-per-run tool if the check happens monthly rather than daily.
From EUR 20 a month at the entry end to $675 a month at the agency end, with most self-serve plans landing between $29 and $99. The figure that matters is what the plan buys: engines included, prompts included and seats.
Because every tracked prompt is a paid model call, repeated daily across several engines, and interface scraping needs proxies on top. A plan tracking 50 prompts daily across three engines is 4,500 model calls a month before anyone looks at a dashboard.
Rankscale and Otterly AI for the lowest monthly commitment, LLMrefs for the lowest cost per prompt, and a pay-per-run tool when the check happens monthly rather than daily.
Anything under $30 a month covers a small prompt set, and a pay-per-run tool removes the monthly commitment entirely. On a tight budget, run the free checkers first and only pay once the free result shows the brand appearing somewhere worth tracking.
By prompt allowance, LLMrefs. By interface, Peec AI. By depth, Profound AI. By price, Rankscale. There is no single top tool, because the plans sell different units.
There are free checkers, and they give a snapshot rather than tracking. Free tiers that keep history are rare and heavily limited.
Run a set of prompts your buyers would actually type through ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google's AI surfaces, and record whether your brand appears and which page was cited. A tool automates that and keeps the history.
Get mentioned in the sources the models read, publish pages that answer the exact question, and make the answer easy to lift. Tracking measures the result, it does not create it.
None of these increase it. They measure it. Visibility rises from content, mentions and the sources the models read, and these tools tell you whether that worked.
Not necessarily. Both sell AI tracking as an add-on. Start there and add a dedicated tool only when the allowance runs out.
A single number summarising how often a brand appears across a tracked prompt set. It is a diagnostic rather than a target, because the number moves on its own when models update, so read the trend over several runs and not one figure.
A one-off check of how a site appears in AI answers today, covering which prompts return the brand, which page is cited and which sources are used instead. Monitoring repeats that on a schedule.
Prices come from vendor pricing pages where they are public and from dated third-party comparisons where they are not, checked in August 2026. Every cost-per-prompt and yearly figure was calculated from those list prices rather than taken from another article. Where a vendor does not publish a price, that is stated rather than filled in with an estimate.
Cite as: IvaBot, Best AI Visibility Tracking Tools for Startups on a Tight Budget, August 2026.
Last verified: August 2026. Pricing in this category changes faster than most, so check the current figures before deciding.
Before paying for any of these, run a free check and see whether the brand appears at all. If it does not, the work is content and mentions rather than tracking.
IvaBot checks ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI on your own prompts, keeps the answer text so you can read what the model actually said, and shows Google positions and backlinks in the same place. Three free credits to try each tool, no card. Run AI Readiness on your page.
Related guides on IvaBot: