Tracking your brand in ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Google's AI answers costs anything from nothing, with the free reports in Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools, to a few hundred a month: on the official pricing pages we read on 27 October 2026, entry plans ran from €29 (Citatur) and $29 (Otterly) to $199 (Ahrefs Brand Radar). The figure that really sets the bill is the cost per 100 AI answers tracked, and in our table it ranges from $0.12 to €15.60, more than a hundredfold gap.
The entry price is the easy part.
The rest shows up later. When you add Gemini. When the 15 prompts in the starter plan run out in a week. When you realise you read the report once a month but pay for it every day.
Take Sunscape, which builds solar plants across Italy. From March 2026, in six months, its organic impressions went from 329 to 5,809 a month, as we explain in how long SEO takes. Search Console gives you that number at no cost.
And how often does ChatGPT name Sunscape when someone asks for an installer?
No free tool answers that. That's where the spending starts.
The budgeting mistakes we see most often:
- comparing entry prices without checking how many prompts and engines they include;
- forgetting engines sold separately: on Otterly, Claude adds $29 a month on Lite and $109 on Standard;
- paying for daily tracking and reading the report once a month;
- ignoring Search Console's generative AI report, available to every site since 31 August 2026.
In this guide:
- prices for 10 tools, read on the official pages on 27 October 2026;
- the cost per 100 AI answers, worked out the same way for every tool;
- two annual budget scenarios, for 50 and 200 prompts;
- free tools, trials and what a DIY setup through an API costs.
How much does AI visibility tracking cost? (price lists checked on 27 October 2026)
An AI visibility tool costs between 29 and 199 a month on its entry plan, in euros or dollars depending on the vendor; larger plans reach €299 (Citatur Business) and $489 (Otterly Premium), while Profound and enterprise plans are quoted on request. These are prices we read ourselves, page by page, on the same day.
| Tool | Entry plan | Prompts included | AI engines | Frequency |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Otterly | Lite, $29/month | 15 | ChatGPT, AI Overviews, Perplexity, Copilot (AI Mode and Gemini +$9, Claude +$29) | Daily |
| SE Visible (SE Ranking) | Basic, from $99/month | 200 | ChatGPT, Gemini, AI Mode, AI Overviews | About 30,000 answers/month stated |
| Semrush AI Visibility Toolkit | $99/month | 25 (+50 for $60/month) | AI Mode and ChatGPT among those named | Not stated |
| Ahrefs Brand Radar | from $199/month | Packs: 2,500 checks for $50 | Not listed on the pricing page | Your choice (1 check = 1 prompt on 1 engine) |
| Rankscale | Pro, $99/month | Credit-based | 17+ engines | Not stated |
| Citatur | Starter, €29/month | Not stated | ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude | Weekly (daily from Pro at €99) |
| BIKMA | Starter, €59/month (€49 annual) | 50 | ChatGPT, AI Overviews | Daily |
| GeoSonar | Pro, €49/month | Not stated | ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude, Copilot | Not stated |
| ADLinko OS | from €79/month + VAT | Not stated | Not listed on the page | Not stated |
| ScryRank (Visilay) | Starter, €39/month | 50 + 50 AI Overview keywords | ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, AI Overviews | Monthly |
What about Peec AI and Profound?
On the Peec AI pricing page we could read the limits (50 prompts and 3 models on Starter, 4,500 answers a month) but not a price. Profound shows its trial and an Enterprise plan on request. We don't print figures we haven't seen ourselves.
ScryRank is the monitoring tool built by Visilay. It sits in the table on the same criteria as the others, weak spot included, as you'll see in a moment. For a feature-by-feature comparison, see our guide to the best AI visibility tools.
The real cost: what you pay per 100 AI answers (and why it varies a hundredfold)
Cost per 100 answers is the monthly price divided by the AI answers the tool collects in a month (prompts × engines × runs), times 100. It's the only way to compare a plan with 15 daily prompts against one with 50 monthly prompts.
One answer is one question asked to one engine, once. 15 prompts on 4 engines every day make 1,800 answers a month. 50 prompts on 4 engines once a month make 200.
| Plan | Monthly price | AI answers a month | Cost per 100 answers |
|---|---|---|---|
| DataForSEO LLM Scraper (API, standard queue) | Pay as you go | As many as you request | $0.12 |
| SE Visible Basic | $99 | ~30,000 (stated) | $0.33 |
| DataForSEO LLM Scraper (live) | Pay as you go | As many as you request | $0.40 |
| Ahrefs, Scale pack | $250 | 25,000 checks | $1.00 |
| Otterly Lite | $29 | 1,800 (15 × 4 × 30) | $1.61 |
| BIKMA Starter | €59 | 3,000 (50 × 2 × 30) | €1.97 |
| Ahrefs, Basic pack | $50 | 2,500 checks | $2.00 |
| ScryRank Starter | €39 | 250 (50 × 4 + 50 AI Overview keywords) | €15.60 |
Read it twice.
A low subscription doesn't mean cheap answers. ScryRank costs €39 and runs once a month: €15.60 per 100 answers, almost ten times Otterly.
So is daily tracking always better?
No. It's better if you use the daily answers. SparkToro's January 2026 study, led by Rand Fishkin across 2,961 runs of ChatGPT, Claude and Google AI, found less than a 1 in 100 chance that ChatGPT or Google AI return the same list of brands twice. Fishkin suggests running each prompt at least 60-100 times and averaging the results.
In budget terms: if you want a stable presence rate for each prompt, you need lots of runs, and daily tracking is the way. If you want a monthly trend on 50 questions for a board meeting, one run a month on four engines is enough and costs less overall. How much the data swings between runs is the subject of our guide to AI visibility data accuracy.
What you spend in a year (two worked scenarios, 50 and 200 prompts)
For a small business tracking 50 questions, the annual bill runs from about $43 of API calls to $2,268 of subscription; for a company tracking 200 on ChatGPT, Gemini, AI Mode and AI Overviews, from $1,188 to $4,872. Same prompts, four times the price.
Scenario 1: a small business with 50 prompts
| Setup | What it covers | Annual cost |
|---|---|---|
| DataForSEO LLM Scraper, DIY | 50 prompts × ChatGPT and Gemini, daily | $43.20 + development |
| ScryRank Starter | 50 prompts × 4 engines + 50 AI Overview keywords, monthly | €468 (€390 billed annually) |
| BIKMA Starter | 50 prompts × ChatGPT and AI Overviews, daily | €708 (€588 billed annually) |
| SE Visible Basic | 200 prompts × 4 engines, daily | from $1,188 |
| Otterly Standard | 100 prompts × 4 engines, daily (Lite stops at 15) | $2,268 |
Scenario 2: a company with 200 prompts and Google's engines
Here the engines sold separately change the maths. On Otterly you need Standard ($189), 100 extra prompts ($99), AI Mode ($59) and Gemini ($59): $406 a month, $4,872 a year. SE Visible Basic already includes 200 prompts and those four engines: from $1,188 a year.
ScryRank Pro, 200 prompts at €139, comes to €1,668 a year, with monthly runs and no AI Mode. Doing it yourself through the API, 200 prompts on ChatGPT and Gemini every day, costs $14.40 a month in calls: $172.80 a year, plus whoever writes and maintains the code.
But are they comparable?
Only partly, and that's the point: a $3,684 gap on the same number of prompts comes from how the engines are packaged, not from data quality. To work out which engines you actually need, see how to choose an AI visibility tool, criterion by criterion.
Same 200 prompts, a $3,684 difference a year.
You've just seen what engines sold separately add to the bill. Before picking a tool, we work out with you which questions and engines matter in your market, so you only pay for the runs you'll actually read.
Book a strategy callAre there free AI visibility tools? (yes, but each sees only part of the picture)
Yes: Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools reports come with tools you already use, and some vendors offer one-off checks or a basic plan at zero. None of them, though, tracks a list of questions you choose on ChatGPT over time.
- Search Console: since 3 June 2026 it has generative AI performance reports, extended to every site on 31 August 2026. They show impressions and pages in AI Overviews and AI Mode, by country and device. They don't show competitors.
- Bing Webmaster Tools: the AI Performance section, in public preview since 10 February 2026, counts how often your site is cited in Copilot and Bing's AI answers.
- Semrush AI Visibility Checker: free, 3 checks a day with no sign-up, on ChatGPT, Gemini, AI Mode and AI Overviews. A snapshot, not a history.
- GeoSonar Free: 1 project, ChatGPT only, updated every 7 days.
- Citatur Free: a one-off audit at zero cost.
Then there's the manual route: the same questions, every month, on every engine, in a spreadsheet. 30 questions on 3 engines means 90 answers to read each round. It costs nothing but hours; which questions to put on the list is covered in our guide to prompt tracking.
To isolate visits from ChatGPT and Perplexity in GA4, the other free data point, see our guide to ChatGPT traffic in Google Analytics.
Which AI visibility tools offer a free trial? (and what they let you see)
Otterly, SE Visible, Profound and Rankscale offer a free trial; Semrush's AI Visibility Toolkit doesn't. The terms differ a lot, and two of the four pages don't say how long the trial lasts.
| Tool | Trial | Stated limits |
|---|---|---|
| Otterly | Yes, no card needed | Length not stated on the pricing page |
| SE Visible | 10 days | Basic and Core plans |
| Profound | 7 days | 50 industry prompts chosen for you, not editable, 3 engines, 1 country |
| Rankscale | Yes | Length and limits not stated |
| Semrush AI Visibility Toolkit | No | Only the free checker |
| ScryRank | Preview on your own domain | Terms not described on the page |
A practical tip: run the trial on your own questions, not the suggested ones. Profound's trial, for example, tracks a set the vendor picks for your industry: useful to see the interface, useless for finding out whether your customers find you.
DIY through an API costs pennies (you pay in hours)
With an API such as DataForSEO, one ChatGPT or Gemini answer costs $0.0012 in the standard queue and $0.004 live, with no subscription and $1 of trial credit. The raw data costs almost nothing.
So why pay for a tool?
Because the API gives you text. Spotting your brand and competitors, extracting sources, storing history, drawing the chart: that's the work subscriptions charge for. We use the API for the tests we publish, like the one on AI visibility metrics. For ongoing tracking, DIY only makes sense if someone in-house already writes code.
Which affordable tool for a small business? (it depends how often you read the report)
For a small business, the affordable choice depends on frequency: if the report is read once a month, monthly tracking is enough; if you need a reliable figure per prompt, you need daily runs. The entry price comes second.
- You want to know if you show up today: Semrush AI Visibility Checker and Search Console's AI report, at zero cost.
- You want a monthly trend on 4 engines for a meeting: a monthly plan, such as ScryRank Starter at €39.
- You want a presence rate for every prompt: a daily tool with plenty of prompts per dollar, such as SE Visible Basic.
- ChatGPT is enough and you have few questions: Otterly Lite at $29, knowing 15 prompts run out fast.
Whatever you pick, decide first which number goes in the report: mention rate, citations or a score. The AI visibility scores of different tools can't be compared, and switching tool mid-year means losing your history. How to set it up is in our guide to the AI visibility report.
What ChatGPT says when you ask about prices (6 sources out of 6 were vendor pages)
On 27 October 2026 we asked ChatGPT, with web search on and location set to Italy, the question that shows up in Search Console: how much it costs to track your brand in AI answers. It listed 6 tools with prices and cited 6 sources, all vendor pricing pages. No blogs, no agencies.
Two details. For Peec AI and Profound, ChatGPT gave exact prices that we couldn't read on the public pages on the same day, which is why they're not in our table. Otterly's prices matched the ones we checked.
What it means for your own AI visibility: on price questions, at least in this test, ChatGPT went straight to the source. If you sell a service, the page that can get cited is your pricing page, written in readable text and tables, with plans, limits and currency. A price list buried in an image or "on request" leaves the answer to whoever publishes numbers. It's no guarantee of a citation, but it's the place to start; the rest is generative engine optimisation (GEO) work.
Tool or managed service? (what the price list leaves out)
A subscription gives you data; a managed monitoring service also gives you the choice of questions, the reading of results and changes to your pages. The price gap is all in working hours, not in the tracking itself.
The hours go into three things: choosing 50 questions that sound like your customers, understanding why a competitor gets cited and you don't, and changing the pages AI tools use as sources. In our view, the third one moves the numbers.
If you'd rather hand it over, our AI monitoring service starts here. If you'd rather do it in-house, the full map of the topic is in our guide to AI visibility; for AI Mode, see how to track Google AI Mode.
FAQ
It depends on prompts, engines and runs per month. On price lists checked on 27 October 2026, Otterly Lite starts at $29 a month (15 prompts, daily) and ScryRank Starter at €39 (50 prompts, monthly); a DIY setup through an API costs about $3.60 a month for 50 prompts on ChatGPT and Gemini, development excluded.
Yes. Search Console shows impressions in AI Overviews and AI Mode, Bing Webmaster Tools shows citations in Copilot, and the Semrush checker runs 3 checks a day with no sign-up. None of them tracks a list of questions you choose over time.
It depends: it is if you want a reliable presence rate for each prompt, because SparkToro's 2026 study found brand lists change on almost every run. For a monthly trend on four engines, one run a month is enough.
No, usually not. Citatur and BIKMA show prices excluding VAT, ADLinko adds "+ IVA" (Italian VAT) and Otterly lists engine add-ons excluding tax. With dollar prices, the exchange rate matters too.
Yes, but it costs time: 30 questions on 3 engines means 90 answers to read and log every round, and without repeated runs the data swings a lot.
Summary
Entry plans between 29 and 199 a month, Google and Bing reports at zero cost.
The fair comparison is cost per 100 answers: from $0.12 to €15.60.
200 prompts with Gemini and AI Mode: from $1,188 to $4,872 a year.
Raw API data costs pennies, analysis costs hours.
Monthly for the trend, daily for a per-prompt presence rate.
One last thing. In our test ChatGPT answered the price question by citing only public price lists, and for two tools it quoted figures we couldn't read. So a tool's price, for anyone asking ChatGPT, is whatever ChatGPT manages to find. Before signing an annual contract, open the pricing page and take a dated screenshot: in six months it will tell you what changed.
