Is there a meaningful difference between the $10,000 a year and the $70,000 a year tiers, or is it mostly seat count? That is the question an operations lead might type into a search box the week before a renewal meeting, and my short answer is that the software side of this market is cheap and fairly flat, while everything above roughly $2,500 a month is people with a dashboard attached.
This article lays out what the self-serve tools charge today, what the expensive tiers add on top, whether any of it deserves your money, and which band a team of your size belongs in. Every number was checked against the vendor's live pricing page on August 28, 2026, and the Sources section lists each page so you can repeat the check.
What does the market charge right now?
Self-serve tools cluster between $0 and $300 a month. The sticker prices sit close enough together that the differences hide in the billing basis and in what the entry tier lets you run, so the table lists one row per tool, the first price that runs a prompt, how you pay it, and what you get for it.
Prices checked August 28, 2026, against each vendor's own pricing page. These change monthly, so re-verify before you buy.
| Tool | Entry price | Billed how | What you get at entry |
|---|---|---|---|
| Rankscale | $99/mo Pro | Monthly or annual | The "from $20/mo" Essentials plan ships with zero credits, so it tracks nothing. Pro is the first tier that measures anything. Growth $385, Enterprise $780. |
| Otterly | $29/mo Lite ($25 annual) | Monthly or annual | Lowest paid entry on the list. Standard $189, Premium $489 monthly ($160 and $422 annual), Enterprise from $1,000. |
| Peec AI | About $95/mo Starter | Annual; Enterprise via sales | The pricing page shows tiers with no amounts to a crawler, which is why most roundups say "contact Peec." Open it in a browser and you see roughly $95, $245 and $495 a month (€85, €205, €425) for 50, 150 and 350 prompts, three engines included, extra engines paid, unlimited seats. Agency plans run on credits with a minimum per project. |
| Scrunch | $300/mo Starter ($250 annual) | Monthly or annual | Growth $417 to $500. Older roundups list a cheaper tier that no longer exists, so check the live page. |
| Profound | $99/mo Starter | Annual only, $1,188 up front | Starter watches ChatGPT only, 50 prompts, one seat. Growth is $399/mo for three engines, also annual, so $4,788 up front. Profound only put these numbers on its site on June 11, 2026, so any roundup older than that says "contact sales." |
| Semrush AI Visibility Toolkit | $99/mo | Monthly, add-ons stack | 1 domain and 25 prompts. Each extra domain is +$99, each extra user +$99, each 50 extra prompts +$60, per the knowledge base. In August 2026 the main Semrush pricing page no longer offers the toolkit on its own and folds AI prompts into Semrush One, which starts at $199 a month, so ask whether the $99 standalone can still be bought before you plan around it. |
| Ahrefs | $129/mo Lite | Monthly or annual | Every paid Ahrefs plan except Starter includes a small AI prompt allowance: 150 checks a month on Lite, 300 on Standard, 600 on Advanced, and from 2,500 on Enterprise. Ahrefs defines a check as one prompt on one platform on one day, and gives the worked example itself: 5 prompts on 1 platform is 150 checks a month. On top of the plan, Brand Radar sells the AI Visibility Index at $199 a month for 83 prompts a day and 2,500 extra checks across all platforms, Claude included, and lists $699 a month for all models. Custom prompts start at $50 a month. The $199 covers every platform together rather than costing that much per engine, and extra checks are sold per check. |
| BrightEdge | Quote only | Annual contract | BrightEdge publishes no price and asks you to call. Costbench's contract data puts small business from about $12,000 a year, mid-market at $30,000 to $60,000, and large enterprise at $100,000 to $150,000, with a median near $103,000 across seven verified purchases. That is aggregator data on deals we cannot see, so treat it as an estimate rather than a quote. |
| Ooky | $0 Free, $79/mo Starter | Monthly, no annual lock-in | Free covers 1 brand, 5 prompts and 2 engines. Starter covers 1 brand, 50 prompt slots and 3 engines. Pro is $249 for 3 brands, 225 prompt slots and daily scans. |
Three traps stand out once the rows sit next to each other. Rankscale does sell a $20 plan, but that plan ships with zero credits and cannot run a single prompt, so the working entry is the $99 Pro tier. Profound's $99 looks like the same shelf as everyone else until you notice it is billed as $1,188 a year, for one engine. Semrush's $99 is a base you build on, and a team with two domains, two users and 75 prompts is already at $357 a month, while the main Semrush pricing page now folds AI prompts into Semrush One from $199 a month, so ask whether the standalone toolkit can still be bought before you plan around it. None of these tools is bad on that account, but "starts at" is a number you should only compare across vendors after doing the arithmetic. Acromatico's roundup is a reasonable second opinion on most of these figures, with the caveat that it lists a Scrunch tier that does not exist on the live page.
What does the $70,000 tier buy that the $10,000 tier does not?
Four things scale with software price: prompts tracked, engines covered, how often the scans run, and how many people can log in. Seat count does matter, but I believe it is the smallest of the four, and buyers fixate on it because it is the easiest number to count on a pricing page.
Prompt count makes the biggest difference. A 25-prompt plan covers one product line answering one set of buyer questions, and if you sell six products into four markets you need hundreds of prompts to see your full surface area, which is what pushes companies up tiers. Engines matter the same way, since a plan that watches only ChatGPT is blind to what Perplexity, Gemini and Claude say, and we showed how far those answers drift apart in five prompts to see what AI really says about your brand.
Above roughly $2,500 a month you are buying people. Subscribe PR's writeup of the service market reports BrightEdge annual contracts between $36,000 and $120,000. The narrower bands in the table below come from Costbench's contract data, where $70,000 a year works out to about $5,800 a month and lands in the second row.
| Band | Monthly | What you get |
|---|---|---|
| GEO consultants | $200 to $450 an hour | Audits and advice billed by the hour, with the page changes left to your team. |
| Boutique agency retainer | $3,000 to $10,000 | A small team that reads the reports, rewrites your pages and manages your schema. |
| Optimization plus digital PR | $8,000 to $25,000 | The retainer work plus pitching the publications the models cite. |
| Enterprise platform plus services | $25,000 to $50,000 and up | Software for many brands and markets with a services team attached to it. |
By the same survey, mature programs spend 50 to 70 percent of the budget on content production and earned media and only 5 to 15 percent on software, and 40 to 60 percent of that money comes out of the existing SEO line. So the answer for the buyer with the renewal meeting is that the gap between the two tiers is mostly whether human hands are included in the price, and the question to carry into that meeting is whether you already have those hands in house.
Should you pay for any of it?
For measurement alone at $70,000, no. Every tool in the table above will show you your mention rate for a few hundred dollars a month, and several show a first read of it on their free tier, while what costs real money is knowing what to change once you have seen it. The paid software tiers add cadence, engines and brands, and I would pay for those because a weekly scan across three engines catches an answer changing while a one-off check on a Tuesday cannot.
The channel itself is small today and growing quickly, and the visitors it sends are more valuable than their count suggests. AI referrals are still a low single-digit share of most sites' traffic, and the headline growth figures come from US retail, where Adobe Analytics measured AI-referred traffic up 393 percent year over year in the first quarter of 2026, with those visitors converting 42 percent better than visitors from other channels in March (TechCrunch, April 2026), and Adobe's June update put the conversion gap at 54 percent by May (Digital Commerce 360, June 2026). A B2B software company should not paste those numbers into its own forecast, since the bigger figures you see quoted usually come from that one retail category, but the same pattern repeats across industries, and a channel that is small, compounding and high intent is where cheap measurement early beats expensive measurement late.
I said as much in how to know if AI brand visibility is worth your money, where a five-figure retainer makes sense once you already know the answers are wrong or missing and you have nobody to fix the pages. The first step costs nothing, since Ooky's free tier tracks one brand across five prompts on Gemini and Perplexity on a schedule, and if that scan shows you a pricing tier that has never existed, you will know which band the next dollar belongs in.
How to pick your band
If you have a marketing team with five to ten hours a month and one main product, a self-serve tool between $0 and $300 covers you. Track your buyers' real questions across the engines they use, fix the pages the answers draw on, and check back weekly, which is the loop our Brand Tracker runs on a schedule across models, personas and regions.
If you have budget but no hands, a boutique retainer at $3,000 to $10,000 a month plus a cheap measurement tool beats an all-in-one enterprise contract, because you can change either half without renegotiating both. The retainer does the writing and the outreach, and the tool tells you whether any of it changed the answers.
If you are at enterprise scale, with many brands, markets and stakeholders, the $25,000-and-up tier can make sense, and I would price it against a $250-a-month tool plus one full-time content person, because that is what the software-plus-services bundle competes with. Ooky's Pro plan at $249 covers three brands and 225 prompt slots with daily scans, and the comparison pages lay out how it lines up against Profound, Peec AI, Scrunch and Semrush feature by feature.
Whichever band you land in, take the free tiers seriously. They exist because vendors know the data sells itself once you see it, so run the free scan, read what the models say, and then decide what the next dollar should buy.
Frequently asked questions
Why do AI visibility tools that look identical vary so much in price?
Prompt allowances, engine coverage, scan frequency and billing basis explain most of it. Two tools at $99 a month can differ several times over in how many answers they collect for you each month, and one of them may be billed as $1,188 up front while the other lets you cancel next month, so read the entry row before the headline number.
Is annual billing for an AI visibility platform worth it?
I would take it once you have used a tool for two or three months and know it fits. The discounts we saw in August 2026 run from about 15 percent at Otterly and Rankscale to about 17 percent at Scrunch. Profound only sells annual plans, so there the question becomes whether you are ready to commit before you have tested anything.
Do I need to track every AI engine?
You do not need to on day one. Start with the two or three engines your buyers use, which for most B2B companies means ChatGPT plus one of Gemini or Perplexity, and add engines once the first ones produce changes you act on. A plan that watches only ChatGPT will miss answers that differ more than most people expect.
What share of an AI visibility budget should be software?
In programs that combine tools and services, Subscribe PR puts software at 5 to 15 percent of spend, with content production and earned media taking 50 to 70 percent, and 40 to 60 percent of the total coming out of the existing SEO line. If your software line is most of your budget, you are measuring a lot and changing little.
Can I check AI visibility with a spreadsheet and the free chatbots?
For a first audit, yes, and five buyer prompts typed into ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini will tell you a lot in an afternoon. A spreadsheet cannot run on a schedule, notice when an answer changes, or compare you against competitors across regions, and those three jobs are what you pay a tool for.
Find out where you stand before you pay anyone
The free tier tracks one brand across five prompts and two engines, on a schedule, for nothing. Read what the models say about you first, then decide what the next dollar buys.
Sources
- Rankscale. "Pricing." Essentials "from $20/mo" with 0 credits; Pro $99/mo; Growth $385; Enterprise $780. The page offers an annual toggle advertising 15 percent off, but the discounted figures render only in the browser, so no annual price is quoted here. Retrieved 2026-08-28. https://rankscale.ai/pricing
- Otterly. "Pricing." Lite $29, Standard $189, Premium $489 monthly; $25, $160, $422 annual; Enterprise from $1,000. Retrieved 2026-08-28. https://otterly.ai/pricing
- Peec AI. "Pricing." No published prices. Starter, Pro, Advanced, Enterprise and Custom tiers, all marked annual, with Talk to Sales on Enterprise. Retrieved 2026-08-28. https://peec.ai/pricing
- Scrunch. "Pricing." Starter $250/mo annual or $300/mo monthly; Growth $417 to $500. Annual billing carries a 17 percent discount, so the annual figure is a monthly rate on an annual commitment. Retrieved 2026-08-28. https://scrunch.com/pricing/
- Profound. "Pricing." Both tiers are billed yearly and no month-to-month price is published, so these are monthly rates on an annual commitment. Starter $99/mo (ChatGPT only, 50 prompts, 1,500 responses) and Growth $399/mo (3 engines), both billed yearly; prices first published June 11, 2026 per GEO Toolbox (geotoolbox.ai/blog/profound-pricing). Retrieved 2026-08-28. https://www.tryprofound.com/pricing
- Semrush. "AI Visibility Toolkit" (knowledge base). $99/mo for 1 domain and 25 prompts; +$99 per extra domain, +$99 per extra user, +$60 per 50 extra prompts; silent on whether a base plan is required. Semrush's AI pricing page (semrush.com/pricing/ai/) lists users from $45 and annual billing. Retrieved 2026-08-28. https://www.semrush.com/kb/1493-ai-visibility-toolkit
- Ahrefs. "Pricing." Lite $129, Standard $249, Advanced $449 with 150 / 300 / 600 AI checks included, and from 2,500 on Enterprise (ahrefs.com/custom-prompts). Brand Radar lists the AI Visibility Index at $199/mo for 83 prompts a day and +2,500 checks/mo across all platforms with Claude available, custom prompts from $50/mo, and "$699/MO FOR ALL MODELS" (ahrefs.com/brand-radar). Custom prompt packages are $50 (+2,500 checks), $100 (+7,000) and $250 (+25,000), priced per check and not per engine. The plan page also lists Starter at $29 and Enterprise at $1,499 with an annual commitment. The custom-prompts page serves euro pricing outside the US, so dollar figures here are from the US pages. Retrieved 2026-08-28. https://ahrefs.com/pricing
- Tim Soulo (Ahrefs). X post announcing included AI prompt checks on every paid plan except Starter, March 2026. The post itself could not be retrieved on 2026-08-28 and the exact date could not be confirmed; the 150 / 300 / 600 allowances are cited to ahrefs.com/custom-prompts instead. https://x.com/timsoulo/status/2036063440112964050
- Trakkr. "Peec AI pricing." Browser-visible tiers $95 / $245 / $495 (€85 / €205 / €425); notes the prices are absent from crawl-visible HTML. Verified August 1, 2026. Retrieved 2026-08-24. https://trakkr.ai/reviews/peec-review/pricing
- Semrush. "Pricing." Semrush One Starter $199 monthly ($165.17 annual) with AI prompts included; no standalone toolkit purchase path shown. Retrieved 2026-08-28. https://www.semrush.com/pricing/
- Costbench. "BrightEdge pricing." Third-party contract estimates from seven verified purchases: small business from about $12,000, mid-market $30,000 to $60,000, large enterprise $100,000 to $150,000, median about $103,000. The page reports its own last-verified date as 2026-07-29. Retrieved 2026-08-28. https://costbench.com/software/ai-seo-tools/brightedge/
- Ooky. "Pricing." Free $0 (1 brand, 5 prompts, 2 engines); Starter $79 (1 brand, 50 prompt slots, 3 engines); Pro $249 (3 brands, 225 prompt slots, daily). Retrieved 2026-08-28. https://ooky.ai/pricing
- Subscribe PR. "How Much Does an AI Visibility Company Cost in 2026." Published 2026-08-07. Service bands, budget allocation shares and SEO reallocation figures. Reports BrightEdge annual contracts at $36,000 to $120,000; the per-segment bands and the median come from Costbench, not from this source. Retrieved 2026-08-28. https://subscribepr.com/blog/how-much-does-an-ai-visibility-company-cost/
- Adobe. "AI traffic surge hits retail sites that are not machine-readable." Not retrieved on 2026-08-28 (the page timed out), so the 393 percent figure above is cited to TechCrunch's coverage of the same Adobe release rather than to this page. Adobe Digital Insights, US retail, Q1 2026 traffic up 393 percent year over year; AI-referred visitors converted 42 percent better than non-AI traffic in March 2026. Retrieved 2026-08-24. https://business.adobe.com/blog/ai-traffic-surge-retail-sites-not-machine-readable
- Digital Commerce 360, citing Adobe Digital Insights. "AI-referred traffic to retail sites doubles in a year." June 17, 2026. AI-referred visitors converted 54 percent better than non-AI traffic in May 2026. The headline says traffic doubled; the body gives 138 percent year over year for May 2026, which is the figure to quote. Retrieved 2026-08-28. https://www.digitalcommerce360.com/2026/06/17/adobe-ai-referred-traffic-to-retail-sites-doubles-in-a-year/
- TechCrunch. "AI traffic to US retailers rose 393% in Q1, and it's boosting their revenue too." April 16, 2026. Retrieved 2026-08-28. https://techcrunch.com/2026/04/16/ai-traffic-to-us-retailers-rose-393-in-q1-and-its-boosting-their-revenue-too/
- Acromatico. "AI visibility tool pricing compared, 2026." Used as a cross-check only; it lists a Scrunch tier that does not appear on the live Scrunch pricing page. Retrieved 2026-08-24. https://acromatico.com/ai-visibility-tool-pricing-compared