Quick answer. AI visibility tools track whether ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini and Google's AI Overviews mention your brand when someone asks a question you care about. Entry pricing runs from about $13/month to $295/month, and the cheapest tier of most tools covers fewer engines than the marketing implies — Claude in particular is an add-on or an enterprise-only feature almost everywhere.
Every price below was read from the vendor's own pricing page on 2026-09-29. Where we could not read a price, we say so rather than repeating one from another article. One vendor's pricing had changed in the seventeen days since we last checked it, which is why we date everything.
Quick comparison
| Tool | Entry price | Prompts at entry | Engines at entry | Claude included? |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Verified Tools | $39/quarter (≈$13/mo) | 15 | 5 | Yes |
| Otterly.AI | $29/mo ($25 annual) | 15 | 4 | No — +$29/mo |
| AthenaHQ | Free tier, then $295/mo | Credit-based | 11+ | Yes |
| Profound | Free 7-day trial | 50 (trial) | 3 (trial) | Enterprise only |
| DataForSEO LLM Mentions | $0.10/request + $0.001/row | n/a (archive) | ChatGPT (US/EN) | No |
| Peec AI | Could not verify | — | — | — |
Prices read 2026-09-29 from each vendor's public pricing page. Verified Tools is this site — see the disclosure below.
One category, five names
Before comparing anything, know that this category is sold under at least five labels, and vendors use them interchangeably: AI visibility tracking, LLM SEO, GEO (generative engine optimization), AEO (answer engine optimization), and AI search monitoring.
They are not meaningfully different products. What differs between tools is which engines they watch, whether they ask live or query an archive, and whether you control the questions — so compare on those three, not on which acronym the homepage uses.
Why two AI visibility tools can give you opposite answers
This is the part no comparison table shows, and it matters more than price.
There are two different instruments being sold under one name.
A mentions index is retrospective. The vendor runs a very large pool of prompts on its own schedule and stores where each brand appeared. You query the archive: across everything already asked, where did my domain show up?
A live check is prospective. You choose the questions, the tool asks the engines right now, and parses the answers.
On 2026-09-12 we ran both on the same two domains. The index reported 0 mentions for a domain where a live scan two days earlier had measured 35 citations, including one inside Google's AI Overview.
Neither instrument was broken. The index can only report on prompts in its pool, and a pool built for breadth concentrates on mass-market questions — best CRM, best to-do app. The domain in question competes in a narrow consumer-health niche, and the questions it wins are not in the archive. Zero there means "we never asked the questions you win," not "AI never recommends you."
The reverse limitation applies to live checking: it only sees questions you thought to ask. A frozen prompt set is deliberately narrow — that is what makes week-over-week comparison honest — so it will not surface an unexpected query where you appeared once in March.
Buy the wrong instrument for your question and you will misread your own visibility in whichever direction the tool is blind.
The tools
1. AthenaHQ
Free tier, then $295/month. The free Essential plan includes $25 of credit (300 credits); Starter is $295/month with $300/month of credit (3,600 credits), where one credit equals one AI response. Annual billing takes 17% off. Enterprise is custom.
The engine list is the broadest we verified: ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, Google AI Mode, Gemini, Claude, Copilot, Grok, DeepSeek, Meta AI and Mistral, with more on request.
The credit model is the thing to model before buying. At one credit per AI response, a 50-prompt set across 8 engines is 400 credits per run — about nine runs a month on Starter.
Suits: teams that need coverage across many engines, including the ones most tools skip, and can plan around a credit budget.
2. Otterly.AI
$29/month Lite ($25/month billed annually), covering 15 search prompts across ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity and Microsoft Copilot. Standard is $189/month for 100 prompts, Premium $489/month for 400, Enterprise custom from 1,000. Annual billing takes 15% off. Tracking runs daily on every tier and team members are unlimited.
Read the add-on line before comparing prices. On Lite, Claude costs an extra $29/month — doubling the bill — and Google AI Mode or Gemini are $9/month each. The headline $29 buys four engines, not the full set. An extra 100 prompts is $99/month.
Suits: a small team that wants daily tracking on the four mainstream surfaces and can live without Claude, or budget for it.
3. Profound
Free 7-day trial; everything else is Enterprise with custom pricing. The trial tracks 50 recommended prompts (not editable) daily for seven days across ChatGPT, Gemini and Google AI Overviews, in one language and one region.
Enterprise covers the widest engine list of any vendor here — ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Mode, Gemini, Microsoft Copilot, DeepSeek, Claude, Google AI Overviews and Exa Search — with editable prompts and custom regions.
⚠️ This changed recently. When we checked on 2026-09-12, Profound published a $99/month Starter tier that covered ChatGPT only. On 2026-09-29 that tier is gone from the pricing page. If you are comparing against an article that quotes $99/month for Profound, that article is out of date — including, until today, a comparison page on this site.
Suits: enterprises and agencies that need nine engines, custom regions and a procurement process, and have budget for custom pricing.
4. Verified Tools
This site. Disclosed up front so you can weigh the rest accordingly.
$39 per quarter (about $13/month) for 15 prompts across five engines — ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini and Google's AI Overviews. Higher tiers are $199 (≈$66/month) and $599 (≈$200/month). Checks are live, not archive lookups, and a free check runs five prompts against two engines with no account.
The comparison that made us build it: at the entry tier, Otterly Lite is $29/month for 15 prompts across four engines with Claude at $29 extra. Ours is about $13/month for 15 prompts across five engines with Claude included. That is a narrow, checkable claim — both pricing pages are linked and dated.
What we do not have: no Copilot, Grok, DeepSeek, Meta AI or Mistral; no shopping data; no SSO; no agent-crawler analytics. If you need those, AthenaHQ or Profound are the honest answer and we would rather say it here than after you pay.
5. DataForSEO LLM Mentions API
$0.10 per request plus $0.001 per row. Our whole two-domain probe cost $0.91 — roughly $0.45 per brand.
This is the mentions index described above, and it is the cheapest way to screen a mass-market brand. It reports ChatGPT data for the US/English market and its archive refreshes monthly, so it cannot tell you what happened this week, and it cannot support before-and-after attribution because the prompt pool changes underneath you.
Suits: a cheap first pass on a brand whose customers ask mass-market questions, or a developer building their own tooling.
6. Peec AI
Could not verify. Peec AI's pricing page lists Starter, Pro, Advanced and Enterprise tiers, but the figures are not present in the page source we could read on 2026-09-29 — they render client-side.
We are listing it rather than dropping it because it appears consistently in this category and you will meet it while shopping. We are not quoting a price we did not read. Other articles list roughly €85/month for its entry tier; treat that as unverified until you see it on their page.
Which instrument do you actually need?
| You want to know | Use |
|---|---|
| "Do AI engines recommend me for the specific questions my customers ask?" | A live checker with a prompt set you control |
| "Across the mass-market question space, does my brand appear at all?" | A mentions index |
| "Did last month's content changes move my citations?" | A live check with a frozen prompt set — an index pool changes underneath you, so before-and-after deltas are not attributable |
| "Which competitor gets recommended where I don't?" | Either, but a live check names the competitor in the answer text |
| Any niche, non-US or non-English category | A live check — index coverage is too thin there to interpret a zero |
What to check before you pay
Count the engines at your tier, not on the homepage. Every vendor here advertises a long engine list and ships a shorter one at entry price. Claude is the usual casualty: an add-on at Otterly, enterprise-only at Profound.
Convert credits into runs. A credit-based plan sounds generous until you multiply prompts by engines. One run of 50 prompts across 8 engines is 400 responses.
Ask whether the prompt set is editable. A tool that picks your prompts for you is measuring its idea of your market, not yours. Profound's trial explicitly does not allow prompt editing.
Ask whether the prompt set is frozen. If you want to prove a content change caused a citation, the question set must not move between measurements. This is the single most common reason AI visibility reporting is unreadable six months in.
Check the refresh interval. Daily, weekly and monthly are all sold in this category, and monthly cannot answer "did last week's change work?"
FAQ
What is an AI visibility tool?
Software that checks whether AI assistants — ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini, Google's AI Overviews — mention or cite your brand when someone asks a question in your category. Some tools ask the engines live with prompts you choose; others query an archive of prompts the vendor already ran. The two can return opposite answers for the same domain, so which kind you buy matters more than the price.
How much do AI visibility tools cost?
Verified entry prices as of 2026-09-29: Verified Tools $39/quarter (about $13/month), Otterly.AI $29/month, AthenaHQ free then $295/month, Profound a free 7-day trial then custom enterprise pricing, and DataForSEO's LLM Mentions API at $0.10 per request plus $0.001 per row. The number that actually matters is price per engine at your tier, because entry plans cover fewer engines than the marketing suggests.
Which AI visibility tools track Claude?
Fewer than you would expect. At entry pricing on 2026-09-29: Verified Tools includes Claude, AthenaHQ includes it, Otterly.AI charges $29/month extra for it on the Lite plan, and Profound covers it only on Enterprise. DataForSEO's index reports ChatGPT for US/English only. If Claude matters to your category, check this line specifically — it is the most common gap between the homepage and the plan you buy.
Is there a free AI visibility checker?
Yes, several, with different limits. AthenaHQ has a free Essential tier with 300 credits. Profound offers a 7-day trial covering 50 prompts across three engines. This site runs a free check of five prompts across two engines with no account required. Free tiers are useful for a first look and generally too small for tracking change over time.
Why did two tools give me different AI visibility scores?
Almost always because one queried an archive and the other asked live. We measured this directly: on 2026-09-12 an index reported zero mentions for a domain where a live scan two days earlier found 35 citations. The index had never asked the questions that domain wins. Before treating either number as wrong, check which instrument produced it.
How often should AI visibility be measured?
Weekly is enough for most brands, and the interval matters less than keeping the prompt set fixed. If the questions change between measurements, you cannot tell whether a change in your score came from your content or from a different question being asked. Daily tracking is available on most tools here and is mainly useful during a launch or an incident.
How were these prices verified?
Each vendor's public pricing page was read on 2026-09-29: AthenaHQ, Otterly.AI and Profound directly; DataForSEO's rates come from our own API invoices when we ran the tool on 2026-09-12. Peec AI's figures render client-side and could not be read, so no price is quoted for it. Prices in this category change quickly — Profound's published tiers changed within seventeen days of our previous check — so confirm on the vendor's page before committing.
Is this list biased because Verified Tools is on it?
It is our site, and we have said so in the entry rather than in a footnote. The entry also lists what we do not offer — Copilot, Grok, DeepSeek, Meta AI, Mistral, shopping data, SSO and agent-crawler analytics — and names the competitors that do. Every price here is linked to a vendor page and dated so you can check the comparison rather than trust it.