What AI visibility tools cost in 2026: monthly plans compared with pay per check

The cheapest way to track your brand in AI answers in 2026 depends on how many prompts you check and how often. For a dashboard that refreshes daily, OtterlyAI starts at $29 a month for 15 prompts and Rankscale at $20 a month on a yearly plan. For a few checks a week, Cite42 costs less because it charges per check: $0.13 per prompt across ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini, or $0.20 across five AI engines, with no monthly fee. Semrush, Ahrefs, Peec AI, Scrunch and Profound sit above that, from $99 a month to enterprise contracts.

This guide lists what each tool charges, what the entry plan includes, and where the price jumps. It ends with a table of what 10, 50 and 200 prompts a week cost on a pay-per-check model, and a plain note on when a subscription is cheaper.

Cite42 publishes this guide and is one of the tools in it. We read every other vendor's public pricing page: OtterlyAI and Rankscale on October 16, 2026, the rest on October 6, 2026. We did not buy their plans. Prices in this category change often, so check the vendor page before you decide.

AI visibility tool prices at a glance

What the entry price buys

Three things move the real price: the prompt allowance, the engines on the plan, and the refresh rate.

Prompts are the unit of cost. OtterlyAI Lite includes 15 prompts and Standard 100, and 100 extra prompts cost $99 a month. Semrush includes 25 and charges $60 a month for 50 more. Rankscale sells credits, and each engine query draws down the monthly allowance.

Engines are often add-ons. OtterlyAI covers four engines on every plan and sells Gemini, Google AI Mode and Claude separately: Claude costs $29 a month on Lite, $109 on Standard and $439 on Premium. Profound's trial covers three engines, and Perplexity needs Enterprise. Peec AI plans track three models you choose, and Claude needs Enterprise there too.

Every dashboard above reruns prompts daily, and that is what you pay for. If you only read the numbers once a week, most of those runs go unread.

Annual billing takes 15% off OtterlyAI and sets Scrunch's $250 price. Rankscale's Essentials plan is sold yearly only.

What pay per check costs at 10, 50 and 200 prompts

Cite42 charges per successful call: $0.05 for a ChatGPT-only check, $0.13 for the default three models (ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini) and $0.20 for all five including Claude and Google AI Overviews. There is no subscription. You top up from $25.00, the balance never expires, and a verified signup includes $1.00 of credit, enough for 7 three-model checks.

Weekly figures are monthly averages (52 runs a year divided by 12). A tracker reruns the saved prompts weekly or monthly and shows the maximum cost per run before it starts.

Fifty prompts a week across three models costs $28.17 a month, against $189 for OtterlyAI Standard or $99 for Semrush with 25 prompts. Two hundred prompts a week on all five engines is $173.33, in the same range as a mid-tier dashboard plan, and it includes Claude without an add-on.

When a subscription is cheaper

Pay per check loses when you want daily data at volume. One hundred prompts refreshed every day across three models costs about $395.42 a month on Cite42, while OtterlyAI Standard tracks 100 prompts daily on four engines for $189. The dashboards also include things a per-call API does not: a prompt discovery database (Ahrefs Brand Radar, Semrush), client workspaces and white-label reports (OtterlyAI, Peec AI, Rankscale), and page audits (Scrunch, OtterlyAI).

A reasonable rule: weekly checks on fewer than 200 prompts favor pay per check. Daily tracking of 100 or more prompts, or reporting for several clients from one dashboard, favors a plan.

How to decide in an afternoon

1. Write 10 questions your buyers ask an AI assistant on the way to a shortlist, rather than searches for your brand name.
2. Run them once. Manually in ChatGPT and Perplexity (free, about an hour), or in one call each with Cite42 for $1.30 in total across three models. The step-by-step guide covers both.
3. Count how often you were named and who was named instead. If you are absent from most answers, the next spend should go to content, not to daily tracking.
4. Pick a cadence. Weekly is enough to see whether a new page changed anything. Daily matters mostly in news-driven categories.

Frequently asked questions

What is the cheapest AI visibility tool?

For occasional checks, Cite42 is the cheapest because it has no monthly fee: $0.13 per prompt across ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini, with a $25.00 minimum top-up that never expires. For a daily dashboard, Rankscale starts at $20 a month billed yearly and OtterlyAI at $29 a month for 15 prompts (as of October 2026).

How much should I pay for AI visibility tracking?

Price it from the prompts you will read. Ten prompts a week across three AI models costs $5.63 a month on Cite42. Dashboards start at $29 to $99 a month for 15 to 25 prompts and reach $189 to $489 for 100 to 400 prompts. Above that, Scrunch, the Ahrefs add-ons and enterprise contracts run from $250 to $699 a month and up.

Is there an AI visibility tool with pay-as-you-go pricing and no subscription?

Yes. Cite42 is pay as you go: you pay only for successful calls, from $0.01 per AI model, with no subscription and a balance that never expires. Rankscale sells monthly credit allowances, but as a plan, and Profound and Peec AI offer free trials rather than pay-per-use pricing.

Which AI visibility tools include Claude?

Cite42 includes Claude on any call for $0.06 per check. Scrunch covers Claude on every plan. OtterlyAI sells it as an add-on from $29 a month, Peec AI and Profound include it on Enterprise, and Ahrefs covers it on custom prompts. Semrush does not list Claude (as of October 2026).

Check your own prompts first

Write down the 10 questions, run them once and look at who gets named. Create a free Cite42 account for $1.00 of starter credit, run the checks from Claude, ChatGPT or the REST API, and save the ones that matter as a weekly tracker. The full tool comparison covers features beyond price.