How much do AEO and GEO tracking tools cost?
Most self-serve AEO and GEO tracking tools cost between about $50 and $500 a month, checked 24 October 2026. Ahrefs Brand Radar starts at $50 for custom prompts, Semrush's AI Visibility Toolkit is $99, Peec AI runs $95 to $495, and AthenaHQ's paid plan is $295 with a free tier. Enterprise plans, including all of Profound's paid plans, are quoted by sales. The real bill depends on prompts, engines and how often each is checked.
What drives the price of an AI visibility tracker?
Every tracker sells the same raw unit: an answer from an AI engine to one of your prompts. Peec AI states the formula plainly: monthly answers equal tracked prompts times active models times tracking frequency (Peec AI pricing). Four levers move the bill.
Prompts. The questions you track. 25 is a pilot; 100 to 350 covers a mid-size product line.
Engines. ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude, Copilot, Grok, Google AI Overviews and AI Mode each cost a separate run.
Frequency. Daily runs cost about seven times weekly runs.
Regions and languages. Some vendors charge per market; Peec says extra countries and languages cost nothing more on its plans.
A worked example: 50 prompts on 3 engines checked daily is 50 × 3 × 30 = 4,500 answers a month. The same panel checked weekly is about 650.
What do the leading tools charge?
Each block gives the plan, the figure and the limit worth knowing. All were read on the vendor's own pricing page on 24 October 2026.
Ahrefs Brand Radar
Pricing: custom prompts start at $50 a month, or $699 a month for all models. The AI Visibility Index, which maps visibility across what Ahrefs says are 496 million prompts, is $199 a month with 83 prompts a day and 2,500 checks a month, then $0.020 per extra check (Ahrefs).
What a check is: one prompt on one platform per update. Ahrefs notes that each Claude update uses 8 checks.
Best for: teams already on Ahrefs, whose paid plans include some free AI prompts.
Limitation: it measures and points to gaps; it does not change your site. The page may show prices in your local currency.
Semrush AI Visibility Toolkit
Pricing: a $99 a month add-on with 25 tracked prompts, AI search checks in Site Audit for up to 100 pages, and no free trial. Another 50 prompts cost $60 a month (Semrush). The bundled Semrush One plans are $199 a month with 50 prompts and $299 a month with 100 prompts, or $165.17 and $248.17 a month billed annually (Semrush pricing).
Best for: SEO teams already living in Semrush.
Limitation: the toolkit's Brand Performance reports use ChatGPT and Google AI Mode, so check engine coverage before you buy.
Peec AI
Pricing: Starter $95 a month (50 prompts), Pro $245 (150 prompts), Advanced $495 (350 prompts, 5 projects). Each plan includes 3 models; one more model costs $30, $70 or $140 a month by plan. Annual billing saves 15%. Enterprise is custom, up to 13 models (Peec AI).
Best for: teams that want transparent prompt-based pricing and daily data with unlimited users.
Limitation: it recommends actions; your team does the work.
AthenaHQ
Pricing: Essential is free with 300 credits on five engines. Starter is $295 a month with 3,600 credits, where one credit is one AI response, across eleven engines. Enterprise is custom (AthenaHQ).
Best for: teams that want wide engine coverage and a content optimization agent on a published price.
Limitation: 3,600 responses is 30 prompts on 4 engines checked daily. Bigger panels need a custom plan or extra credits.
Profound
Pricing: a free Trial runs 50 prompts daily for 7 days on ChatGPT, Gemini and Google AI Overviews. Enterprise is custom, with up to nine engines and SSO. Agencies add client workspaces at $399 a month each (Profound).
Best for: enterprise teams that want tracking plus an AI Marketer that drafts content.
Limitation: no self-serve paid price for brands is published. Older roundups quote a $99 starter tier that Profound's own page no longer shows.
What does a realistic budget look like by team size?
These are illustrations built from the published prices above, not quotes.
Pilot (one product, one market): 25 to 50 prompts on three engines, weekly or daily. Ahrefs custom prompts, Semrush's toolkit or Peec Starter: roughly $50 to $100 a month.
Growing B2B team: 100 to 150 prompts, four or five engines, daily. Peec Pro plus one added model is $315 a month; AthenaHQ Starter is $295 if the response count fits.
Multi-product or multi-market: 300 or more prompts, every major engine, regional splits. Peec Advanced at $495 plus add-ons, or an enterprise quote from any of the five.
What costs are not on the pricing page?
The subscription is usually the smaller cost.
Someone has to act on it. A tracker reports gaps; a person rewrites pages, fixes schema and pitches third-party sources. Ahrefs' survey of 439 SEO providers put the average agency retainer at about $3,209 a month (Ahrefs). Even a few hours a week in house costs more than most trackers.
Prompt maintenance. Writing, reviewing and pruning prompts takes time every month.
Seats and exports. Some plans cap users, API access or data history; check before you sign.
Overages. Credit and check models charge for growth. Ask what happens at the limit: pause, overage or forced upgrade.
How do you avoid overpaying?
Start with fewer, better prompts. 30 buyer questions you would actually lose deals on beat 300 generic ones.
Match frequency to decisions. If you review monthly, weekly sampling is enough. Daily sampling helps when you are testing changes.
Pick engines by buyer, not by list. Ask your sales team which assistants prospects mention on calls, and track those first.
Ask for the run count. A figure from one run per prompt is noise; insist the tool shows how many answers sit behind each number.
Check the annual discount. Semrush saves up to 17% and Peec 15% on annual billing.
Questions to ask every vendor:
How many answers per month does my plan include, after engines and frequency?
Are answers taken from APIs or logged-in apps, and does that differ by engine?
What happens when I exceed the limit?
Can I change prompts without losing trend history?
Can you build a tracker yourself for less?
You can, and some technical teams do. A script sends your prompts to each engine's API on a schedule, stores the answers and parses the cited URLs. The API bill for a small panel is modest. The hidden costs are elsewhere:
APIs are not the app. Peec's measurement guide warns that API, logged-out and logged-in answers can differ significantly, so a home-built tracker measures one view of each engine (Peec AI).
Google's AI surfaces are hard to capture. AI Overviews and AI Mode have no simple answer API, which is why vendors charge for them.
Maintenance. Engines change models, citation formats and rate limits. Someone has to keep the script running and the history comparable.
A spreadsheet plus a monthly manual check of 20 prompts is a sound free start. Move to a tool when you need trends you can defend.
How does Nagent's DRIS price this work?
We make Nagent, so here is how our own visibility agent, DRIS, is priced, for comparison. DRIS works on Nagent's Marketing team, and Nagent meters agent work in credits rather than per-tool subscriptions; the plans and what each includes are on Nagent pricing.
Prompts are priced before you commit. The prompt form shows what generating new prompts costs and what each accepted prompt adds to every full sweep, then the cost of the whole panel as it stands.
A daily cap you set. Answer-engine reads stop at a cap between 200 and 200,000 credits a day until you raise it.
Audits are cheap and fail free. An AEO page audit is about 10 credits. If no page returns readable content, the audit is marked "could not read" and charges nothing.
Panels are bounded. A tracked page holds at most 25 accepted prompts, so the panel spreads across pages instead of piling onto one.
What you get for the credits goes past tracking: DRIS also reads Search Console and Google Analytics 4, audits pages and drafts fixes that wait for a person to approve. What it does not do: publish straight to WordPress or Shopify, or analyse backlinks, which is coming soon.
Frequently Asked Questions
Are there free AEO or GEO tracking tools?
Yes, with limits. AthenaHQ's Essential plan is free with 300 credits, Profound offers a free 7-day trial, and Ahrefs includes some free AI prompts in paid Ahrefs plans. Manual tracking in a spreadsheet is free but slow.
Why do prices differ so much between tools?
They meter different units: prompts, checks, credits or responses. Convert each plan to answers per month (prompts × engines × runs) before comparing.
What are the best AI search visibility tools in 2026?
It depends on your stack. Semrush and Ahrefs suit teams already on those suites, Peec AI suits transparent self-serve tracking, AthenaHQ adds content help, and Profound suits enterprise budgets.
Is an AEO agency cheaper than a tool?
Rarely. Ahrefs' survey put average SEO agency retainers near $3,209 a month, against tools mostly under $500. But a tool alone does not make the fixes, so budget for the hours.
Want to see what a credit-metered visibility agent costs for your site? Book a Nagent demo.