What AI visibility tools cost in 2026, and what one business should pay

How much do AI visibility tools cost?

Most AI visibility tools are monthly subscriptions, and the price bands are consistent across the market. Entry plans cost $20 to $59 a month and include a small prompt allowance, one to three assistants and a weekly or daily refresh. Mid plans cost $59 to $99 and add prompts, assistants or a second brand. Team plans cost $95 to $300 and add seats, competitors and exports. Enterprise platforms such as Profound do not publish a price at all.

Two other models exist. A handful of SEO suites sell AI tracking as an add-on to a plan you already pay for, so the real cost is the add-on plus the plan. And Peekl sells a one-time audit for $99 with optional tracking afterwards, which is the only pay-once option in the category. The table gives the bands and what you typically get in each.

What drives the price: prompts, assistants, refresh and seats

Every tool in the category buys the same raw material. It sends a prompt to an assistant, stores the answer, and reads it for names and cited pages. The cost to the vendor is the number of answers it has to fetch, which is prompts multiplied by assistants multiplied by how often it asks. Your bill follows the same shape, plus a charge for each person who logs in.

Prompts are the first lever and the one to check before anything else. Entry plans include 15 to 30, and the number is per month, not per day. A local business has about 12 to 15 questions its customers actually ask, so an entry allowance covers one business in one town, and no more. Assistants are the second lever, and the one most likely to surprise you; the next section covers it. Refresh is the third: daily tracking costs more than weekly, and for a local business weekly is already more than the answers change in a useful way. Seats are the fourth, and they only matter if more than one person needs to log in.

Dividing the entry price by the prompt allowance gives a number vendors never print: the price per tracked prompt per month. It is the fairest way to compare plans that look different on the surface.

The add-ons that change the bill: Gemini, Claude and AI Mode

The advertised price usually covers ChatGPT and one or two other engines. The assistants a local customer actually uses next, Gemini through Google and Claude, are often sold separately. Ayzeo charges $29 a month each for Gemini, Claude and Perplexity on top of its $39 plan, so adding Gemini and Claude to reach the three assistants Peekl checks costs $97, not $39. Otterly lists Gemini, Claude and Google AI Mode as add-ons. SurfacedBy, AI Peekaboo and LLMPulse sell Claude as an add-on. SE Ranking does not offer Claude at any price.

This matters because the assistants disagree. In our scans of 756 answers across seven trades and nine cities, ChatGPT and Gemini agreed on a business only half the time, and Claude names shorter, different lists again. A plan that covers one assistant reads half the picture. Before you compare prices, write down which assistants you need and price the plan with those switched on.

Three other lines raise the bill quietly. Annual billing: the low price on the pricing page is often the yearly rate, and SurfacedBy's $24 and Scrunch's $250 are both yearly figures. Per-domain pricing: Semrush charges $99 per domain, so a second location on its own site doubles it. Suite dependency: Ahrefs Brand Radar costs $50 a month but only inside an Ahrefs plan, and the full index is $199; SE Ranking's $89 tracker sits on a $129 plan, so the entry price for AI tracking is $218.

Is there a free ChatGPT rank tracker?

Not a continuous one. No vendor tracks ChatGPT for free on an ongoing basis with a useful prompt allowance, because every answer costs them money to fetch. What the word free covers, in September 2026, is one of four things. A time-limited trial: 7 days at Rankscale, SurfacedBy, Ziptie, Peec AI and Scrunch, 14 days at Ayzeo, Omnia, SE Ranking and Morningscore, 3 days at AIclicks, sometimes with a card on file. A capped free tier: Profound's trial covers ChatGPT only for 10 prompts, and Qwairy gives 120 credits without a card. A preview tool: Ahrefs publishes free lookups that show a slice of its index. Or a free check on one assistant: Peekl's free AI visibility check runs twelve customer questions once, on Gemini, with no card.

The genuinely free method is asking by hand. Open ChatGPT with search on, ask the questions your customers ask, and write down who is named. It costs nothing but an hour, and it is a fair first read. The ChatGPT visibility checker explains what a proper check adds on top: the same questions asked three times, because ChatGPT rebuilds its shortlist on every run, and the sources behind each name.

Is there a free Claude rank tracker?

No, and the gap is wider than for ChatGPT. Claude is the assistant most often sold as an add-on, so a free trial rarely includes it, and no vendor offers a free Claude tier. In September 2026, Rankscale, Scrunch and Profound included Claude in their plans; Otterly, LLMPulse, SurfacedBy, Ayzeo and AI Peekaboo sold it as a paid extra; Semrush, SE Ranking, Ziptie and Morningscore did not list it. If Claude is the one you need to see, the by-hand route or a paid check that covers it is the honest answer. The best Claude rank trackers lists which tools include it at the entry price, and the Claude visibility checker explains how Peekl's audit reads it.

Cheap ChatGPT rank tracking: what the budget tier covers

Cheap in this category means $20 to $59 a month. At that price you get 15 to 30 prompts, ChatGPT plus one or two other engines, a weekly or daily refresh and one login. Rankscale starts at $20 for its Essentials plan. SurfacedBy is $24 billed yearly for 15 prompts. Otterly and AI Peekaboo are $29 a month, AI Peekaboo priced by usage. Ayzeo is $39 for 20 prompts. Ziptie is $42.75, also usage-priced. AIclicks is $59 for 30 prompts.

For a marketer tracking one brand and a trend line, the budget tier is a good deal, and the cost per prompt is close to the mid tier. For a local business, the arithmetic is different. Fifteen prompts covers your questions once, on the engines included, and the add-ons above push the real price toward $60 to $100 before you see Gemini or Claude. Twelve months at the cheapest listed plan costs $240; at $29 a month it costs $348. That is the number to hold next to a one-time check.

What twelve months costs: subscription against a single check

Subscriptions are priced by the month, but nobody buys AI visibility for a month. Multiply each entry plan by twelve and the picture changes. The cheapest subscription, Rankscale at $20, costs $240 a year. The popular $29 tools cost $348. Mid-tier plans cost $708 to $1,188. SE Ranking's tracker plus the plan it requires is $2,616. Scrunch is $3,000 at the yearly rate. Peekl's audit is $99, once; if you add its optional monthly tracking at $39, a full year is $567, and you can stop it any month.

The chart puts those figures side by side. It is a cost comparison, not a value one: a subscription gives you a dashboard that updates, and an audit gives you one measurement and a plan of fixes. Which is worth more depends on the next section.

What should a one-location business pay?

Start from what you need to learn, not from what the tools sell. A single business needs to know three things: whether the assistants name it when customers ask, who they name instead, and which websites put those competitors there. That takes about 15 questions, all three assistants, and several runs of each, because a single run of ChatGPT is a coin toss. It does not take a daily refresh, a second seat, an API or a competitor dashboard.

Priced against the levers above, that is a one-time job, and under $100 is the fair price for it. Pay monthly only once you have made the fixes and want to see whether the answers moved, and expect to check monthly rather than daily: in our scans the top-named business in a city appeared in only a third of answers, so week-to-week movement is mostly noise. If you run several locations, or you sell marketing to other businesses, the arithmetic flips and a $39 to $99 subscription with enough prompts is the better buy. The AI search optimization services guide compares doing it yourself, a tool and an agency on the same basis.

Seven questions to ask before you pay

Pricing pages are written to make the entry price look small. These questions surface the real one in five minutes.

• Is the price one-time or recurring, and is the figure shown monthly or the yearly rate divided by twelve?
• How many prompts are included, per month, and what does one more cost?
• Which assistants are included at that price, and how much are Gemini, Claude and Google AI Mode as add-ons?
• How often does it refresh, and can I choose weekly to pay less?
• Is the price per brand, per domain or per seat, and what happens when I add a second location?
• Does it need another subscription to run, as the SEO-suite add-ons do?
• What do I keep if I stop paying: an export of my history, or nothing?

How we priced this guide

Every figure is the starting price shown on the vendor's public pricing page in September 2026, before tax, in the currency the vendor displays. Where a vendor shows a yearly rate as a monthly figure, we say so. Prompt allowances are the entry plan's published monthly limit. Add-on prices are as listed on the same pages. We did not use quotes, sales calls or third-party listings. Prices in this market change monthly; treat the table as a starting point and confirm on the vendor's page before you buy. Peekl's own prices are on its pricing page and in a machine-readable pricing file.