AI Visibility Tool Pricing in 2026: Cost per Tracked Question, and Why Xtrusio Starts Free

AI visibility tool pricing at a glance

We took each rival's price from its vendor's own pricing page on October 9, 2026 (Profound and Ahrefs again on October 10), and every row links to the page we used. Prices change, so open the linked page before you buy.

Cost per tracked question, plan by plan

A sticker price tells you little until you know what it buys. The common unit we use here is the tracked question: one prompt a tool puts to the AI engines for you, again and again. For every paid plan that is sold in prompts, we took the price its vendor shows with monthly billing and divided it by the number of prompts in that plan. Each pricing page was re-read in Chrome on October 10, 2026. Xtrusio is shown first and kept out of the order, because it is not sold per question.

The measure leaves out engines and frequency, which each vendor bundles differently.

Four vendors sell in a different unit or by quote, so their plans sit outside that order:

Read down the cost column and two patterns show. Larger tiers lower the unit price: a Peec AI question falls from $1.90 on Starter to $1.41 on Advanced, and an Otterly.AI question from $1.93 on Lite to $1.22 on Premium. And Semrush's single plan lands at the top of the range, because its $99 covers 25 prompts for one domain. None of these figures counts the work that follows a report, which the sections below put a price on.

Xtrusio sits off this scale on purpose: a free self-serve plan; managed service with a free trial, then tiered plans (details on request). Xtrusio covers the buyer questions you approve, with scans run on demand or on a schedule.

Why the price on the page is not the price you pay

The headline number is rarely what a team ends up paying. Four things move it.

Prompts times engines times runs. Most tools price by prompts, but what you actually get is answers. Peec AI's own page gives the formula: 25 prompts across 3 models for 30 days is 25 x 3 x 30 = 2,250 AI answers. A plan with more prompts on fewer engines can give you less than it looks.

Engines your buyers use may cost extra. Otterly.AI's base plans cover ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity and Copilot. Claude, Google AI Mode and Gemini are add-ons; on Lite they are $29, $9 and $9 a month. On Ahrefs Brand Radar, Claude uses eight checks per update instead of one. Peec AI's paid plans let you choose three models and charge for more.

Monthly versus annual. Otterly.AI and Peec AI both show 15% off for annual billing, so Otterly's Lite drops to $25 a month on an annual plan. Semrush showed the same $99 a month per domain for Base on both toggles.

Seats and extras. Peec AI and Otterly.AI include unlimited users. Scrunch Core includes five licences. Semrush lists additional users starting at $45 a month.

One more warning: Profound prices brands and agencies on separate tabs of one pricing page. The brand tab offers a free Trial and a custom Enterprise plan, while the agency tab puts Agency Growth at $99 a month and charges $399 a month for each client workspace. A list that quotes one tab as the whole price is mixing two buyers, so check which tab fits you and trust the vendor's page, with a date on it.

The real cost of a tracker: licence plus the work after

A tracker tells you which questions you are missing from. It does not close the gap. Every gap it finds becomes work for someone on your team:

1. Research. Find out what the engine searched for and which pages it cited instead of yours.
2. Write. Create or rewrite the page that should have been cited.
3. Place. Win mentions on the sites the engine already trusts: industry publications, guest posts, press coverage, LinkedIn, Reddit, YouTube.
4. Verify. Wait for the next scan and check whether the engine now cites that exact page on that question.

So the honest monthly cost of a tracker looks like this:

Licence + add-ons (engines, prompts, seats) + (gaps you act on x hours per gap x your team's hourly cost) + any placement or PR fees

We have not put numbers into that formula, because your rates and your gap count are yours. Run it with your own figures. The pricing pages cover only the first term. The rest grows with every gap the tool finds, which means a tracker that works well also creates more work.

That is the difference between buying measurement and buying results. If you price only the licence, you are pricing half of the job.

Already paying for a tool and facing a renewal? Our cost-per-cited-page test for AI visibility contract renewals turns the same sum into a renew, renegotiate or stop decision.

For ways to track citations on a smaller budget, see our cheaper Profound alternative guide.

Xtrusio: priced around getting cited

Xtrusio is our product, so we put it first. It is built for the second half of that formula, the work after measurement.

It asks the questions your buyers ask. Xtrusio puts your buyers' questions to ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, Grok, Google AI Overviews and Google AI Mode. It keeps every full answer, every brand named and every page cited, and reports visibility, share of voice, sentiment, average position and citations by engine, topic and buyer persona.

It plans from what the engines search. In Xtrusio's checks, ChatGPT and Claude search the web on every answer; Gemini and Grok decide when to search. Xtrusio records the searches ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Grok run and drafts a content plan for each buyer question from those searches and the sites the engines cite. A strategist approves the plan, and each piece gets the right channel: your blog, LinkedIn, Medium, Reddit, YouTube, guest posts or PR.

It does the writing and the placing. Xtrusio writes and scores articles, checks every link before approval and publishes to your blog where it is connected. It drafts LinkedIn posts, YouTube scripts, Medium essays and press releases from each article. Guest posts go through about 2,000 publisher sites in its network, and PR runs through Connectively, Featured, HARO and SourceBottle with a journalist team.

It only counts what gets cited. Every piece is tied to the question it targets. It counts as verified only when an engine's answer to that question cites that exact URL in a later scan. For each placement you see whether that page was cited, and on which question.

It protects what you already rank for. Xtrusio connects to Google Search Console and flags pages that are slipping in Google, with the reason in plain words.

It keeps your data separate. Provider keys and secrets stay server-side and encrypted, access is role-based, and each client gets its own separate deployment and data.

On price, there are two ways in. Start free on the self-serve plan and run it yourself, or let our team run it as a managed service with a free trial, then tiered plans (details on request).

The other six, by the job each plan covers

Profound suits large teams that want a tailored enterprise package across up to nine answer engines, with AI Marketer credits and reusable Agents. The free Trial runs 50 prompts daily for seven days on three engines. For a side-by-side view, read Xtrusio vs Profound.

Peec AI suits an in-house SEO or content team that wants daily tracking on three chosen models and will act on the data itself. Every plan includes unlimited users.

Semrush AI Visibility suits teams already working in Semrush who want AI mentions for one domain next to their SEO data. An SEO suite such as Semrush covers keyword research; the AI Visibility Base plan adds 25 tracked prompts.

Otterly.AI suits small teams that want the lowest paid entry price and are happy to add engines one at a time.

Ahrefs Brand Radar suits existing Ahrefs customers, because paid plans already include a small daily allowance of custom prompts, so the extra cost to start can be zero.

Scrunch suits teams focused on how AI agents read their own website, with site audits and agent traffic on Core and its Agent Experience Platform on Enterprise.

If price is only one of your filters, start from our guide to the best AI visibility and monitoring tools, chosen by what you need to monitor.

How to check what a plan really buys

A price per tracked question only means something once you know what each unit buys. Put these four questions to every vendor before you sign:

1. How many answers does one unit buy? Multiply prompts by engines by runs per month for the plan you would buy.
2. Which engines does the unit include? List the engines your buyers use and add every add-on needed to cover them.
3. What happens after a unit finds a gap? For one real gap, ask who researches it, who writes the page, who places it and what that costs.
4. What proves the spend worked? On the same question, how will you see that an engine now cites your exact page?

If a vendor's answers stop after the first two, you are paying per question for measurement alone. Xtrusio is built to answer all four.

See what each Xtrusio plan includes and start with your own buyer questions.