AI visibility tools: what they actually cost, and what they don't do

⏰ The 30-second version

• Every tool in this category does roughly the same thing: run a list of prompts against AI models on a schedule and count how often your brand shows up.
• Published entry prices run from $29/mo to $295/mo, and the tiers a real brand ends up on sit closer to $199–$495/mo. That's $2,400–$5,900 a year.
• Free plans are rare. Most give a trial, and several hide their real price behind a demo.
• Every one of them tells you that you're invisible. None of them writes the page that fixes it, and none of them knows what your customers actually ask.
• Measurement is the cheap part. Deciding what to publish is the part that costs you a quarter if you get it wrong.

What this category actually sells

An AI visibility tool does three things:

1. Sends a fixed set of prompts to ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude and others, usually daily.
2. Records whether you were named, which sources were cited, and how competitors placed.
3. Draws the trend on a dashboard.

That's a monitoring product. It's genuinely useful once you have something to monitor. It's also, in most cases, the second thing a brand needs, not the first.

Published pricing, checked 2026-08-15

All figures come from each vendor's own public pricing page on the date checked. Prices move, and "Enterprise" is custom everywhere, so treat this as a starting map and click through before you budget.

Tool	Entry price	Highest published tier	Free access
OtterlyAI	$29/mo (Lite)	$489/mo (Premium); Enterprise from $1,000/mo	Free trial, no card
Peec AI	$95/mo (Brand Starter)	$495/mo (Brand Advanced); agency plans to $795/mo	Trial, limits set by vendor
Profound	$99/mo billed yearly (Starter)	$399/mo billed yearly (Growth)	"Try for free", no published limits
Semrush AI Visibility	$99/mo per domain, billed annually	Enterprise, price not published	None stated
Ahrefs Brand Radar	$50/mo (custom-prompt packages)	$699/mo (all AI platforms)	Free public preview
Scrunch	$250/mo (Core)	Enterprise, no published ceiling	7-day trial
Athena HQ	$295/mo, or $245/mo billed annually	Enterprise, custom	Free Essential plan with $25 credit

Three things worth noticing in that table.

The advertised number is not the number you pay. Profound's $99 and Semrush's $99 are both annual-billing prices, so the real commitment is roughly $1,200 up front. Several vendors show a lower "annual-equivalent" monthly figure that only applies if you buy a year.

The useful tier is higher than the entry tier. Entry plans typically cover one brand, a small prompt allowance and one or two models. Brands that want competitor tracking across several engines land in the $199–$495 range.

Free means trial, not free. Athena HQ is the exception with a genuinely free plan carrying a $25 credit. Ahrefs gives a public preview of Brand Radar data. Everyone else wants a card eventually.

The question the dashboards can't answer

Here's the honest limit of the entire category, including the free scan on this site.

A visibility tool measures the prompts you gave it. If the prompt list is wrong, the dashboard is confidently wrong. It will show a clean 0% and you will have learned nothing, because your customers never asked those questions in the first place.

Nobody outside your company knows what your buyers actually type. Not us, not an agency, not a $495/mo tracker. That knowledge sits with the person who reads your support inbox and your product reviews.

So the sequence that works is:

1. Get the questions right first. They come from your own customer conversations, not from a keyword tool.
2. Measure once against those questions, to get a baseline.
3. Publish an answer to the highest-value unanswered question.
4. Re-measure the same questions later so the change means something.

A daily dashboard is worth paying for at step 4, when you already have a publishing cadence to attribute movement to. Bought at step 1, it becomes a $3,000-a-year graph of a number you can't move.

Where Bulti sits, plainly

We are not a tracker, and we'd rather say that than sell you a worse version of one.

• The free report reads one of your public pages, tests it against 30 buyer questions for your category, and shows you the gaps and real US search volume behind them. No sign-up, no card.
• The paid product is a $1,500 one-time 60-day operating program: the full report, 60 pre-written lessons, and the same automated diagnosis re-run at Day 30 and Day 60 so you can compare like with like. No subscription, no renewal.
• There are no consulting hours in it. It's software plus a fixed curriculum, and it's priced against a year of a mid-tier subscription rather than against an agency retainer.

If what you need is a daily dashboard across nine models, buy one of the tools above — several are good. If what you need is to know which page to write this week and to have proof it changed anything, that's the gap we built for.

Not sure what a GEO audit tool measures before you spend anything? It walks through the four checks, including a 20-minute version you can run by hand. To measure actual model mentions, use the AI search visibility tracking routine.

FAQ

Q. Which AI visibility tool is best? For continuous multi-model monitoring with competitor benchmarking, Profound, Peec AI and Scrunch are the most commonly cited in that order of maturity, and Athena HQ has the only meaningful free tier. "Best" depends on whether you already publish regularly — if you don't, no tracker will help yet.

Q. Is there a free AI visibility checker? Athena HQ has a free plan with a $25 credit, Ahrefs offers a public Brand Radar preview, and our own scan is free with no sign-up. Everything else in the category is a time-limited trial.

Q. What's a realistic budget for AI visibility tracking? If you want more than one brand, more than one engine and competitor data, plan for $200–$500 a month. Entry tiers at $29–$99 are for a single brand with a small prompt set, and several of them require annual billing.

Q. Do I need a tracker to appear in ChatGPT? No. Trackers measure; they don't change what AI reads. Appearing depends on whether your pages answer buyer questions in crawlable text, and on what third-party sources say about you.