The best LLM SEO tools in 2026, ranked by what you actually pay
LLM SEO tools track whether ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Google's AI answers mention your brand. As of September 2026 the cheapest published entry prices are Rankscale from $20/mo, Otterly.ai and RankBull at $29/mo, Knowatoa at $59/mo and Writesonic at $79/mo. Profound and Brandlight publish no pricing at all.
Most roundups in this category quote prices that went stale months ago. We opened all fifteen pricing pages on 29 September 2026 and wrote down exactly what was on them, including the two companies that publish no price at all. Disclosure: RankBull is our product, and it is not the cheapest tracker on this list.
15
pricing pages we opened ourselves
$20–$800
range of published monthly entry prices
2
tools that publish no price at all
3
whose cheapest tier covers 3 engines or fewer
Methodology
How we compared these tools, and our bias stated plainly
First the disclosure: RankBull is our own product. You should read everything below with that in mind, which is why this page is ranked by published price rather than by our opinion of who is best, and why the section about our own limitations is as long as the sections about everyone else's.
We asked four questions of every tool. One: does it actually send prompts to AI engines, or does it score your site's markup and call that visibility? Two: what does the cheapest tier you can buy without talking to a salesperson really cost? Three: which engines does that specific tier cover, not which logos appear on the homepage? Four: is the price public at all?
Every figure here was read off the vendor's own pricing page on 29 September 2026. Where a page would not render a price without JavaScript, or returned a 404, we say so rather than repeating a number from another blog. Prices in this category change monthly, so treat this page as dated evidence, not gospel, and click through before you buy.
One claim we deliberately do not make about any competitor: that it shows you the verbatim text of an AI answer. Several of them may well do it. We could not confirm it from first-party sources for any rival, so we left it out rather than guess.
The fastest way to sort this category: ask a vendor which AI engines your money covers on the tier you would actually buy, not which logos are on the homepage. In three of the fifteen, the answer is three engines or fewer.
What each tool costs to start
Published entry prices fall into three groups. Under $100 a month: Rankscale (from $20), Otterly.ai and RankBull ($29), Knowatoa ($59), Writesonic ($79) and Semrush's AI Visibility Toolkit ($99, billed annually, one domain). At $100 to $300: Trakkr ($100), Ahrefs Brand Radar standalone (from $199), Scrunch AI ($250 on annual billing, $300 month to month) and AthenaHQ ($295, after a genuinely free tier). Above that: Goodie AI ($399) and Evertune ($800).
Two companies publish nothing. Profound, the best-funded company in the category, offers a seven-day trial limited to 50 prompts a day across three engines and then quotes enterprise pricing through an account team. Brandlight's pricing URL returns a 404 and every button is a demo request. Third-party blogs quote figures for both; none of those figures could be verified first-party, so they are not repeated here.
Peec AI sits in between. Its pricing page does not render prices without JavaScript, but Peec's own AI-facing instructions page listed Starter at $95, Pro at $245 and Advanced at $495 a month, confirmed live as of July 2026. Peec also published a pricing update on 29 September 2026, which means those numbers may already be wrong. Check the live page before committing.
According to RankBull's review of sixteen AI visibility tools' own pricing pages on 30 September 2026, published entry prices run from $20 to $800 a month — and two of the sixteen publish no price at all. Read by hand, not scraped. Vendors in this category reprice often, so re-verify before you buy.
Read the small print
What the entry price hides
A headline price in this category usually buys you fewer engines, fewer prompts or fewer seats than the marketing suggests. These are the specific gaps we found on the vendors' own pages.
- Writesonic, $79/mo — The homepage names ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Copilot and Grok. The self-serve tiers cover ChatGPT, Gemini and AI Overviews; the full platform list is Enterprise-only.
- Otterly.ai, $29/mo — Fifteen prompts across four engines. Gemini, Claude and Google AI Mode are paid add-ons ranging from $9 to $439 a month on top.
- Semrush AI Visibility Toolkit, $99/mo — Billed annually, one domain, 25 custom prompts tracked daily. Extra users are from $45 a month.
- SE Ranking, $71.20/mo — That is the AI Search add-on price on annual billing, and it requires a Core plan from $103.20, so the real entry point is about $174 a month.
- Ahrefs Brand Radar, from $199/mo — Standalone, or $50–$250 prompt packages on top of a base plan from $129. A Claude check costs eight credits where other platforms cost one, and the price shown changes currency by region.
- Scrunch AI, $250/mo — Annual billing; month to month is $300. Three users and five page audits on that tier, with extra seats at $75 a month.
- AthenaHQ, free then $295/mo — The free Essential tier is real: $25 of credit, five engines, unlimited members. Starter at $295 unlocks all eleven models, and every AI response consumes a credit, so your actual monthly cost depends on how much you track.
- Knowatoa, $59/mo — The pricing table does not publish a prompt cap. The FAQ answers the question with an invitation to schedule a call, which tells you what you need to know about planning a budget.
Which tool fits which buyer
Almost every tool in this category was built for a marketing team with a budget, and the pricing shows it. Sorting by who is actually being served gets you to a shortlist faster than sorting by feature tables.
- Solo operators and small businesses — Rankscale, Otterly.ai, RankBull, Knowatoa and Writesonic are the only tools with a self-serve price under $100. AthenaHQ's free tier also belongs here if you only need a periodic check rather than continuous tracking.
- Agencies managing several brands — Trakkr's Scale tier ($500/mo, ten brands, white-label portals), Rankscale Growth ($385, white-label and REST API), Goodie's agency plan ($275) and Scrunch are built for this. Peec and Otterly publish agency tiers too.
- Enterprise marketing teams — Profound, Brandlight, Evertune and AthenaHQ Enterprise sell here, with SSO, audit logs and account management. Expect a demo call and a quote rather than a checkout page.
- Ecommerce and Shopify stores — Goodie advertises SKU-level commerce visibility, and RankBull ships a native Shopify app. Most other tools in this list treat a store as just another website.
Our own entry, disclosed
Where RankBull fits, and where it doesn't
RankBull starts at $29 a month, which buys ten tracked prompts across two AI engines for one site, with weekly refreshes and 120 tracked responses a month. Growth at $79 raises that to twenty prompts, four engines and three sites; Scale at $199 covers fifty prompts, six engines and six sites. There is also a one-time lifetime licence at $499, currently $99 for the first ten buyers, which you run on your own infrastructure with your own API keys.
Here is the honest comparison a buyer deserves. Otterly.ai charges the same $29 and gives you fifteen prompts across four engines, more tracking than our Starter tier. If pure tracking breadth at the lowest price is what you want, that is the better buy, and we would rather say so here than have you discover it after paying us.
What RankBull adds for the same money is the half that comes after the measurement: keyword research, articles written against the gaps the tracking finds, publishing into WordPress, Shopify, Framer or a webhook, and Google indexing checks, plus a free AI visibility report before you pay anything. If you want a dashboard that tells you where you stand, several tools here do that well. If you want the pages that change the answer to actually get written and published, that is the gap we built for.
Four traps in this category
The category is barely two years old, and the marketing has outrun the substance in predictable ways.
- A generated text file is not measurement — Several products lead with an llms.txt generator. Publishing one is cheap and harmless, but a file that AI crawlers may or may not read tells you nothing about whether you are being recommended.
- Readiness scores that never ask an AI anything — If a tool scores your site's structure and calls the result AI visibility, it is grading your HTML. Ask to see an actual answer about your business before you pay.
- Credit systems that hide the real bill — Credit metering is common here, and it makes the monthly cost a function of how much you track. Convert credits into prompts-per-month before comparing prices.
- Roundups quoting prices from months ago — Several widely cited comparison pages still list AthenaHQ at $499 with no free trial. Their live plans page shows $295 and a free tier. Check the date on any list you read, including this one.
Every price on this page was read off the vendor's own pricing page on 29 September 2026. If you are reading this months later, click through before you trust the number.
Side-by-side
Published entry prices, checked 29 September 2026
Cheapest tier you can buy without speaking to a salesperson, the engines that tier covers, and whether the vendor publishes a price at all.
| Tool | Cheapest published price | Engines at that price | Public pricing |
|---|---|---|---|
| RankBull (ours) | $29/mo | 2 engines, 10 prompts, 1 site | Yes |
| Rankscale | From $20/mo | Limits not published on Essentials | Yes |
| Otterly.ai | $29/mo | 4 engines, 15 prompts | Yes |
| Knowatoa | $59/mo | Prompt cap not published | Yes |
| Writesonic | $79/mo | 3 engines self-serve | Yes |
| Semrush AI Visibility | $99/mo annual | 4 engines, 25 prompts, 1 domain | Yes |
| Trakkr | $100/mo | 8 models, 50 prompts per brand | Yes |
| SE Ranking | ~$174/mo effective | 5 engines; add-on needs a base plan | Yes |
| Ahrefs Brand Radar | From $199/mo | Claude costs 8 credits per check | Yes |
| Scrunch AI | $250/mo annual | 5+ engines, 3 seats, 5 audits | Yes |
| AthenaHQ | Free tier, then $295/mo | 5 engines free, 11 on Starter | Yes |
| Goodie AI | $399/mo | 5 models, 120 prompts | Yes |
| Evertune | $800/mo | Up to 11 models | Yes |
| Peec AI | ~$95/mo (July 2026) | 3 models per plan | Page needs JavaScript |
| Profound | Quote only | 3 engines on the 7-day trial | No |
| Brandlight | Quote only | Not published | No (pricing URL 404s) |
Step-by-step
Choose an LLM SEO tool in ten minutes
You do not need a feature matrix. You need to know whether the tool watches the questions your customers actually ask, on the engines they actually use.
- 01
Write down five buying questions
Write the five questions a customer would type before choosing a business like yours. Not keywords — full questions, the way someone talks to ChatGPT.
- 02
Ask them yourself, free
Put those five questions to ChatGPT and Gemini and note who gets named. If you are already recommended, you need monitoring. If a competitor owns every answer, you need content work, not just a dashboard.
- 03
Match the tier to your questions
Count your questions and the engines that matter to you, then find the cheapest tier that covers both. Five questions across four engines is a very different bill from fifty across nine.
- 04
Check what happens after the score
Ask each vendor what the product does once it finds a gap. Some report it, some recommend a fix, a few write and publish the page. Pay for the one that matches how much time you have.
Tools & platforms mentioned
Real tools. Real integrations.
6 brands
Ours — disclosedRankBull
Tracking plus the fix: articles written against the gaps and published to WordPress, Shopify, Framer or a webhook. From $29/mo, or a one-time licence you self-host.
VisitOtterly.ai
The cheapest real tracker on the list at $29/mo for 15 prompts across 4 engines. Gemini, Claude and AI Mode cost extra.
VisitAthenaHQ
The only genuinely free permanent tier we found: $25 of credit across five engines. Paid Starter is $295/mo for eleven models.
VisitProfound
The best-funded product in the category and enterprise-priced to match. Seven-day trial covers three engines; after that you get a quote, not a price.
VisitScrunch AI
Mid-market and enterprise tracking with personas and page audits, from $250/mo on annual billing.
VisitSemrush AI Visibility Toolkit
If you already pay Semrush, $99/mo annual adds 25 tracked prompts on one domain. Sensible add-on, thin as a standalone.
VisitFrequently asked
Questions about choosing an LLM SEO tool.
Each question below ships as FAQPage schema. AI assistants retrieve these answers directly when shoppers and operators search for the same questions.
What is an LLM SEO tool?
An LLM SEO tool tracks whether large language models such as ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and Perplexity mention your brand when people ask buying questions, and shows which sources those answers cite. The better ones also tell you what to publish so the answers change. It is the AI-search equivalent of a rank tracker.
What is the cheapest LLM SEO tool?
Rankscale advertises the lowest published entry price at $20 a month, though it does not publish what that tier includes. Otterly.ai and RankBull both start at $29. AthenaHQ has a permanently free tier with $25 of credit across five engines, which is the cheapest way to see where you stand without paying anything.
Do I need an LLM SEO tool if I already do normal SEO?
Only if you want to know the answer rather than guess it. Classic SEO tools report your position in a list of links; they cannot tell you whether ChatGPT named you or a competitor when someone asked what to buy. The underlying work overlaps heavily, but the measurement does not.
Which LLM SEO tools show the actual AI answer?
Most of the tools here meter usage in prompts or AI responses, which means they do send real questions to the engines. We could not confirm from first-party sources which of them display the verbatim answer text, so ask for a live example of an answer about your own business during the trial.
Is publishing an llms.txt file enough?
No. An llms.txt file is a cheap, harmless addition that may help AI crawlers read your site, but it is not a ranking mechanism and it tells you nothing about whether you are being recommended. Treat it as housekeeping, not strategy.
Do these tools work for Shopify stores?
Most treat a store as an ordinary website, which works but misses product-level detail. Goodie advertises SKU-level commerce visibility and RankBull ships a native Shopify app with a free scan, one-click fixes and product FAQs. If you sell products, ask specifically how the tool handles collection and product pages.
How often should I check AI visibility?
Weekly is enough for most small businesses. AI answers vary run to run, so a single check is a sample, not a measurement, and small week-to-week movements are usually noise. What matters is the direction across a month and whether competitors are gaining ground in the answers you care about.
Why do other comparison pages list different prices?
Because this category reprices constantly and most roundups are never updated. Several widely shared lists still show AthenaHQ at $499 a month with no free trial, while its live plans page shows $295 and a free tier. Every price on this page was read from the vendor's own page on 29 September 2026.
Free AI visibility report
Find out whether you need a tool at all
Before you pay anyone $29 or $800 a month, see where you actually stand. We ask ChatGPT and Gemini the questions your customers ask, show who gets recommended instead of you, and hand you the list of gaps. Free, one report, no card.