11 min read
Where the money goes in AI visibility tools, what changed in their pricing this autumn, when daily tracking is worth it, and what 30 prompts cost at each schedule.
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Run IvaBot →Ask on Reddit why AI visibility tools cost so much and the same thread appears again and again: a freelancer with five clients, a small SaaS team with no budget, an agency told to sign an annual contract before seeing a single report. The prices are real. Entry plans start around $29 a month for 15 prompts, mid plans for 100 prompts sit between $99 and $189, and two of the best-known tools stopped publishing their prices altogether during autumn 2026.
IvaBot, a pay-as-you-go SEO and AI visibility tool, pays the same API bills these tools pay, so this article explains where the money goes from the inside. It covers what you should get for the money, when daily tracking is worth paying for, and what checking AI visibility costs if you pay per check instead of per month. Prices were checked in October 2026.
An AI visibility tool asks ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Google's AI the questions your buyers ask, then reads every answer for your brand, your competitors and the sources each answer cites. Every one of those questions is a paid request to an AI engine or a data provider. The bill grows with three numbers multiplied together: how many prompts you track, how many engines you track them on, and how often the tool asks. A subscription prices in a fixed, usually daily, schedule, and you pay for every one of those checks whether you open the report or not.
The largest part of the cost is the answers themselves. Every engine charges for each request, the engines do not charge the same, and a check of brand mentions across the web is a separate, heavier request on top of the answers. A plan's price follows directly from how many of those requests it commits to every day.
On top of the answers sits storage for months of history, the code that reads each answer and separates a mention from a citation, retries when an engine times out, support, and the margin that keeps the company running. None of this is unusual for software. What makes AI visibility expensive is the daily schedule: 30 prompts on four engines checked every day is 3,600 paid answers a month before anyone reads a report.
Below are Otterly AI pricing, Peec AI pricing, Profound AI pricing, Semrush One pricing and Ahrefs pricing for AI visibility, plus Scrunch and AthenaHQ, checked on vendor pages and help centres in October 2026. Where a vendor no longer publishes the price of its AI visibility tracker, the table says so.
| Tool | Entry price per month | Prompts on entry plan | Engines | Check frequency | Trial and commitment |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Otterly AI | $29 | 15 | Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Copilot; Gemini and AI Mode cost extra | Daily | Trial without a card |
| Semrush AI Visibility Toolkit | $99 on top of a paid Semrush plan | 25, plus 50 more for $60 a month | ChatGPT, Google AI Mode and others | Daily | No free trial |
| Peec AI | Not published since autumn 2026 | 50 | Three engines of your choice, more as paid add-ons | Daily | Trial available |
| Profound | Custom, through sales | Custom | Up to 9 | Daily | 7-day trial with 50 preset prompts you cannot edit |
| Ahrefs Brand Radar | From $199, $699 for all platforms | Custom prompts on the top tier | Up to 7 | Not stated | Part of Ahrefs plans |
| Rankscale | $17 to $20 on yearly billing, $99 Pro | Credits, about 4 answers per credit | ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Google AI and others | Not stated | 7-day trial on Pro |
| Scrunch AI | about $300 | Not published | Several | Daily | Sales demo |
| AthenaHQ | about $295 | Not published | Several | Not stated | Sales demo |
| IvaBot | No monthly fee, top-ups from $5 | Pay per run | ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Google AI Overviews | Whenever you run it | 5 free credits, no card |
Three things in the small print change the real price more than the headline number:
Engine coverage also explains part of the price gap. Gemini is the most expensive of the major engines to query, and several subscriptions sell it as a paid add-on rather than including it. IvaBot includes Gemini in every run, alongside ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews.
| Tool | August 2026 | October 2026 |
|---|---|---|
| Peec AI | Starter about $95 for 50 prompts | Price removed from the pricing page |
| Profound | Starter about $99, Growth $399 | Custom quotes only, after a 7-day trial |
| Rankscale | Essentials EUR 20, Pro EUR 99 | Priced in dollars and credits: $17 to $20, Pro $99 |
Neither Peec AI nor Profound explained why the prices disappeared. The likely reasons are a move toward larger clients, who get individual quotes on a call, and API costs that change often enough to make a published price risky for the seller. For a buyer the effect is simple: there is no number to compare until the demo.
Both are established tools used by large brands, so Peec AI is legit and Profound is a serious enterprise product. Peec AI suits teams that want a clean report and unlimited seats, while Profound suits funded companies that need deeper data and compliance. For a small team, the main difference today is that neither shows a price before a sales conversation. Peec AI competitors include Otterly AI, Profound, the Semrush AI Visibility Toolkit, Ahrefs Brand Radar, Rankscale, Scrunch, AthenaHQ and IvaBot.
Daily tracking is what makes most plans expensive, so it is worth asking whether you need it.
AI answers are not fixed. Ask ChatGPT the same question ten times and your brand can appear in six of them. People who test these tools seriously agree on the consequence: a single run is noise, and the number only means something as a trend over weeks. Tools also do not see what a logged-in user sees, because real users have memory, location and follow-up questions that a tracking query does not.
Daily tracking makes sense in a few situations: during a launch or an ad campaign, when an agency reports to a client every day, and when negative coverage appears and you need to see what assistants say about the brand. Once the launch is over and the brand grows steadily, daily checks add cost without adding certainty, and the same is true for most small teams from the start. One answer a day is still one sample, and AI answers change from run to run. A weekly check, plus a check after each meaningful change to a page, shows the trend more reliably and at a fraction of the price.
Whatever you pay, the tool should show you more than a score. Before paying, check that it gives you:
An AI visibility score without the answers and sources tells you that something moved, not what to do about it.
Freelancers and small agencies feel the pricing hardest, because most plans charge per brand, per project or per client workspace. Five clients on 30 prompts each can mean five subscriptions or an agency tier at several hundred dollars a month.
IvaBot has no fee per brand or per client. Each run is charged for the page and the prompts you check, so five clients checked weekly cost five times one client checked weekly, and a client you pause costs nothing.
IvaBot is an independent product, built and run by one person, an SEO consultant who needed SEO and AI visibility data for client work in one place. It has no investors to repay, no sales team and no enterprise contracts to support, and those are large parts of what a subscription covers elsewhere. That is why IvaBot can charge only for the checks you actually run.
IvaBot has no monthly plan. You buy credits once, starting at $5, and pay only for the runs you start. Each run checks your prompts on ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Google AI Overviews, and new accounts get 5 free credits without a card.
For 30 prompts, Otterly costs $189 a month, because its $29 plan stops at 15 prompts, and the cheapest Semrush option is Semrush One at $199 a month. Both prices include daily checks. With IvaBot, a monthly check comes to about $10 to $13 a month and a weekly check to about $43 to $58, so paying per check costs less at a weekly schedule or less. Daily runs suit a short test after a change rather than ongoing tracking. For weekly or monthly checks, the cheapest AI visibility tool is one that charges per run rather than per month.
Each run includes the full answer from each engine, the sources it cites, whether your brand is mentioned or cited, the sentiment of the answer, the competitors named instead of you, and notes on what the page is missing to be cited.
The other way to save money is to build your own tracker. It is a reasonable choice if you code or are ready to build with an AI assistant, and it shows what a finished tool actually saves you. A working tracker needs more than API access: something to write the code, somewhere to store results, something to run checks on a schedule, and a place to read the reports.
| What you need | What it does | What it costs | Conditions |
|---|---|---|---|
| DataForSEO | Answers from AI engines and Google AI Overviews in one API | Minimum payment $50 | The balance stays until it is used |
| SerpApi | Google results, including AI Overviews | $25 a month for 1,000 searches, $75 for 5,000, $150 for 15,000 | Monthly plan |
| Serper | Google results | From $50 for 50,000 credits | Credits expire after six months |
| OpenAI, Google Gemini and Perplexity APIs | Answers straight from each assistant | A separate prepaid balance for each provider | Each provider bills separately |
| Claude Pro or ChatGPT Plus | Writes and fixes the code | $20 a month each, $100 to $200 for heavier plans | Usage limits per session; long build sessions reach them |
| Or a freelance developer | Builds the tracker for you | About $25 to $60 an hour at intermediate level, $75 to $150 for specialists | Every later fix is more paid hours |
| Supabase | Stores runs, answers and history | Free tier, Pro $25 a month | Free projects pause after 7 days without activity |
| Make | Runs checks on a schedule and connects the services | Free up to 1,000 credits, Core $10.59 a month | Every scheduled check uses credits |
| Hosting and a domain | A dashboard to read the reports | Free tiers exist, a domain costs about $10 to $20 a year | Paid hosting once traffic grows |
Before the first check, a minimal setup built with an AI assistant comes to roughly $30 to $55 a month in subscriptions, plus upfront top-ups of $50 or more for data, and the bill for the checks themselves grows with prompts, engines and frequency.
Then comes the work: code that asks each engine, parses the answers, separates mentions from citations, stores history, handles timeouts, and keeps up when an engine changes its API. For one founder tracking one site, that can be a weekend project. For several clients and reports, it becomes a product you maintain.
Before paying for anything, you can get a baseline for free:
A paid tool earns its cost when the manual version starts taking hours, when you track several brands, or when you need history to show a client.
Entry plans start around $29 a month for 15 prompts, plans for about 100 prompts cost $99 to $189, and enterprise tools quote individually. Pay-as-you-go tools such as IvaBot have no monthly fee, so the cost depends on how often you check.
Every tracked prompt is a paid request to each AI engine, and most plans run those requests every day. The price grows with prompts, engines and frequency multiplied together.
For value per prompt and a ranked comparison, see Best AI visibility tracking tools for startups on a tight budget.
Most tools offer a trial rather than the best AI visibility tool free plan people look for. IvaBot gives 5 free credits that do not expire, and a few tools offer a free one-off check.
Most trials last seven days, and Otterly AI starts without a card. IvaBot has no trial period, because its free credits do not expire.
Pay-as-you-go tools such as IvaBot have no monthly plan, and Otterly AI can be paid month to month. Semrush requires a paid Semrush plan, and Profound and Peec AI now quote through sales.
It is worth it for funded companies that need enterprise data and compliance, and too much for a small team that checks a few dozen prompts.
Yes. Peec AI is an established AI visibility tool with unlimited seats on every plan; its prices are now shared on request.
Otterly AI, Profound, the Semrush AI Visibility Toolkit, Ahrefs Brand Radar, Rankscale, Scrunch, AthenaHQ and IvaBot.
Usually not. Answers change from run to run, so the trend over weeks matters more than one day. Daily checks are useful during a launch, a campaign or a test.
Choose a tool that does not charge per brand or per workspace and check each client weekly or monthly. With pay-as-you-go pricing, each client costs only the checks you run for them.
Yes, with API access to the engines or a data provider. Expect upfront top-ups of several tens of dollars across providers, a monthly bill that grows with prompts and frequency, and ongoing work to maintain it.
Run IvaBot once on the page that matters most and see which engines name you, which sources they cite and which competitors appear instead. Five free credits, no card. Start on ivabot.xyz.
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