An AI visibility tool tracks a set of prompts across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews and similar surfaces, records whether your brand is named and lists the pages the model cited instead. Five tools qualified for this comparison by a stated method. Their published prices, read from each vendor’s own page on 10 August 2026, run from $29 a month to $399. Two of the five publish no price at all.
The prices are the checkable part. The uncomfortable part is at the bottom: the four specialists carry 81 AI citations between them across six platforms, against 31,547 for Semrush.
Buying a tool is one of four routes. Buying AI search work sets out the others, with every verified UK price in one place.
How were these five chosen?
By counting, not by preference.
Method. We took the ten results on the first page of Google for “ai visibility tools” in the UK (Ahrefs serp-overview, GB, 10 August 2026). Five of the ten are lists of tools: Brainlabs at position 1, Zapier at 3, Frase at 4, Backlinko at 6, Rankability at 7. We read all five, recorded every tool named as a pick, then kept the tools named on at least three of the five lists.
That produces five: Profound, Peec AI, Semrush, ZipTie and Otterly.AI. It excludes about twenty tools named once or twice, including AthenaHQ, Scrunch AI, Rankscale, SE Ranking, AirOps, Writesonic, LLMrefs, Nightwatch and Ahrefs.
Two things about the lists themselves, worth knowing before you read one.
Two of the five rank themselves first. Frase names Frase the best AI visibility tool of 2026 in its own list of ten. Rankability puts Rankability at number one in its own list of twenty-two. Brainlabs is the honourable exception: it appears sixth in its own ranking, behind five competitors. This is the same pattern we found in the UK agency lists, where both UK publishers ranked themselves first.
The lists disagree with the vendors on price. Zapier puts Profound at “from $82.50/month”. Backlinko puts it at $99. Rankability says “from $499/mo historically”. Profound’s own page says $99. Two lists quote Peec AI at €89 a month, a figure Peec’s pricing page does not carry. So every price below was read from the vendor, not from a list.
What do they actually cost?
Read from each vendor’s own pricing page on 10 August 2026.
| Tool | Entry price | What that buys | Top published tier |
|---|---|---|---|
| Otterly.AI | $29/mo | 15 prompts, 4 engines | $489/mo, 400 prompts |
| ZipTie | $69/mo | 500 AI searches, 3 engines | $159/mo, 2,000 searches |
| Profound | $99/mo | 50 prompts, ChatGPT only | $399/mo, 3 engines, 100 prompts |
| Semrush | $139/mo | AI search inside the SEO plan | $549/mo |
| Peec AI | not published | 6 engines on every tier | not published |
Otterly’s $29 is monthly billing. Annual billing brings it to $25. Profound’s $99 is the annual rate; the page quotes yearly billing throughout. Semrush’s $139 is the monthly rate for its SEO plan, $117.33 if paid annually.
Three readings.
The cheapest entry tier tracks more engines than the dearest one. Otterly at $29 covers ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity and Copilot. Profound at $99 covers ChatGPT alone. You reach three engines on Profound at $399. If the question you are answering is “where am I invisible”, a single-engine tool answers a sixth of it.
Nobody sells the same unit. Otterly sells prompts. ZipTie sells AI searches. Profound sells prompts plus agent credits. Semrush sells a plan. Peec sells countries per project. This is why the comparison lists disagree with each other and with the vendors: there is no shared unit to disagree about.
Normalised anyway, they cluster. Cost per tracked prompt per month: Otterly Lite $1.93, Otterly Standard $1.89, Profound Starter $1.98. The outlier is Profound Growth at $3.99 per prompt, which buys three engines instead of one. Around $2 a prompt a month appears to be the going rate for this category.
Why does Peec AI publish no price?
We do not know. We can tell you what the page contains.
peec.ai/pricing on 10 August 2026 shows four tiers, Starter, Pro, Advanced and Enterprise, with a full feature comparison: countries tracked per project, tracking frequency, projects included, six engines on every tier. No figures. We fetched the raw page as well as reading it. The only currency string anywhere in 844KB of markup is “€7m”, in a line about the money the company has raised. To see a price you start a signup or contact sales.
Meanwhile two of the five UK-ranking lists quote Peec at €89 a month for Starter. One adds €199 for Pro plus €499 upwards for Enterprise. Those figures may well have been accurate when they were written. They are not on the vendor’s page today, which makes them the sort of number you should not spend against.
Semrush is a milder version of the same problem. Two lists quote a $99 per domain AI Visibility Toolkit. Semrush’s own pricing page carries no standalone AI toolkit price; the AI search features sit inside the paid plans from $139 a month.
Do the tools have any AI visibility themselves?
This is the test we can run on all of them at once, so we ran it.
Method. Ahrefs’ AI citation index (site-explorer-ai-responses-count, mode=subdomains, no country filter), queried on 10 August 2026. It counts citation links pointing at a domain across the AI answers Ahrefs samples, split by platform. One method, one date, applied to every vendor.
| Vendor | ChatGPT | Perplexity | AI Overviews | Gemini | Copilot | Grok | Total |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Semrush | 7,097 | 10,578 | 4,339 | 2,912 | 3,355 | 3,266 | 31,547 |
| Ahrefs | 6,850 | 4,559 | 776 | 1,152 | 1,301 | 970 | 15,608 |
| Profound | 10 | 6 | 5 | 9 | 0 | 16 | 46 |
| Otterly.AI | 4 | 12 | 1 | 1 | 2 | 6 | 26 |
| ZipTie | 3 | 4 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 8 |
| Peec AI | 0 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 1 |
The four specialists total 81 citations across six platforms. Semrush has 389 times that on its own.
We checked four more specialists outside the shortlist, in case the five were unrepresentative. AthenaHQ 38, Evertune 22, Rankscale 6, Scrunch AI 1. Eight specialists, 148 citations between them. The pattern holds.
What this does not mean. It does not mean the specialist tools are bad. We are not going to pretend it does. Semrush and Ahrefs are enormous, decade-old content estates publishing on hundreds of subjects. This index counts every one of them. Comparing a two-year-old startup’s domain with semrush.com on total citations is not a fair fight. It is not intended as one.
What it does mean. Two things a buyer should carry into the demo. The first is mechanical: citations accrue to large, long-established, heavily-referenced domains, which is the actual finding underneath the numbers and the reason a citation count is hard to move quickly. The second is narrower. Peec AI, named on all five UK-ranking lists, carries one citation across six AI platforms. Whatever its product does, the models do not currently reach for its domain when answering questions about this category.
Our disclosure. Ahrefs appears in that table and Ahrefs is the index the table is built from. It was named on two of the five lists, so it did not qualify for the price comparison. We use its citation index for our own monthly measurement, which makes us a customer, not a neutral party. The alternative was to leave it out of a table it belongs in, which seemed worse.
Which should you buy?
Answer three questions before you look at any of them.
- How many prompts do you actually need? Not “how many does the plan include”. Write your buying questions down first. Most UK B2B businesses land between 15 and 40. At around $2 a prompt a month, that sizes the budget before a salesperson does.
- Which surfaces matter to your buyers? If your market lives in Google, an AI Overviews and AI Mode tool matters more than a ChatGPT-only one at the same price. If your buyers use ChatGPT at their desks, the reverse.
- Can you get the cited sources out, rather than the score alone? The list of pages the model leaned on is the part you act on. A score out of 100 tells you the temperature. The source list tells you which page to go and get mentioned on.
Then run the free version first. Fifteen prompts, three runs each, recorded by hand, takes an afternoon. Do that before you spend anything, because it tells you whether the paid version would have told you something you did not already know. Two of these tools cost less per month than an hour of agency time, so this is not about saving the $29. It is about knowing what the number means when it arrives.
If the tool is going to be part of a bought audit rather than something you run yourself, what an AI search audit should cost has every published UK price we could verify. For the vocabulary underneath all of it, start with what AI visibility means.
Data in this article: SERP composition from Ahrefs serp-overview, GB, 10 August 2026. Tool selection by counting appearances across the five list pages ranking on that SERP, all read the same day. Every price read from the vendor’s own pricing page on 10 August 2026 (tryprofound.com, peec.ai, otterly.ai, ziptie.dev, semrush.com). Citation counts from Ahrefs site-explorer-ai-responses-count, mode=subdomains, 10 August 2026. Prices are the vendors’ own, in the currency each vendor quotes; none of them publishes in sterling.