How AI Visibility Tools Price Prompts: A Per-Prompt, Per-Engine Cost Comparison

Entry prices for AI visibility tools run from $20 to $399 a month, and the entry price is the least informative number on any of the pricing pages. What you are buying is tracked prompts, on a number of engines, at a cadence. Convert every plan to that unit and the spread is about ten to one.

The unit: one prompt on one engine for one month

A "prompt" is one question the tool asks the engines on your behalf. Every tool prices by prompts, and every tool includes a different number of engines. So the comparable figure is price ÷ (prompts × engines): what it costs to watch one question on one engine for a month. Cadence matters too — daily tracking produces thirty data points a month where weekly produces four — but it is a second-order effect for most buyers, because the answers to buyer questions change over weeks, not days.

September 2026 prices, converted

Prices were read from each vendor's own page on 5 September 2026 and will drift; treat the table as a snapshot and the method as the point.

What the conversion shows

Three pricing models are hiding in the table. Per-prompt plans (AEOTrack, Otterly, Peec, Semrush) are cheapest to start and scale linearly. Credit-based plans (Athena, Rankscale, Scrunch's higher tiers) are cheaper per prompt-engine at volume but hard to predict, because a credit buys different things on different engines. Per-platform plans (Ahrefs) charge for each engine you turn on regardless of prompts, which suits a brand tracking a few questions on many surfaces and punishes the opposite.

Engine add-ons change the ranking. Otterly's $29 looks like AEOTrack's $29 until you want Gemini and Google AI Mode, which are paid add-ons priced by tier. Peec's $95 covers three models; the fourth and fifth cost more than the plan. If the engines your buyers use are not in the base plan, the entry price is not your price.

Daily tracking costs real money somewhere. Peec and Otterly run daily on every plan; the difference is paid for in the prompt count. AEOTrack runs weekly with an on-demand re-check pool and daily tracking on a pinned few questions from Pro upwards — which is the cheaper way to buy the same information if you only need to react to changes, and the wrong way if you are running an experiment and want to see the effect tomorrow.

How to choose

1. List the engines your buyers actually use. Look at your referral traffic and ask five customers. If it is ChatGPT and Perplexity, a Google-heavy tool is measuring the wrong thing.
2. Write the twenty questions a buyer types before they know your name. That is your prompt count; most products do not need fifty.
3. Price every tool at that prompt count with those engines included, not at the entry price.
4. Then compare what the tool does with a result. A tracker that reports a number is cheaper than one that tells you which sources to earn a mention on, and it should be.