AI visibility tools cost $0 to $2,000+/mo as of June 2026. A full price table from free graders to enterprise, plus what you actually need at each budget.
AI visibility tools cost between $0 and $2,000+ per month as of June 2026, and the spread is wider than almost any other software category I track. A solo founder can run a free grader and a $29/mo monitor. A global brand can sign a quote-based contract that clears $24,000 a year. Same broad job, a 50x price difference. The reason that gap exists is the whole point of this post, because once you understand what drives the number, the right tier for your situation becomes obvious.
One honest note before the numbers. Crawlytics published this post, and it is the cheapest tool in the table below. I have tried to price the whole market fairly, list real entry prices for the enterprise tools, and say plainly where Crawlytics does not compete. Every price here is hedged "as of June 2026" because vendors in this space reprice and re-gate constantly. Confirm current pricing on each vendor's own site before you buy.
Four levers set the price of almost every tool in this category. Once you can name them, you can predict roughly what any given tool will charge.
Prompt scale. Prompt-sampling monitors ask LLMs the same questions on a schedule ("best CRM for plumbers") and log whether you got mentioned. A cheap tier samples a handful of prompts. An enterprise tier samples hundreds, daily. Each prompt run is an API call to a paid model, so prompt volume is a direct cost the vendor passes through. This is the single biggest driver of price in the monitor category.
Engine coverage. Tracking your presence in ChatGPT is one thing. Tracking ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini, Copilot, Google AI Overviews, and a few more is a different cost base entirely. Profound, for example, runs across roughly nine to eleven engines as of June 2026. Each added engine multiplies the prompt-running cost, so broad coverage shows up as a higher tier.
Seats. Self-serve tools assume one operator. Enterprise tools assume a marketing team, an SEO lead, and an executive who all need logins. Per-seat pricing, or seat-gated tiers, is how the expensive end of the market scales revenue with the size of your team.
Reporting and account management. A $2,000/mo plan is partly buying software and partly buying a human. Executive-ready share-of-voice decks, scheduled exports, competitor benchmarking, sentiment analysis, and a named account manager are the line items that separate a four-figure contract from a $29 self-serve seat. The software underneath is often similar. The service wrapper is not.
Two of these levers (prompt scale, engine coverage) apply mainly to the prompt-sampling monitors. The other two (seats, reporting) apply to the enterprise tier of any tool. A log-grounded tool like Crawlytics sidesteps the first two entirely, because it reads your own server logs and crawl set instead of paying to sample a vendor-chosen prompt list, which is a big part of why it sits at the bottom of the price ladder.
Here is the whole market in one table, entry price first. Prices are approximate and reflect what was publicly visible or reported as of June 2026. Several have since moved behind a sales process, which I have noted.
| Tool | Entry price (≈, Jun 2026) | What you get at entry |
|---|---|---|
| Crawlytics | $29.99/mo (Visibility); $49.99/mo (Commerce) | Log-grounded AI-bot analytics, llms.txt generation/serving, clean HTML to bots, free grader; Commerce adds WebMCP. No prompt sampling. |
| Otterly.ai | $29/mo (Lite) → $189 → $489 | Prompt-sampling brand-mention monitor + GEO content audit; capped prompts/engines on Lite. |
| Knowatoa | $59/mo → $199 | Cheapest pure monitor; AI Search Console probes whether 24 AI user-agents can reach your site. |
| Peec AI | €89/mo → €199 → €499+ | Marketing-team share-of-voice monitor + Crawl Insights (reads logs); no content generation. |
| Semrush AI Visibility | $99/mo Toolkit add-on (+ paid base) → Enterprise AIO (sales-only) | Share-of-voice bolt-on to the Semrush suite; AI traffic = third-party referral estimates. |
| Profound | ~$99 → $399 → enterprise (now sales-led) | Daily prompts across ~9-11 engines, share of voice, sentiment, citation sources, competitor comparison. |
| Ahrefs Brand Radar | Paid base plan (~$129+) PLUS $398 or $699/mo add-on | Search-backed share-of-voice add-on; no sentiment, no AI-shopping; data skewed to Google surfaces. |
| Scrunch AI | $250/mo (Core) → $417 → enterprise | Share of voice + Agent Traffic (bot logs) + AXP (clean HTML to agents) + page audits. Acquired by Sitecore, moving enterprise. |
| AthenaHQ | $295/mo → enterprise (~$2,000+) | Share-of-voice monitor + optimization recs; LLM-traffic analysis is enterprise-only. |
Read the table by buyer, not by row order. The bottom three (AthenaHQ, Scrunch, Ahrefs Brand Radar at its add-on price) are built for mid-market and enterprise teams. The middle (Profound, Peec, Semrush) starts mid-market and climbs. The top three (Crawlytics, Otterly Lite, Knowatoa) are where a small business or solo operator actually shops. A more detailed budget-tier breakdown lives in our roundup of the best AI visibility tools under $50/mo.
The gap between a $29 monitor and a $2,000 platform is not mostly margin. It is mostly the four cost drivers, stacked.
Start with prompt volume. A budget monitor might sample three to ten prompts on a schedule. An enterprise platform like Profound samples hundreds daily, across every major engine. Each of those runs is a metered API call to a paid model, multiplied by engines, multiplied by days. That is a real recurring cost the vendor carries, and it scales linearly with the depth of coverage you are buying. When a tool charges 20x more, a large slice of that is literally more model calls.
Layer engine coverage on top. Going from "we track ChatGPT" to "we track nine to eleven engines" does not add 10% to the cost base. It roughly multiplies it, because every prompt now runs everywhere. Broad coverage is the headline enterprise sell, and it is genuinely expensive to deliver.
Then seats and service. Enterprise buyers need logins for a whole team, role permissions, scheduled reports their executives will read, competitor benchmarking, sentiment analysis, and usually a human account manager who joins quarterly calls. None of that exists in a self-serve $29 seat. AthenaHQ's jump from $295 to a roughly $2,000+ enterprise tier as of June 2026 is largely this wrapper. The software is similar. The service, scale, and support are not.
This is also why "Profound is sales-led now" matters. When a vendor pulls public pricing behind a quote, it usually signals the product has moved upmarket, where deals are negotiated by prompt volume, seats, and contract length rather than picked off a pricing page. The $99 and $399 figures that still float around on review sites are historical anchors, not a checkout button. Our full Crawlytics vs Profound comparison walks through exactly who that enterprise pricing serves, and our roundup of the best Profound alternatives covers what to do if it is out of range.
The right spend follows the question you are trying to answer, not the size of the most expensive tool. Here is what each budget buys you in practice.
$0 — establish a baseline. Before paying a cent, run the free layer. Google Search Console reports impressions where your pages showed up in AI surfaces (Google only, but free and first-party). The free Crawlytics Agent-Ready Grader scans a URL across five categories and hands back an itemized readiness report. Ahrefs, Semrush, AthenaHQ, and Knowatoa each offer a free one-off checker. For many small sites, the free layer answers the only question they actually had ("am I even reachable by AI bots?") and the paid step can wait.
~$30 — track one question continuously. This is the right first paid step for most small businesses. At roughly $30/mo you get continuous monitoring of a single surface. Pick by the question you have. If you want to know whether AI bots reach and fetch your pages, and you want the tools to fix that, Crawlytics Visibility at $29.99/mo reads your real logs and serves your llms.txt. If you mainly want to watch your brand-mention rate in AI answers, Otterly Lite at about $29/mo samples prompts for you. One tool, one question, no enterprise contract.
~$100 — multi-engine share of voice for a team. Once a marketing team needs to track mentions across many prompts and several engines, benchmark against named competitors, and show movement over time, you are in $99-$295 territory. Profound's lower tiers (where reachable), Peec, Semrush's AI Visibility Toolkit add-on, or AthenaHQ's entry plan live here. Expect prompt and engine caps even at this band, and expect to add a base subscription for the Ahrefs and Semrush routes. We are on record that AI share of voice is a shakier number than vendors admit, so buy this tier because your org has standardized on the metric, not because the metric is precise.
$300+ — seats, SLAs, and executive reporting. The top tier earns its price only when specific needs are non-negotiable: many team seats, role permissions, scheduled exports, a service-level agreement, competitor and sentiment dashboards, and a human account manager. That is AthenaHQ enterprise, Scrunch, Profound enterprise, or Ahrefs Brand Radar at its $398/$699 add-on. If you cannot point to a concrete reason you need seats and reporting, you do not need this tier yet.
A common and sensible setup is to mix bands. Plenty of teams run log-grounded crawler tracking at the $29.99 tier permanently, then add a $99+ monitor only when a specific campaign needs mention data. Match spend to the question, not to fear of missing out.
The sticker price is rarely the real price in this category. Five traps to check before you commit.
Base-plan requirements. The biggest one. Ahrefs Brand Radar and Semrush AI Visibility are add-ons, not standalone products. You pay for a Semrush or Ahrefs base subscription first, then the AI module on top. Ahrefs Brand Radar's $398 or $699/mo add-on sits on top of a paid base plan that itself runs roughly $129+/mo, so the true monthly cost is the sum, not the add-on alone. Budget the bundle, not the bolt-on. We broke this down in detail in do you need Ahrefs or Semrush for AI visibility.
Per-engine charges. Some tools advertise a low entry price that covers one or two engines, then charge to add more. If your entry tier tracks only ChatGPT and you actually care about Perplexity and Gemini, the real price is two or three tiers up. Always check how many engines the entry plan includes.
Per-prompt caps. A $29 monitor that tracks three prompts is a different product from a $189 one that tracks fifty. The cheap tier is often a teaser sized so you outgrow it within a campaign. Read the prompt cap before the price, because the cap is what determines whether the price is real for you.
Seat limits. Self-serve tiers are usually single-operator. The moment marketing, SEO, and leadership all need access, you may be pushed into a higher tier purely for logins, even if you do not need any extra tracking. Count the seats you actually need.
Repricing and re-gating. This whole table moves. Profound pulled its public pricing behind sales. Scrunch was acquired by Sitecore and is moving upmarket, vacating the affordable self-serve lane. A price you confirm today can change next quarter. Re-check before renewal, not just at purchase.
The one cost that does not hide is a flat self-serve price with no usage meter. Crawlytics charges $29.99 or $49.99/mo with no per-event, per-prompt, or per-engine fees and no required base plan, which is the trade-off for not doing prompt sampling at all. See current tiers on the pricing page, and if you want the broader landscape of monitors, our roundup of the best AI brand monitoring tools covers the field.
Written by Crawlytics Team. Crawlytics tracks AI bots, generates llms.txt, and powers WebMCP commerce, all from one snippet on any stack. See how it works →
AI visibility tools cost between $0 and $2,000+ per month as of June 2026. Free graders and checkers cost nothing. Self-serve monitors start around $29-$59/mo (Otterly Lite, Knowatoa, Crawlytics). Mid-market tools run $99-$295/mo (Profound entry tiers on third-party listings, Peec, Scrunch Core, AthenaHQ). Enterprise plans with full seats, prompt scale, and account management reach $2,000+/mo. Verify current pricing on each vendor site, since prices in this category move month to month.
The cheapest paid AI visibility tools as of June 2026 are Otterly.ai at about $29/mo for its Lite tier, Crawlytics at $29.99/mo for its Visibility plan, and Knowatoa at about $59/mo. Below all of them, several free tools exist: Crawlytics runs a free Agent-Ready Grader, and Ahrefs, Semrush, AthenaHQ, and Knowatoa each offer a free one-off checker. Start with the free tier before paying.
Profound costs roughly $99/mo to $399/mo on the tiers that still circulate on third-party reviews, climbing into enterprise pricing as of June 2026. Profound has moved its public pricing behind a sales process, so the real number for a real seat is now quote-based and aimed at $100M+ brands with a data team. Treat the $99 and $399 figures as historical anchors, not a current self-serve checkout price.
Yes. Crawlytics runs a free Agent-Ready Grader that scores your site across five categories with no account required. Google Search Console reports impressions where your pages appeared in AI surfaces, free and first-party. Ahrefs, Semrush, AthenaHQ, and Knowatoa each publish a free one-off AI visibility checker. These free tools are snapshots, not continuous monitoring, but they are enough to establish a baseline before you pay for anything.
Enterprise AI visibility tools cost 10-50x more because they scale four things at once: the number of prompts sampled daily (hundreds versus a handful), the number of AI engines covered (nine to eleven versus two or three), the number of user seats, and the inclusion of executive reporting plus a dedicated account manager. A $2,000/mo plan is buying prompt volume, competitor benchmarking, sentiment analysis, and human support, not just a dashboard.
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