Add as preferred source on GoogleEvery roundup of AI visibility tools quotes the entry price. Almost none of them tells you what the thing costs once you track a real prompt set across the engines your buyers actually use. So we did that instead.
We picked one workload and priced all six against it: 150 prompts, tracked daily, across six AI engines, one seat, twelve months. That is a normal load for a single brand in a competitive category, and it is roughly what everyone ends up running by month three.
Three of the six cannot quote a price for it.
What the same workload actually costs
| Tool | Plan this forces | Per month | 12 months |
|---|---|---|---|
| Peec AI | Pro | $245 | $2,940 |
| Semrush AI Visibility Toolkit | $99 base plus 125 extra prompts | ~$279, four engines | ~$3,348 |
| Omnia | Enterprise (Pro caps at 100 prompts) | From €499 | From €5,988 |
| Rankscale | Enterprise (Growth caps at 22,000 answers) | $780 | $9,360 |
| Profound | Enterprise (Growth caps at 100 prompts, 3 engines) | Not published | Not published |
| AthenaHQ | Enterprise (Starter covers 3,600 of 27,000 credits) | Not published | Not published |
Prices checked against each vendor's own pricing page on 14 September 2026. Annual billing takes 15% to 20% off most of these.
Two things fall out of that table.
The first is that headline prices are close to meaningless here. Profound starts at $99 and Peec AI starts at $95, and those two numbers buy completely different products: one engine in the first case, six in the second. Comparing entry prices in this category is like comparing cars by the price of the cheapest trim without checking whether it comes with seats.
The second is that "Enterprise, contact us" is doing a lot of work. Profound and AthenaHQ both publish a friendly self-serve tier and then require a sales conversation for anything a real brand would run. That is a legitimate way to sell software. It is also worth knowing before you build a budget around the number on the pricing page.
The engines are the whole decision
Write down the engines you need before you look at a single price. For most B2B teams that list is ChatGPT, then Google AI Overviews and AI Mode, then Perplexity.
Google is the part people get wrong. AI Overviews and AI Mode are two different surfaces. AI Overviews is the summary above the classic results, and it leans on pages that already rank. AI Mode is the conversational tab, and it breaks your question into background searches, which pulls in Reddit threads and YouTube videos that would never reach page one. They name different brands for the same question.
So a tool that reports one combined number for Google is averaging two different answers together. Semrush does this. Profound covers AI Overviews from $399 and gates AI Mode to Enterprise. Peec AI, Rankscale, Omnia and AthenaHQ all separate them on their entry plans.
That single distinction moves more teams than any feature comparison we have run.
What the reviews are worth
You will read a lot of reviews before you buy one of these. It is worth knowing who writes them.
Search for the best AI visibility tool and check the footers. Almost every result is published by a company that sells an AI visibility tool. That is not a scandal on its own, vendors have always written comparison pages. It matters because this category changes its pricing and engine coverage every few weeks and nobody independent is re-checking, so the pages you are reading drift out of date and stay there.
Here is what that looks like in practice. We found live pages stating that Peec AI self-serve users pick three engines from a list of seven. Peec's own documentation says six are included on every plan. We found pages stating it has no API on any tier; its documentation lists a REST API and an MCP server. Neither page is lying, both are describing an older product, and a buyer has no way to tell which is current.
The G2 scores need the same care:
- Profound: 4.6 from more than 140 reviews
- Otterly: 4.8 from 54 reviews
- Peec AI: 4.8 from 18 reviews
Read that as a ranking and you conclude Profound is the weakest of the three. That is not what the numbers say. Profound has the only sample large enough to mean anything. Eighteen reviews is a handful of early customers, and any young tool looks excellent on eighteen reviews, because the people who churned in week two did not write one.
Use the ratings to rule things out. A 3.2 tells you something. The gap between a 4.6 and a 4.8 tells you nothing at all.
Be careful with prompt volume
One number in this category deserves more suspicion than it gets. Several tools now report a search volume for prompts: so many people per month ask ChatGPT this exact question. It looks like keyword volume, it sits in a column like keyword volume, and it ends up in planning decks like keyword volume.
Steve Toth and William Alvarez both took this apart publicly, and the criticism holds. The data behind prompt volume comes mostly from browser plugin clickstreams. Desktop, mostly Chrome, from people who chose to install a tracking extension. No mobile, no apps, and a panel that skews technical, then multiplied up to represent everybody.
Small errors in a small panel become large errors after that multiplication. And prompts are not keywords. A keyword is a short string people type the same way every time. A prompt is a sentence phrased differently by everyone who asks it, which makes an exact-match count close to meaningless.
Track your own prompts instead. The questions your buyers ask are knowable, they come out of sales calls and support tickets, and your position on fifty real questions is worth more than a modelled volume on a thousand invented ones.
How we would choose
If you want the most engines for the money and can live with a small vendor, Rankscale is remarkable value. Ten engines on every plan from $20, both Google surfaces included, full credit arithmetic published. It is bootstrapped and run by two founders, which your security review will eventually ask about.
If you are already on Semrush and want one login, add the AI toolkit. It is roughly $180 a month on top for a real prompt set, the data sits next to the rankings that explain it, and nobody needs training. You are accepting four engines and no separate AI Mode surface.
If your purchase has to clear an enterprise security review, Profound. It is the only tool here with published SOC 2, SSO and SAML, the best funded at $58.5M, and the only one with a review base large enough to be statistically meaningful. Budget for Enterprise, because the self-serve tiers will not cover you.
If you want to see your own data before paying anything, AthenaHQ has a genuine free tier at 300 credits, and Omnia has a 14-day trial with no card.
For most marketing teams, Peec AI. Six engines included at the entry price, both Google surfaces separated, source-level data showing which URLs the model read before it answered, and server-log integration so you can watch AI crawlers hit your site rather than infer it. It is the cheapest way to run the workload we priced, and the only tool in that price band doing log analysis at all. What you are giving up: it was founded in 2025, so the track record is short, engines beyond the included six cost extra per engine, and there is no free tier.
The part no tool fixes
All six of these measure the problem. None of them moves it.
When you find a prompt where a competitor is named and you are not, open the sources behind that answer. One of two things is true. Either the cited pages are third-party sites you are absent from, which is a digital PR and review-profile problem. Or they are your own pages, which the model read and did not quote, which is a content problem.
Those need completely different work and different budgets, and a tool that only reports a percentage cannot tell you which one you have. That is the real test when you are comparing these: not whether it shows your visibility, but whether it shows you the URLs underneath it.
