How Much Does an AI Visibility Tool Cost in 2026?

An AI visibility tool costs between €20 and €40 excl. VAT per month at entry level, €65 to €100 in the mid-range and over €130 for a portfolio of brands. Enterprise plans are quote-based. The gaps look huge. They shrink once you bring every price back to the same unit.

I’m Florian Zorgnotti, an SEO consultant since 2016 and co-founder of Cockpyt AI, one of the tools compared here. So I have a stake in this topic. To limit that bias, every price comes from the vendor’s pricing page or from a dated third-party check, and I show the calculations where my own tool comes out behind.

The second question, whether it’s a good idea at all, has no universal answer. It depends on how many questions you track, how much time you can spend on the data and who you report to.

How much does an AI visibility tool cost in 2026?

The market splits into clear price tiers, from free to custom. The amounts below exclude VAT and were checked in October 2026.

Free. One-click graders, such as HubSpot’s AI Search Grader, give you a one-off snapshot. Several vendors also offer a trial: 14 days with no card at Cockpyt AI, 120 credits with no card at Qwairy. No continuous tracking stays free for long, because every question sent to an engine costs the vendor something.

Entry level, €17 to €40 per month. Rankscale starts at $17 billed yearly only, Otterly.ai at $29 ($25 billed yearly), Cockpyt AI at €39 (€29 billed yearly). You track one brand, around 15 questions, on three or four engines.

Mid-range, €65 to €100 per month. Qwairy Starter at €79 (€65 billed yearly), Peec AI Starter at around €85, Semrush’s AI Visibility Toolkit at around €95 per domain, Rankscale Pro at $99. The volume of answers analysed rises sharply.

SEO suites. Semrush sells its AI visibility toolkit separately, per domain. Ahrefs includes custom prompts in its subscriptions from the Lite plan at $129 per month and charges separately for its AI visibility index, at €179 per platform per month according to GEO Toolbox. If you already pay for one of these suites, test what it includes first, as I explain in my Semrush vs Ahrefs comparison for AI visibility.

Teams and agencies, €139 to €500 per month. Cockpyt Agency at €139 billed yearly, Otterly Standard at $189, Qwairy Growth at €199, Peec Pro at around €205, AthenaHQ at $295. You pay for projects, client workspaces and volume.

Enterprise, quote-based. Profound no longer sells a paid self-serve plan to brands, according to GEO Toolbox’s September 2026 check. Peec, Otterly and Qwairy also have a negotiated enterprise tier.

Moving up a tier doesn’t buy you better measurement. It buys volume: more questions, more projects, more engines, more runs. The features added at the top of the grid are mostly organisational, such as API access, white label, SSO or Looker Studio connectors. A small business rarely pays for those.

Real prices, brought back to the same unit

The only figure that lets you compare two tools is the cost per AI answer actually captured. One answer is one question sent to one engine, once. Peec AI spells this out in its own FAQ: 25 questions on 3 models over 30 days give 2,250 analysed answers. I applied that calculation to each entry plan.

Method: questions × engines × runs per month, at the no-commitment monthly price. For Cockpyt AI, I add the 433 AI Overviews checks to the 195 chatbot answers. Peec’s and Semrush’s euro prices come from GEO Toolbox’s check, as Peec’s page didn’t display its amounts in a readable way when I verified it.

The result is plain. Cockpyt AI costs two to four times more per captured answer than daily-tracking tools. The reason is frequency: one run a week versus one run a day. If your only criterion is the volume of answers analysed, a daily tool wins.

That volume genuinely matters. SparkToro’s January 2026 study shows that the list of brands cited by ChatGPT or Google’s AI changes with almost every answer, and that only a presence rate computed over many runs holds up. Rand Fishkin calls tools that display a ranking position “full of baloney”. More runs per question means a more stable estimate.

In my view, for a small business or a consultant publishing two or three pieces a month, a weekly check is enough to follow a trend, since your fixes take several weeks to show up in the answers. If you have to defend a presence rate to the decimal point in front of a board, a daily tool is worth its premium. Cost per answer also ignores what else the subscription includes: audit, action plan, error detection, traffic.

Why the sticker price doesn’t tell you what you’ll pay

The headline price rarely describes your real bill. Five mechanisms push the total up, and none of them shows in the entry price.

• Engines sold as add-ons. At Otterly.ai, Gemini and AI Mode each cost an extra $9 per month on Lite, Claude $29. On the Standard plan, those amounts rise to $59 and $109.
• Weighted credits. At Rankscale, a ChatGPT, Gemini or Perplexity query uses 0.25 credit, a Claude query uses 2. Tracking Claude drains your balance eight times faster.
• Per-domain billing. Semrush’s toolkit is sold per tracked domain. Three client sites, three subscriptions.
• Extra questions. Otterly charges $99 per block of 100 questions above your quota, from the Standard plan only.
• Currency. Otterly, Rankscale and Semrush list prices in US dollars excluding tax. Your cost in euros follows the exchange rate, and VAT treatment is one to check with your accountant.

A sixth mechanism weighs even more: the threshold effect. At Otterly.ai, your 16^th question moves you from Lite to Standard, from $29 to $189 per month. At Cockpyt AI, the 16^th question moves you from Solo to Consultant, from €39 to €89 on monthly billing. Credit-based models such as Qwairy and Rankscale smooth out that jump, because you add credits instead of changing plans. Before you sign, always look at the price of the next tier.

These add-ons aren’t traps. They reflect a real cost for the vendor, since querying Claude costs more than querying another model. The problem is comparison: a $29 tool with two add-ons becomes a $67 tool.

Do you need to pay for every AI engine?

No. For a French website, three engines account for most measurable AI traffic. SE Ranking’s study published in June 2026, based on 101,574 websites connected to Google Analytics 4, gives ChatGPT 77.2% of AI traffic in France over the first four months of 2026. Perplexity follows with 8.82%, Gemini with 6.30%.

Those three engines therefore carry more than 92% of French AI traffic. Copilot reaches 3.72% and Claude 3.01%, with the fastest growth in the panel. Mistral, the French engine, accounts for 0.89% over the full period, a small but steady presence.

Keep two limits in mind. The study measures clicks, not answers read without a click. It also excludes Google’s AI Overviews and AI Mode, which don’t generate a distinct referrer. An engine that sends few visits can still shape a buying decision.

The cost of broad coverage adds up fast. Adding Claude to an Otterly Lite plan costs $29 per month, the price of the plan itself, for an engine that weighs 3% of French AI traffic. At Rankscale, one question tracked on Claude uses as many credits as eight questions tracked on ChatGPT. Those amounts make sense if your audience uses Claude. They make far less sense for completeness alone.

Google’s AI Overviews are a special case. They have been showing in France since summer 2026, right at the top of search results, and most tools include them from the entry tier. They are often tracked on Google keywords rather than on conversational questions, which changes how your quota is counted.

The practical rule: pay for ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Google’s AI Overviews first. Add Claude if you sell to tech or B2B teams, where its use is growing fast. Add Copilot if your audience works in the Microsoft ecosystem. Every add-on engine should answer a precise question about your audience.

The cost nobody puts a number on: your time

The subscription is almost always the smallest line in the budget. Reading a report, understanding why a competitor shows up instead of you, fixing a page, running a new scan: this work takes human time, and that time costs more than the tool.

Run the numbers with a simple assumption. At €60 an hour, two hours a month spent working with the data come to €120. That’s four times the price of an entry plan billed yearly. A pricier tool that hands you a prioritised action plan can therefore cost less overall than a cheap tool that leaves you to interpret thousands of answers on your own.

Here is how that time breaks down in a monthly routine I see with my SME clients, as a rough guide: 15 to 20 minutes to read the report and spot changes, 30 minutes to review the sources citing your competitors, one hour to decide on and launch two or three fixes. A tool that already delivers the sources and a prioritised plan mainly shortens the second and third steps.

The agencies interviewed by Digiday in May 2026 put it bluntly. Ryan Mason, president of Markacy, sums the tool up as “just a benchmarker”: a comparison instrument, not a solution generator. Buyers pay for measurement, then they have to pay for action.

Before comparing prices, ask yourself one question. Who will read the data every month, and how much time can that person give it? If the answer is “nobody”, no tool will pay off, whatever its price.

Is an AI visibility tool a good idea for you?

Yes, once you track around ten questions every month or have to prove a result. No, if you just want a starting snapshot or if nobody can act on the data. Your profile matters more than your budget.

For a small business or a solopreneur

An entry plan at €25 to €40 a month is enough for one brand. Traffic isn’t the main argument: according to SE Ranking, AI still accounts for only 0.26% of total traffic to French websites in 2026. The stakes are elsewhere. An AI that recommends a competitor instead of you, or quotes a wrong price, influences a customer before they even visit your site.

On the sites we analyse with Cockpyt AI, more than 60% receive citations whose source isn’t their own website. What AI engines say about you often comes from directories, reviews or third-party articles. A tool shows you those sources, which a one-off manual test almost never reveals.

For a consultant or an agency

Think in cost per client, not plan price. With five clients on yearly billing, Cockpyt Agency comes to €27.80 per client, Otterly Standard to $32, Peec Advanced to €72, Qwairy Business to €74.80. Semrush’s toolkit, billed per domain, costs about €95 per client.

That cost fits easily into a GEO retainer, which runs between €950 and €5,000 a month on the French market. Check two points before signing: data export and separate projects per client.

For an in-house marketing team

The value lies in proof. A dated history lets you link a rise in visibility to a specific action and present it to management. Without that history, you defend a GEO budget on impressions.

When not to pay

Three situations make a subscription pointless. You track fewer than 10 questions once or twice a year: a manual check is enough. Your site blocks AI crawlers: fix that before measuring anything. Nobody can act on the data: measurement alone changes no answer.

How to estimate your budget in four steps

Your budget comes from four variables, in this order. The calculator on this page runs the numbers for the main tools on the market.

Step 1: list your buyer questions

Write down the questions your customers ask an AI without naming your brand, such as “which POS software for a bakery” rather than your product name. Plan for 10 to 15 questions per brand to cover your main intents. That number sets your minimum plan, and the next question often triggers the price jump.

Step 2: choose your engines

Start with ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and AI Overviews. Add an engine only if your audience uses it. Every addition is paid for as an add-on or in credits.

Step 3: set the frequency

Weekly tracking gives about four runs per question per month. Daily tracking gives thirty. The first shows a trend, the second sharpens the measured presence rate. Choose based on what you have to prove, and to whom. With credit-based vendors, the frequency you pick directly multiplies your consumption.

Step 4: add the time to use the data

Multiply monthly hours by your hourly rate. Add that amount to the subscription to get your real total cost. If the tool is less than 20% of that total, choosing it over a €10 difference makes little sense: focus on the one that saves you time.

In my view, start on monthly billing for two or three months, then switch to yearly once your question set has settled. Yearly billing saves 15 to 25% depending on the vendor, but several of them have changed their prices in the last quarter. Don’t commit for twelve months before you know what you really need to track.

Where Cockpyt AI fits in this landscape

Cockpyt AI sits at entry level on price and last on cost per captured answer. The Solo plan costs €29 excl. VAT per month billed yearly for one brand, 15 questions and 100 AI Overviews keywords, on ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity.

That choice is deliberate. I measure once a week, under identical conditions, with no logged-in account and no conversation history. In return, every paid plan includes a full GEO audit every month with a prioritised action plan, tracking of the competitors cited instead of you and AI traffic through Google Analytics 4. No feature is locked behind a higher tier.

The limits are real too. Cockpyt AI doesn’t track Claude, Copilot, AI Mode or Mistral. If those engines matter to your audience, a broader tool will serve you better. Detailed prices are on the Pricing page.

FAQ: AI visibility tool pricing and ROI

Is there a free AI visibility tool?

Not for continuous tracking. Free graders, such as HubSpot’s AI Search Grader, give a one-off snapshot. Free trials last a few days or a few credits. Google Search Console added generative AI performance reports in June 2026, limited to Google surfaces. Google Analytics 4 captures visits from ChatGPT or Perplexity, not answers read without a click.

Why do tools charge per prompt or per credit?

Every question sent to an engine costs the vendor something, in model access and compute. The prompt measures your question volume, the credit measures your actual consumption. Credit-based models weight engines by cost, which makes Claude pricier than ChatGPT with some vendors.

Daily or weekly tracking: which should you choose?

Daily tracking multiplies runs and stabilises the measured presence rate, at a higher subscription cost per answer. Weekly tracking is enough to follow a trend driven by content you publish or fix. Choose based on the precision you need to defend.

Should you take the yearly plan?

Yearly billing saves 15% at Otterly and Peec, about 17% at Qwairy and up to 25% at Cockpyt AI. In exchange, you commit for twelve months in a market whose prices move every quarter. Validate your usage on monthly billing before switching.

Can you rebill an AI visibility tool to your clients?

Yes, and it’s common practice in agencies. The tool becomes the “measurement” line of the GEO retainer. Check that each client has a separate project and that the history can be exported, so your data stays usable if the client changes provider.

Does an AI visibility tool replace a GEO service?

No. The tool measures and prioritises; it doesn’t change a single answer. Producing content, fixing technical issues and earning external citations remain human work. The price of a full GEO strategy runs to hundreds or thousands of euros a month.