AI visibility tools compared

Every established AI visibility platform — Profound, Peec AI, Otterly.AI, Scrunch, Conductor, RankPrompt, and the AI modules from Semrush and Ahrefs — is cloud-hosted subscription software where the vendor runs the queries for you and meters you by prompt volume, engines covered and seats. Self-serve entry tiers cluster around $29–$99 per month, the tier most teams actually need lands around $200–$500 per month, and enterprise is quote-only at every single vendor. AI Visibility Tracker is the outlier in kind rather than degree: a macOS desktop app for $29 once, no subscription, running on your own API key with your data on your own disk.

Last updated 2026-07-28

What does AI visibility tracking actually cost?

Between roughly $29 and $99 per month to start, and roughly $200 to $500 per month for a tier that covers enough prompts and engines to be useful — with every vendor in the category gating enterprise behind "Contact Sales" and publishing no price at all. The numbers below were read from each vendor's own pricing page on 28 July 2026.

Two things distort headline comparisons badly. Most of these pages display the annual price by default, so the month-to-month figure is 15–20% higher than what you first see. And several vendors charge extra per engine — so a plan advertising a low entry price may not include Claude or Gemini at all until you add them.

Which AI engines does each tool cover?

Coverage varies more than the marketing suggests, and the differences are concentrated exactly where you would expect: Claude and Grok are the engines most often missing or charged as extras. Check the pricing page's comparison table rather than the homepage — several vendors name a broader set of engines on the homepage than any purchasable plan actually includes.

Where does your data live, and who runs the queries?

In every commercial platform in this category, the vendor runs the queries on their own model access and stores the results on their infrastructure. None of them lets you bring your own LLM API key — billing is metered in prompts, answers or credits, which only works if the vendor controls the calls.

That is not a criticism; it is what makes them managed services, and it is why they can run your prompts at 3am whether or not your laptop is open. But it does mean your prompt set — a compact statement of which questions you think matter and which competitors you consider real — and your complete result history live on someone else's systems, under their retention policy. If that is a problem for you, it is a serious problem, and if it is not, it is not one at all.

Which one should you actually choose?

Pick by organisational shape rather than by feature count, because the feature lists converge and the operating models do not.

• A marketing team with a budget, several people who need logins, and procurement requirements: a cloud platform. Profound and Conductor are built for that end; Scrunch and Peec serve mid-market and agencies well. Do not buy a desktop app to solve an organisational problem.
• An agency tracking many client brands across markets: a platform with agency pricing and shared seats. Peec's unlimited seats and Otterly's per-prompt tiers both aim here.
• A founder, solo marketer or small team tracking one brand or a handful: a desktop tool is usually the better fit, and $29 once versus $29 a month compounds quickly.
• Anyone who needs crawler or agent analytics — how often AI bots fetch your pages, and what they do with them: that is a platform dataset. Profound and Scrunch both build on it and this app has no equivalent.
• Anyone whose prompt set or competitor list is genuinely sensitive: local-first storage is the whole argument, and it is the one thing no cloud platform can offer at any price.

Are there other one-time or local-first options?

Yes, and it would be dishonest to imply otherwise. A free macOS utility called Ahoy Lighthouse runs local, bring-your-own-key AI visibility audits; an MIT-licensed open-source project, geo-aeo-tracker, does something similar in the browser with your keys held locally; and lifetime deals for cloud AI-visibility tools appear periodically on AppSumo, which is one-time pricing on hosted software rather than local-first.

What is accurate to say is narrower and still meaningful: every established, funded commercial platform in this category is cloud-hosted subscription software with vendor-run queries. The full picture, including where those alternatives are genuinely a better choice than paying us anything, is in AEO tracking without a subscription.

How should you verify any of this?

Competitor pricing below was read from each vendor’s own pricing page on 28 July 2026 and is quoted with the billing basis they display. Pricing in this category changes often — check the vendor’s page before making a decision on ours.

Prices in this category move quickly, tiers get renamed, and engines migrate between "included" and "add-on" without announcement. Third-party comparison articles are worse than useless here — the most widely repeated figure for one of these vendors is in the wrong currency and roughly double the current price. If a number matters to your decision, read it off the vendor's own page today.