AI visibility tool pricing: every vendor, every tier, one dated table.

Published list prices for AI visibility tools run $29–399/month (verified August 2026) — but the list price is rarely the price of the coverage you actually wanted. Two patterns move the real number: per-engine add-ons that meter each additional AI model, and credit systems that charge per answer collected and climb fast at a daily cadence. This page is the data layer: every published tier from six vendors — Profound, Peec AI, Otterly.AI, AthenaHQ, Trakkr, and Rankscale — with add-on schedules, trial terms, and a source for every figure. No rankings, no verdicts; the fit questions live on the comparison pages linked throughout.

How to read this table before you trust it

Pricing pages in this category are written to be skimmed. This table is built to be checked — which means knowing six things before the first number lands:

1. List price is a floor, not a forecast. Every figure below is the published list price for that tier. The add-on schedules and credit mechanics are printed with each vendor because that is where the difference between the sticker and the invoice usually lives.
2. “Custom” means sales-quoted. Where a tier has no published price, the cell says so. Where third parties report what those contracts actually run, the note names the reporter — a reported range is due-diligence context, not a price sheet.
3. Billing notes are load-bearing. Some headline numbers are annual-billing figures, some are intro prices that renew higher, and several vendors discount annual commitment. The small line under each price is part of the price.
4. The date is part of the data. This category reprices fast, and stale numbers circulate for months. Every price here was verified August 2026 and gets re-checked quarterly. A pricing table without a date is a rumor.
5. Every tool in this table is buying the same thing: observation. No AI engine publishes an impressions report, a query list, or a citations API. Every score, share-of-voice percentage, and trend line in this category is built by asking the engines questions and recording the answers — sampling, not telemetry. That is a legitimate method and the only one available, but it means two vendors can print different numbers for the same brand in the same week without either being wrong. Price the sampling: which engines, how many prompts, how often.
6. This page picks no winners. It is the reference layer. When you are weighing fit, the job-sorted landscape lives at the best AI visibility tools guide and the vendor-by-vendor cases on the alternatives pages linked below.

One piece of context before the numbers, because stickers compare poorly in a vacuum. Monitoring tools, execution software, and this page's publisher all ultimately compete against the same alternative — hiring humans to do the work:

Where tools sit on the full spending ladder — DIY hours, monitoring, software, retainers — is mapped in how much AEO costs in 2026, and what those retainers themselves include is broken down in the AEO services guide.

The table: six vendors, every published tier

Vendors are ordered by cheapest published tier — computed from the data, not curated. Each card carries the engine-coverage, cadence, add-on, and trial notes its price only makes sense next to, plus the sources each figure was checked against: the vendor's own pricing page first, independent 2026 reviews second.

Prices verified August 2026 · USD list prices per month · ordered by cheapest published tier · sources linked per vendor

Hidden-cost pattern one: the per-engine add-on

The most common way a sticker price grows is engine metering. The base subscription includes a fixed set of AI engines — usually three or four — and each additional engine becomes its own monthly line item. The cards above document three variants of the pattern:

• The per-model surcharge (Peec). Base tiers include three engines of your choice; every model beyond them costs a flat monthly fee that rises with your tier — so the more you already pay, the more each extra engine costs on top.
• The add-on grid (Otterly).Four base engines, then a published grid where each addable engine carries three prices by tier. At the top self-serve tier, the Claude add-on alone costs more per month than Otterly's own Standard subscription.
• The enterprise gate (Profound). No add-on schedule at all: the entry tier includes one engine, the mid tier three, and every further engine moves to a custom contract. A gate is add-on pricing without a printed price.

None of this is hidden, exactly — it is published, which is why it can sit in this table at all. It is simply priced to be discovered after the tool is chosen. There is also a real cost story underneath: engines charge tools different amounts per query, and one vendor prices that difference openly — Rankscale's credit weighting has a single Claude query cost eight times a base-engine query. The defensive move is mechanical: write down the engine list you actually want covered, then price that exact list at each vendor — never the sticker. The worked add-on math for specific vendors lives on the Peec AI alternatives page and the Otterly alternatives page.

Hidden-cost pattern two: the credit meter

The second pattern replaces line items with a meter. You buy a monthly pool of credits, and most actions draw from it — typically one credit or a fraction per AI answer collected and analyzed. It reads as flexibility. In practice the meter interacts with cadence, and cadence is the whole product: checking the same prompts daily consumes roughly thirty times what a monthly check does, and entry-tier pools tend to be sized for the lighter habit.

• AthenaHQ meters everything against one pool: monitoring and its Ask Athena agent draw from the same credits, extra credits are a paid top-up, and reviewers report surprise overages.
• Rankscale lets you configure anything from hourly to monthly checking, but weights credits per engine per query — and its own onboarding guidance suggests dropping from daily to weekly scans to conserve the pool.
• Trakkr is the counterexample the pattern needs: flat $100/mo entry price, all eight of its models on every paid plan, no add-ons — with the trade printed just as plainly: a hard 50-prompt-per-brand cap at every price point. Flat pricing is not free coverage; it is a different ceiling.

The question that prices a credit tool honestly is not “how many credits do I get” but “what does my intended week cost in credits.” Run the multiplication before the trial ends — prompts × engines × checks per month — and hold it against the pool. If the answer exceeds the tier's allowance, the real price is the next tier up, plus top-ups.

What a table can't hold still

Three warnings this page owes you, because a canonical table earns trust by naming its own error bars:

• Repricing is routine. Peec has already replaced its original tier structure, and stale copies of the dead tiers still circulate on review sites; Rankscale added a tier mid-2026. Undated pricing content in this category has a short shelf life — which is why this table carries its verification date on its face.
• Two figures above are actively disputed.One July 2026 review reports Rankscale's entry tier no longer includes credits, against earlier listings that say it does — the card above carries the dispute instead of resolving it quietly. And one competitor source reports Profound's pricing page went fully demo-led in July 2026 while its published tiers stay corroborated elsewhere; the full teardown of that conflict is on the Profound pricing page.
• Enterprise notes are reports, not price sheets. Where a custom tier cites contract ranges, those are third-party reports, attributed in place — context for walking into a sales call, not published prices.

Where AEO Action sits, same columns

Disclosure:AEO Action publishes this page and sells a product in this market. Our row gets the same treatment as everyone's — published prices, plan definitions pulled from the pricing module this site actually bills from, and no adjectives.

Two honesty notes in the same spirit as the vendor cards. Our engine coverage is tier-gated too: Solo picks 3 of 5 engines, Solo Pro picks 4 of 6 — Claude enters the pool there; Copilot is already in Solo's pool — and Agency includes all six. The difference from the add-on pattern above is that no per-model surcharge ever stacks on top of a tier. And a fair word for the other side of the table: a monitoring-only tool at a flat price is a genuinely sound buy when execution is already paid for — an in-house content team or an agency retainer that needs a scoreboard rather than another pair of hands. Whether any of this spend is justified for your situation is its own question, worked through in is AEO worth it.