| Quick answer |
|---|
| For SEO professionals, Otterly.AI at $29 a month is the best entry point and Scrunch AI is the cheapest at scale, at roughly $0.86 per tracked prompt on its $300 Starter plan. Semrush’s AI Visibility Toolkit at $99 a month suits teams already inside Semrush. |
| How we compare |
|---|
| Every plan is normalised to cost per tracked prompt per month, because prompt allowance is what constrains an SEO workflow. Prices were read from the vendor pages linked below in September 2026, and marked where they come from third-party reports instead because the vendor publishes no rate card. Every price was re-checked against the vendor’s own pricing page in September 2026, and figures available only from third-party trackers are marked as reported. No vendor paid for placement. We did not run a head-to-head accuracy test of these platforms. |
Table of Contents
Why this is not just another rank tracker
The unit of measurement changes, and that is the whole adjustment. Rank tracking returns an ordinal for a URL against a query. AI search monitoring returns a presence rate for a brand against a prompt, sampled repeatedly, because generated answers vary between runs.
That has two consequences SEO professionals feel immediately. First, one observation means nothing — you need repeated samples before a movement is real. Second, your keyword list does not transfer. Prompts are conversational and longer, and a good prompt set looks like a buyer’s actual question rather than a head term. Prompt tracking is the skill this category demands, and it is closer to survey design than to keyword research.
Best AI search monitoring tool for SEO professionals compared
| Tool | Entry price | Prompts included | Cost per prompt | Pricing published? |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Scrunch AI | $300/mo ($250 annual) | 350 | ~$0.86 | Yes — vendor page |
| Otterly.AI Premium | $489/mo | 400 | ~$1.22 | Yes — vendor page |
| Otterly.AI Standard | $189/mo | 100 | ~$1.89 | Yes — vendor page |
| Otterly.AI Lite | $29/mo | 15 | ~$1.93 | Yes — vendor page |
| Profound Starter | ~$99/mo | 50 (ChatGPT only) | ~$1.98 | Yes — vendor page |
| Peec AI Starter | ~$95 (€85)/mo | 50 | ~$1.90 | Third-party reports |
| Semrush AI Toolkit | $99/mo per domain | 25 | ~$3.96 | Yes — vendor page |
| AthenaHQ Self-Serve | $295/mo | 3,600 credits | Not comparable | Yes — vendor page |
The ranking inverts the way this category is usually presented. The most expensive entry plan has the lowest unit cost, and the cheapest has one of the highest. Scrunch charges roughly four and a half times Otterly Lite’s headline price and delivers more than twenty times the prompt allowance.
The six tools in detail
Otterly.AI
Otterly.AI is the cheapest credible starting point. Otterly publishes Lite at $29 a month for 15 prompts, Standard at $189 for 100 and Premium at $489 for 400, all covering ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity and Microsoft Copilot with daily tracking. Claude, Gemini and Google AI Mode are paid add-ons.
Semrush AI Visibility Toolkit
The Semrush AI Visibility Toolkit is a separate add-on rather than part of a core Semrush plan. Semrush lists it at $99 a month per domain billed annually, covering 25 daily-tracked prompts and mentions from ChatGPT, Google AI, Gemini and Perplexity, with extra users from $45 a month. Convenient if your reporting already lives in Semrush.
Peec AI
Peec AI is a mid-market European platform with unlimited seats, which matters for agencies billing several people against one licence. Its prices render in-browser rather than in the page text; trackers report Starter at $95 (€85) a month for 50 prompts and Pro at $245 (€205) for 150, with three models included and about 15% off annual billing — roughly $1.90 a prompt on Starter.
Scrunch AI
Scrunch AI has the highest entry price and the lowest unit cost. Scrunch lists Starter at $300 a month, or $250 billed annually, for 350 custom prompts and three seats, with Growth at $500 a month for 700 prompts and five seats. Extra seats are $25 a month. A seven-day trial is offered on Starter.
AthenaHQ
AthenaHQ is positioned at agencies and in-house marketing teams. Its pricing page lists Starter at $295 a month for 3,600 credits and a free Essential tier with 300 credits. Because it meters credits rather than prompts, the bill moves with usage and is harder to forecast than a flat prompt allowance.
Profound
Profound is the most-cited enterprise name. Its pricing page lists Starter at $99 a month billed yearly for 50 prompts on ChatGPT only, Growth at $399 for 100 prompts across three engines, and Enterprise quoted individually.
The agency number: cost per client site
Cost per prompt is the right unit for one brand. For an agency it hides the decision that actually moves the invoice, which is whether a licence pools across client domains and seats or is sold per domain and per user. Model a realistic shop — six people, ten client sites — on the published August 2026 rates and the spread is much wider than the entry prices suggest.
| Plan | What the licence covers | Arithmetic for 6 seats and 10 client sites | Monthly total | Per client site |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Otterly.AI Standard | 100 prompts, unlimited seats, pooled | 189, no seat charge | $189.00 | 189 ÷ 10 = $18.90 |
| Scrunch AI Starter | 350 prompts, 3 seats, extra seats $25 | 300 + (3 × 25) | $375.00 | 375 ÷ 10 = $37.50 |
| Otterly.AI Premium | 400 prompts, unlimited seats, pooled | 489, no seat charge | $489.00 | 489 ÷ 10 = $48.90 |
| Semrush AI Visibility Toolkit | 25 prompts per domain, extra users from $45 | (99 × 10) + (5 × 45) | $1,215.00 | 1,215 ÷ 10 = $121.50 |
That is a 6.4× spread between the cheapest and dearest row (1,215 ÷ 189), and almost none of it comes from features. It comes from licensing shape. A pooled plan lets you spend 40 prompts on the client who needs them and 10 on the one who does not; a per-domain licence charges you the same for both and multiplies by ten. Read the per-client column with the prompt column beside it, though: Otterly Standard is $18.90 a client but only ten prompts each, while the Semrush toolkit gives 25 per client for $121.50 — convenience and depth you may or may not want to buy.
The break-even is easy to compute for your own shop. Divide the pooled plan’s prompt allowance by your client count, and if the result is fewer prompts than a client genuinely needs, the pooled plan is not cheaper, it is smaller. Scrunch Starter at 350 pooled prompts covers 35 per client at ten clients for $37.50 each, which is the strongest published combination of depth and price on this page. Whichever way it lands, take the wider answer engine optimization tool comparison into the same spreadsheet before you sign, because several adjacent products price on the same two axes.
How to build a prompt set worth paying for
Your prompt allowance is the budget. Spend it on prompts that could change a decision, not on ones that flatter the brand:
- Category prompts, not brand prompts. “Best AI search monitoring tools” tells you something. “Is [your brand] good?” tells you nothing, because you will always appear.
- Include your competitors’ strongest ground. Share of voice only means something on prompts you might lose.
- Cover the buying stage spread — problem-aware, solution-aware and vendor-comparison prompts behave very differently in generated answers.
- Freeze the set for a quarter. Changing prompts mid-period destroys the trend line, which is the only output clients actually care about.
- Budget for repetition. Because answers vary, a prompt sampled daily for a month is one data point with confidence; sampled once, it is an anecdote.
Then hold the tool to a reporting standard, not a dashboard standard. The deliverable an SEO professional needs is a defensible trend in share of voice against named competitors on a fixed prompt set — everything else in these products is supporting detail. Our wider roundup of AI search monitoring tools covers the full field, and generative engine optimization covers the page-side work that moves the numbers. The LLMEO execution playbook turns that into a shipping schedule, and our marketing AI round-up covers the reporting stack around it.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the best AI search monitoring tool for SEO professionals?
Otterly.AI at $29 a month is the best entry point, and Scrunch AI is the best value at scale. Scrunch’s $300 Starter plan covers 350 prompts, which works out at roughly $0.86 per tracked prompt against $1.93 on Otterly Lite. If your reporting already runs through Semrush, its AI Visibility Toolkit at $99 a month per domain avoids a second dashboard.
How should an agency report AI visibility to clients?
Report a trend, not a snapshot. Freeze each client’s prompt set for the quarter, then show presence rate, share of voice against the two or three competitors they care about, citation rate, and the domains each engine cited. The cited-domains list is what turns the report into a work plan, because it names the pages to earn or outrank.
How many prompts does each client need?
Divide a pooled plan’s allowance by your client count and compare it with what each client genuinely needs. Scrunch Starter’s 350 pooled prompts give 35 per client across ten clients; Otterly Standard’s 100 give ten. Most single-brand programmes start between 15 and 50 prompts, so a client needing more than a pooled plan’s share is the signal to move up a tier.
Which AI engines should SEO professionals track first?
Start with ChatGPT and Google AI Overviews, then add Perplexity. Those three cover the overwhelming majority of assistant-mediated research for most B2B and consumer categories. Gemini matters if your audience is inside Google Workspace. The practical constraint is commercial rather than editorial: several vendors sell Gemini, Claude and Google AI Mode as per-engine add-ons, so each additional engine has a line-item cost.
Is AI visibility tracking different from rank tracking for SEO professionals?
Yes, and the difference is structural rather than cosmetic. A rank tracker asks “what position is this URL for this query?” and returns an ordinal. An AI visibility tool asks “was this brand named in the generated answer, and was it linked?” and returns a presence rate across repeated samples. Because model output varies between runs, the unit is a percentage over many samples, not a single position — which is why prompt-set design matters more than keyword selection.
Conclusion
For a single brand, start at Otterly Lite for $29 a month and upgrade when 15 prompts stops being enough. For an agency or an in-house team covering several markets, Scrunch Starter is the better arithmetic at roughly $0.86 per tracked prompt, and its seven-day trial lets you test before committing $300.
Remember what none of these products do — they measure AI visibility, they do not create it. Our guide to ranking in ChatGPT covers the work that actually changes the number.
