# Best AI Visibility Tools: Pricing and Citation Tracking
> Compare the real monthly cost of tracking your brand across ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and AI Overviews, plus how to choose the right tool.
Source: https://capitalandcompute.net/blog/best-ai-visibility-tools/
Published: 2026-07-19
Updated: 2026-10-13
An AI visibility tool tracks whether your brand shows up when someone asks ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, or Google AI Overviews a question, which competitors appear next to you, and which pages earn the citation. The best one for most teams is not the cheapest sticker price. It is the one whose effective cost per tracked prompt matches how many questions you actually need to monitor. On that measure the field splits cleanly: [Otterly.ai](https://otterly.ai/pricing/) from $29/month for small prompt sets, [Peec AI](https://peec.ai/pricing) as the mid-market challenger, the [Semrush](https://www.semrush.com/pricing/ai/) and [Ahrefs](https://ahrefs.com/brand-radar) modules if you already pay for their SEO suites, and [Profound](https://www.tryprofound.com/pricing) at the enterprise end where pricing goes behind a sales call.
The reason a whole software category exists is that these surfaces now answer questions without sending a click. As covered in [how AI search broke the web’s business model](/blog/ai-search-disruption-economics/), 68% of US Google searches ended without a click in early 2026, and AI Overviews cut organic clicks by roughly 40% on the queries where they appear. When the answer replaces the visit, the only thing you can still measure is whether your brand is inside the answer. That is what an AI visibility tool sells: a scoreboard for a channel where the old scoreboard, organic clicks, no longer reports the score.
## What an AI visibility tool actually does
An AI visibility tool runs a fixed list of prompts against the major answer engines on a schedule, then records five things: whether your brand is mentioned, where it ranks against competitors (share of voice), which sources the engine cited, the sentiment of the mention, and how all of that moves over time. The unit of work is the prompt. You define the questions your buyers ask (“best project management software,” “CRM for small law firms”), and the tool re-asks them daily across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Copilot, and AI Overviews so you can see your presence trend rather than guess it.
That framing matters because it explains the entire pricing structure. Every vendor meters two axes: how many prompts you track and how many engines you track them across. A tool that quotes “$29 a month” is quoting a prompt ceiling, usually a low one. The moment you need to monitor a realistic set of buyer questions across every engine, the effective price climbs, and it does not climb evenly between vendors. The comparison that follows is built on that effective cost, not the headline.
The one number the comparison pages hide
Divide the monthly price by the number of prompts a tier actually tracks. A $99/month plan that covers 25 prompts costs $3.96 per tracked prompt. A $489/month plan that covers 400 prompts costs $1.22\. The expensive-looking plan is three times cheaper per unit of work. Sticker price and unit cost point in opposite directions.
## The pricing reality nobody puts on the comparison page
Here is what tracking the same brand actually costs across the five tools most worth knowing, verified against each vendor’s own page on 19 July 2026\. Prices in euros are the vendor’s listed price; the dollar-per-prompt figures below convert at roughly 1.08 USD per EUR.
| Tool | Entry price | Realistic tier | Engines (base) | Prompts (entry to top self-serve) | Citation export |
| ------------------ | ------------- | --------------------- | --------------------- | --------------------------------- | --------------- |
| Otterly.ai | $29/mo | $189/mo | 4 | 15 to 400 | Yes |
| Peec AI | €85/mo | €205/mo | 3 of 6 | 50 to 350 | Yes |
| Semrush AI Toolkit | $99/mo | $199/mo (Semrush One) | 5+ | 25 | Limited |
| Ahrefs Brand Radar | €358/mo | €654/mo | 6 | 2,500 checks/mo | Yes |
| Profound | Not published | $399+/mo (reported) | ChatGPT only at entry | Custom | Deep |
The per-prompt view is where the ranking rearranges. Plotting effective monthly cost per tracked prompt at each self-serve tier shows that the cheapest entry points are the most expensive per unit, and that cost per prompt falls sharply as you buy volume.
__Effective cost per tracked prompt, by tool tier__
| Item | Value |
| ----------------------- | ----- |
| Semrush AI Toolkit (25) | $3.96 |
| Otterly Lite (15) | $1.93 |
| Otterly Standard (100) | $1.89 |
| Peec Pro (150) | $1.48 |
| Peec Advanced (350) | $1.31 |
| Otterly Premium (400) | $1.22 |
Effective monthly cost per tracked prompt, by tool and tier (self-serve plans that meter prompts tracked daily). Euro tiers converted to USD at 1.08\. Ahrefs Brand Radar is excluded here because its 2,500 allowance is monthly ad-hoc prompt checks, a different unit than a continuously tracked prompt.Source: Vendor pricing pages, verified 19 July 2026: Otterly.ai, Peec AI, Semrush
The practical read: if you only need to watch a dozen high-value questions, a $29 entry plan is fine and the per-prompt premium is irrelevant. If you need to watch a hundred or more, buying up a tier almost always lowers your unit cost, and the vendor that looked cheapest at the door is rarely the cheapest at scale. Ahrefs Brand Radar sits outside this chart on purpose: its allowance is 2,500 monthly prompt checks rather than continuously tracked prompts, so at roughly $0.28 per check it looks dramatically cheaper, but it is buying a different thing (breadth of ad-hoc lookups, not a daily monitored panel).
## The five tools worth knowing
The market has more than sixteen entrants and grows monthly, but five cover the realistic buying decision from solo operator to enterprise.
**Otterly.ai** is the budget and small-business pick. The Lite plan is $29/month for 15 prompts across four engines (ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity, and Microsoft Copilot), scaling to Standard at $189 for 100 prompts and Premium at $489 for 400, with a 15% discount on annual billing and Claude, Gemini, and Google AI Mode available as paid add-ons. It is the most accessible way to get a real daily scoreboard, and its per-prompt economics at the Premium tier are the best of any self-serve plan here.
**Peec AI** is the fastest-growing mid-market challenger. Pricing runs Starter at €85/month (50 prompts, one project), Pro at €205 (150 prompts, two projects), and Advanced at €425 (350 prompts, five projects), each covering three of its six supported engines with a fourth engine as a per-model add-on. Peec leans into competitor benchmarking and multi-project structure, which fits agencies managing a handful of brands rather than one.
**Semrush AI Toolkit** is the option for teams already living in Semrush. As a standalone premium toolkit it is $99/month for one domain and 25 tracked prompts, or bundled into Semrush One from $199/month alongside the full keyword and rank-tracking suite. The prompt allowance is stingy and citation export is limited, but the value is integration: AI visibility sitting next to the traditional SEO data you already trust.
**Ahrefs Brand Radar** is the other SEO-suite play, pitched at breadth. It tracks six answer engines plus YouTube, TikTok, and Reddit, drawing on a database Ahrefs describes as 401 million-plus monthly prompts. Select-platform access is €358/month and all-platform is €654/month with 2,500 custom prompt checks. It is built for teams that want AI visibility as one lens inside a wider brand-monitoring picture, not a dedicated daily prompt panel.
**Profound** is the enterprise leader and the one that will not show you a price. Its pricing page is demo-led; third-party and historical signals put a Starter tier around $99/month (ChatGPT only), a Growth tier near $399 for three engines, and enterprise deployments anywhere from $2,000 to $5,000-plus per month depending on seats and platform count. Profound’s depth of citation and conversation analytics is the reason large brands pay it, and the reason it raised the largest rounds in the category.
## How to choose one
Match the tool to the shape of your problem, not to a feature checklist. The three axes that decide it are prompt volume, whether you already own an SEO suite, and whether you need enterprise-grade citation analysis.
__AI visibility tools across the decision dimensions__
| Dimension | Otterly | Peec AI | Semrush | Ahrefs BR | Profound |
| ---------------- | ------- | -------- | --------- | ----------- | ---------- |
| Entry price | $29/mo | €85/mo | $99/mo | €358/mo | Sales call |
| Engines (base) | 4 | 3 of 6 | 5+ | 6+ | 1 at entry |
| Prompt allowance | 15-400 | 50-350 | 25 | 2,500 | Custom |
| Citation export | Yes | Yes | Limited | Yes | Deep |
| Full SEO suite | No | No | Full | Full | No |
| Best fit | SMBs | Agencies | SEO teams | Brand teams | Enterprise |
AI visibility tools rated across the dimensions that actually drive the buying decision. Green marks an advantage for the buyer, amber a trade-off, red a drawback. Ratings reflect self-serve plans as of 19 July 2026.Source: Capital & Compute, from vendor pricing pages verified 19 July 2026
The decision resolves quickly once framed this way. A solo founder or small business watching a dozen questions should start with Otterly Lite. An agency juggling several client brands wants Peec AI’s multi-project structure or, if it already runs client SEO in Semrush or Ahrefs, the module that bolts onto the suite it already pays for. A brand team that needs AI visibility as one panel in a wider social and search monitoring view is the natural Ahrefs Brand Radar buyer. An enterprise that treats AI citation as a board-level channel, with the budget to match, is who Profound is built for. Nobody needs to compare all five: two axes (prompt volume and existing suite) eliminate most of the grid.
## Do you actually need one yet?
Not every site does, and the honest answer is worth more than the affiliate-friendly one. If AI referral traffic is not yet a line item you care about, you can approximate most of what these tools sell for free. Ask ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini your top ten buyer questions by hand once a month and note whether you appear and who does instead. Watch Google Search Console for the queries and pages that AI Overviews are reshaping. Set a brand-mention alert. That manual pass costs an hour and catches the big movements.
What you lose without a tool is the schedule, the history, and the share-of-voice math. Answer-engine responses vary run to run, so a single manual check is noisy; the value of a paid tool is that it re-asks daily and turns the noise into a trend. The threshold is simple: buy a tool when AI visibility becomes a number someone has to report on, not before. Until then, the free baseline plus a clear view of the [publisher revenue playbook for the AI search era](/blog/publisher-revenue-playbook-ai-search-era/) is enough to know whether the channel is worth instrumenting at all.
How these numbers were checked
Every price here was read from the vendor’s own pricing page or, where a vendor does not publish prices (Profound), attributed to third-party reporting and labeled as such. Figures were verified on 19 July 2026 and will drift: AI-visibility pricing has changed repeatedly across 2025 and 2026\. Treat the per-prompt math as the durable insight and the exact dollar amounts as a snapshot. See our [editorial standards](/editorial-standards/) for how sourcing and verification work here.
Key takeaways
* AI visibility tools meter two things: how many prompts you track and across how many engines. Price follows both.
* Effective cost per tracked prompt inverts the sticker ranking: a $99/25-prompt plan costs $3.96 per prompt, a $489/400-prompt plan costs $1.22.
* Otterly.ai ($29 entry) fits SMBs, Peec AI (€85) fits agencies, Semrush and Ahrefs fit teams already paying for their SEO suites, Profound fits enterprise.
* Ahrefs Brand Radar sells ad-hoc prompt checks, not a daily panel, so its per-check cost is not comparable to the others.
* If AI visibility is not yet a number you report on, a free monthly manual pass across ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini approximates most of the value.
## Frequently asked questions
What is an AI visibility tool?
An AI visibility tool tracks whether and how a brand appears when users ask AI answer engines like ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews questions. It runs a fixed set of prompts on a schedule and reports brand mentions, share of voice against competitors, which sources were cited, and sentiment over time.
How much do AI visibility tools cost?
Entry plans start around $29 per month (Otterly.ai) and €85 per month (Peec AI) for small prompt sets. Mid-market tiers run $189 to €425 per month. SEO-suite modules like Semrush AI Toolkit start at $99 per month and Ahrefs Brand Radar at €358\. Enterprise tools like Profound do not publish prices and typically run $2,000 to $5,000-plus per month.
Which AI visibility tool is best?
There is no single best tool. Otterly.ai is best for small businesses on a budget, Peec AI for agencies managing multiple brands, Semrush and Ahrefs for teams already using those SEO suites, and Profound for enterprises that need deep citation analysis. The right pick depends on how many prompts you track and whether you already own an SEO platform.
Are there free AI visibility tools?
There is no full-featured free tool, but you can approximate the basics at no cost. Manually ask your top buyer questions to ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini once a month, monitor Google Search Console for AI Overview shifts, and set brand-mention alerts. Paid tools add the daily schedule, historical trend, and share-of-voice math that manual checks cannot.
How is AI visibility tracking different from SEO?
Traditional SEO measures rankings and clicks on search engine results pages. AI visibility tracking measures whether your brand is named and cited inside AI-generated answers, where there is often no click at all. The two overlap but use different scoreboards: position and traffic for SEO, mentions and citations for AI visibility.
## The bottom line
The AI visibility category is real, funded, and still repricing month to month. The trap in every “best tools” listicle is that it ranks by sticker price or feature count and skips the only number that survives contact with a budget: effective cost per tracked prompt. Run that math and the buying decision collapses to two questions. How many buyer questions do you need to watch, and do you already pay for an SEO suite that can watch them? Answer those and the right tool is usually obvious, often cheaper than the headline suggests, and sometimes not necessary yet at all. The channel matters more than any single vendor: being inside the answer is the new distribution, and the same shift is reshaping [national AI adoption economics](/blog/ai-adoption-by-country-economics/) and publisher revenue alike.
## Sources
Otterly.ai (2026). _Pricing_. Vendor pricing page.
Peec AI (2026). _Pricing_. Vendor pricing page.
Semrush (2026). _AI Visibility Toolkit Pricing_. Vendor pricing page.
Ahrefs (2026). _Brand Radar_. Vendor product and pricing page.
Profound (2026). _Pricing_. Vendor pricing page (demo-led, no public price).
TechCrunch (2026). _ChatGPT reaches 900M weekly active users_. February 27, 2026\.
Google (2026). _Gemini app monthly active users, Google I/O_. May 2026, as reported by industry coverage.
SparkToro (2026). _Zero-click search analysis_. As cited in Capital & Compute, AI Search Broke the Web’s Business Model.