The cheapest AI visibility tools — and the one-time alternative to all of them

There are two questions people actually ask before buying anything in this category: what is the cheapest one, and is there a way to just find out once without signing up for a monthly bill. Every list we could find answers neither, because the prices in them are stale, undated, or copied from a competitor's blog post. So we opened seventeen vendors' own pricing pages on 2026-08-01 and wrote down what they said, including which billing toggle the page was showing. Then we answered both questions with the numbers, including the ones that are inconvenient for us.

Method — and who wrote this

Who we are: AskedAbout sells a $79 one-time AI-visibility audit. We are the one-time row in the table below, which means we have an obvious interest in the answer. Read accordingly, and check the numbers — every one of them names the page it came from and the day we read it.

How the list was built. Our own audit engine runs a fixed panel of buyer questions against four engines (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google Gemini, Perplexity) three times each and records every domain those answers cite. The vendor list is the one that panel produced on 2026-07-28 for "What is a good Profound alternative for a small business?" — 47 distinct cited domains, of which every one that is an AI-visibility product with a public price was kept — plus seven well-known category tools the engines did not happen to cite that day. The list is unchanged from our 07-31 table. Every price was re-read on 2026-08-01 rather than aged forward, and re-reading changed two of them.

How the prices were read. Fifteen of the seventeen pages render prices in server HTML and were read with a plain HTTPS fetch. Two (peec.ai, trakkr.ai) render prices client-side and were read in a headless browser, as were ahrefs.com, semrush.com and rankscale.ai, where the billing toggle's default state had to be established by observation rather than assumed. On Rankscale we clicked Yearly and watched Pro move from $99 to $84, which is how we know the default view is the monthly rate. The full machine-readable file, including every tier's monthly and annual figure, is `growth/pricing/vendor-prices-2026-08-01.json` in our repo.

Three things we will not pretend about. We ran no feature bake-off and hold paid seats in none of these products — what is below is price, billing basis, and what the entry tier says it includes. Where a page showed only one billing basis we record only that one; we never derive the missing figure from a "save 20%" badge, because a discount badge is a claim about a price, not a price. And "cheapest" means cheapest readable published price among these seventeen on 2026-08-01 — it is not a claim about the whole category, because sales-led vendors publish no number at all.

Twelve months of every tool, cheapest first — read 2026-08-01

Median twelve-month entry cost across the seventeen: $960. Nightwatch's €948 is counted at face value, because we do not publish a converted figure we did not read on the page. Frase is in the table because the engines cited it, and flagged here because it is a content-optimization tool, not an answer tracker — it does not tell you how ChatGPT answers a question about your brand. Ahrefs' cheapest route is its custom prompt package at $50/mo, not its suite: the Lite suite plan is $129/mo and includes only 5 tracked prompts.

The finding: 7 of 17 pricing pages open on the annual rate

This is the part no roundup records, and it is why two "cheapest tool" lists can disagree while both being honestly written. Seven of the seventeen pages display the annual-billed rate by default, six default to monthly, and four print both bases at once. If you read the headline number off an annual-default page and then pay month to month, you pay more than the page told you — and three of those seven do not print the monthly figure anywhere we could read it.

Where both figures are readable, month-to-month costs 19.5% to 25% more than the number the page shows first. That is not a scandal — annual discounts are ordinary and every one of these pages labels the basis honestly if you read the small text. It matters because a list of "entry prices" that does not record the basis is comparing four different things, and because a shopper who wants to cancel in three months is not being quoted the price they will pay.

"Is there a one-time AI visibility audit instead of a monthly subscription?"

Among these seventeen vendors: no. Zero of them publish a one-time purchase. Three publish a free tier — Ahrefs Free, Alhena's 25-conversations-a-month plan, AthenaHQ's $25 starting credit — and eight publish a free trial, but a free tier is a limited ongoing account, not a one-off answer, and every trial ends in a subscription decision. The only non-recurring option in the table is ours, and here is exactly what it is, so you can decide against it if it does not fit: $79, once. 25 buyer questions run against ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Claude, three samples each — 300 answers — plus a prioritized fix list. No card kept on file, nothing to cancel. There is a free two-engine check first, so you can see the shape of the answer before you spend anything.

The honest arithmetic against us: a year of the cheapest subscription in this table is $240, three times the price of one audit — so if what you want is a trend line, we are not the cheap option, we are the wrong option. Twelve months of the median tool is $960, twelve times a single audit. That gap is the whole case for buying a snapshot first: you find out whether you have a problem before you commit to watching it. If the audit says you are fine, you are done for $79. If it says you are invisible, you now know which subscription above is worth its monthly bill — and you will be choosing it with evidence instead of a free trial's dashboard.

"What is the cheapest AI visibility or brand-monitoring tool?"

The cheapest ongoing subscription we could read on 2026-08-01 is Rankscale, "Starting at $20/mo" for Essentials — $240 a year. Second is Otterly.ai at $25/mo on annual billing ($29 month-to-month), and Otterly is the cheapest whose own page prints a four-engine list at the entry tier: AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Perplexity and Copilot. Read that engine list before you buy anything at this end of the market. Otterly charges $9/mo each for Google Gemini and Google AI Mode on the Lite tier — fine if your buyers do not use them, and a hidden price rise of more than 60% if they do.

The cheapest thing that is not a tool at all is the free check — ours, or one of the three free tiers above. It will tell you whether you appear in a couple of answers. It will not tell you who is being named instead of you, on which engine, or why, because that takes repeated sampling across engines and nobody gives that away.

If you already pay for an SEO suite, start there

Do not buy a second subscription before opening the one you have. Ahrefs Lite ($129/mo) includes Brand Radar with 5 tracked prompts and 150 checks a month; Semrush's Starter "SEO + AI Search" ($199/mo month-to-month) tracks 50 prompts daily; SE Ranking sells AI Search as an $89/mo add-on on top of a $129/mo Core plan. Five prompts is not a monitoring programme. It is enough to find out whether you have a problem, and you are already paying for it. Ahrefs also sells Brand Radar standalone — its page says so explicitly — from $199/mo, with custom prompt packages at $50, $100 and $250 a month.

Where AskedAbout is the wrong choice — stated plainly

• You want a trend line. We sell a snapshot. Rankscale at $20/mo and Otterly at $25–29/mo are cheaper than us within four months and do something we do not do at all.
• You want alerts. We have none. No dashboard, no Slack integration, no "your visibility dropped" email.
• You want to know what the ChatGPT consumer app shows. We query the engines through their official APIs — repeatable and defensible, but not byte-identical to what a logged-in person sees with memory and personalization on. No tool on this page can honestly claim otherwise; we are saying it out loud.
• You run dozens of brands under one login. We sell a white-label Agency 5-pack at $249 and nothing bigger. At 30 clients, Trakkr Scale ($500/mo, 10 brands), Rankability Agency ($799/mo) or Peec Advanced ($495/mo) are built for you and we are not.
• You want a seat, a QBR and a customer success manager. Buy the enterprise end of this table. Nothing at the cheap end replaces a vendor with an onboarding call and an SLA.

A correction we made while building this page

Re-reading beats remembering, and it caught two of our own errors in one morning. Our Ahrefs comparison page said Brand Radar was not a standalone product and priced its tiers at "≈ $398/mo and ≈ $699/mo" — figures sourced to third-party reviews in June 2026. On 2026-08-01, ahrefs.com/pricing carries no figure resembling either, and its own FAQ states plainly that "Brand Radar is available as a standalone tool." We corrected that page in the same commit as this one, with the source and the read date on it. Separately, our 07-31 file recorded Peec AI at $80/mo from an annual badge; the page opens on Monthly at $95/mo, and both bases are now recorded. A price you could not read on the vendor's own page is not a price we publish — that rule is why this page exists in the shape it does, and it cost us two claims to keep.

If you find a figure here that is out of date, tell us at hello@askedabout.com. We will re-read the page, correct it, and date the correction rather than quietly editing it.

Why we publish our own zero

Across the full 12-question panel behind this table, the four engines cited 538 distinct domains in 1,465 citation entries, and askedabout.com appears in none of them — including on the two questions this page is written for. We are publishing that because it rules out the comfortable explanation that engines only cite established authorities: the cited set is full of companies newer and smaller than us. Our working hypothesis is artifact shape — the pages engines cite on these questions are dated, multi-vendor, machine-readable tables, and until 2026-07-31 every page we had built was a head-to-head. This page and its sibling are the test. We will report the result either way on 2026-08-24, after three scoring runs of the same panel, including if it says we were wrong.

Related reading: the best Profound alternatives, with real prices · AI visibility tools compared · AskedAbout vs Otterly.ai · AskedAbout vs Peec AI · AskedAbout vs Scrunch AI · how to check whether AI recommends your business.

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