Which AI Visibility Tool Should You Actually Pay For? Pricing and Engine Covera…

As of August 2026, published entry pricing runs from $29/month (Otterly, 4 engines, 15 prompts) to $499/month (Cognizo, 5 of 7 engines, 150 prompts), with Cituna at $39/month for all six engines plus Google Search Console. The main thing to check is not the engine count but which engines: Claude and Grok are the most common gaps, and Peec AI lists neither while Otterly sells Claude as a paid add-on. Search Console integration is rare across the category — of the five tools compared, only Cituna publishes it as included. Pick based on how many distinct buying questions your business really has, because the expensive tiers are priced around prompt volume most small businesses never use.

Every tool in this category advertises that it tracks AI engines. Almost none of them mean the same thing by it, and the gap between the homepage claim and what arrives at the entry tier is where most of the money in this category gets wasted. This guide compares what five platforms actually include at the price they advertise.

Every figure below comes from the vendor's own published pricing page, checked on 8 August 2026. No scores, no ratings, nothing inferred. Pricing in this category changes often, so check before you buy.

Otterly is genuinely cheaper at entry and gives you more prompts for the money. That is worth saying plainly, because most comparison content in this category pretends the recommended tool wins on everything.

Two of these tools advertise six-engine coverage, and they are not the same six.

Peec AI's six are ChatGPT, Google AI Mode, Google AI Overviews, Microsoft Copilot, Perplexity, and Gemini. No Claude, no Grok. Cituna's six are ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude, Grok, and Google AI Overviews. No Copilot.

Neither is wrong. They are different bets about which assistants your buyers actually use. But it does mean an engine count on its own tells you nothing. Always ask which engines, not how many.

These two are the most common gap across the category, and they matter more than their market share suggests, because of who uses them.

If you sell to developers, founders, or technical evaluators, Claude is frequently their default assistant — not a secondary one they check occasionally. A tool that omits it is not giving you a slightly incomplete picture, it is missing the population most likely to be researching you. Otterly charges extra for it, Peec AI does not list it, and Cognizo puts it behind Enterprise pricing.

This is the clearest difference in the table, and the one that changes what the tool is for.

Without Search Console, a tool can tell you that you are not being cited. That is a fact, and it is mildly worrying. With Search Console connected, the same tool can tell you that you rank fourth for that question, that it drove 1,900 impressions last month, and that the AI answer sitting above your link names three competitors instead of you.

The first is an observation. The second is a number you can make a decision with, and it sorts your to-do list automatically, because the gaps worth fixing first are the ones with real search volume behind them. Of the five tools here, only Cituna publishes Search Console integration as included, from $39/month.

Be careful with the Looker Studio connectors that Otterly and Peec AI offer. Those are reporting outputs — they export what the tool already knows. They do not import what Google knows about your existing rankings. It reads similar on a feature list and does something completely different.

Here is the thing the pricing pages are structured to obscure: the expensive tiers are priced around prompt volume, and prompt volume is what small businesses have least of.

A tool offering 150 tracked prompts sounds like better value than one offering 10. It only is if your market genuinely contains 150 distinct buying questions. Most do not. A single-location garage might have six real questions customers ask. A dental clinic maybe twelve. A property brokerage perhaps twenty.

Work out your real number first. If it is eight, an entry tier is correctly sized and the money you saved is better spent fixing what the scan finds than tracking questions nobody asks.

Before buying anything, spend ten minutes establishing whether you have a problem at all.

Write down the five questions a customer would ask before they know your name — plain language, include your city, no brand names in the question. Run each one through ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity, and write down which businesses get named and in what order. That list is your real competition, and it is often not who you assumed.

Then run the control: ask each assistant about your business by name. If it describes you fluently but never named you in the first test, you are recognised but not recommended. That is the most common position, and it is a different problem from being unknown — it means the information exists but nothing is making you the answer.

A paid tool automates this across all six engines and tracks whether your fixes worked. That is genuinely worth paying for once you are actively working on it. It is not worth paying for to discover you have a problem, because the free version of that check takes ten minutes.

Worth knowing before you spend anything, because no tool has much incentive to tell you: the work that improves AI citation rates is mostly unglamorous and mostly free.

Make your business information identical everywhere — same name, address, phone, description across your site, Google Business Profile, and every directory. Models corroborate across sources, and contradictions read as uncertainty about whether you are a real business.

Answer real questions completely on your own pages, with actual numbers. One page that fully answers "how much does a pre-purchase car inspection cost" beats ten pages of service copy, because it contains something an assistant can quote.

Write so individual paragraphs stand alone. Assistants lift fragments. A sentence that only makes sense after reading the three above it will never get quoted.

Add structured data — FAQ and LocalBusiness schema tell a model what you are without making it guess.

None of that needs a subscription. The tool tells you which to do first and whether it worked. That is measurement, and measurement is useful, but it is not the work.

If you want the per-plan breakdown behind the row for Cituna in the table above, including what changes between its tiers, it publishes a full pricing comparison for the category.

Before paying for anything, run the free test: ask each engine the three questions your buyers ask and record who gets named. Only pay for a tool once you know you have a visibility problem worth tracking.