Key takeaways
- You can get real AI visibility tracking for $29 to $99 a month. Otterly.AI starts at $29, Knowatoa at $59, LLMrefs at $79, and Semrush's AI toolkit and Rankscale at $99.
- At this price you give up prompt volume, engine coverage, history and exports. Know which of those you can live with before you buy.
- Most cheap tools only report. If you have no SEO person, pick one that tells you what to fix, or plan to do the fixing yourself.
- Run a free audit first. Thirty minutes with ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google will tell you whether you need a paid tool at all.
- Prices below come from vendor pages and vendor-written comparison posts, so confirm each one before you pay.
Who this guide is for
Pre-seed means one to three people, a founder doing the marketing at 11pm, and a tooling budget that competes with hosting bills. Most AI visibility roundups are written for brand teams with an analyst on staff. They list tools that cost more per month than your whole stack, or hide the price behind a sales call.
This guide only covers tools you can buy with a card, read the price of without talking to anyone, and run yourself. I'm treating $100 a month as a hard ceiling, because past that the answer for most pre-seed teams is "not yet."
A caveat on sources. Nearly every comparison I found online was written by a vendor that places its own product first (Sightivo, Omnia, Geoptie, Canlah AI, Siftly). I used them for pricing and plan details and ignored their rankings. Their numbers also disagree in places, which is a good reason to check each pricing page yourself.
Do the free audit before you spend anything
Before paying $29 for anything, spend half an hour finding out whether you have a problem. A tracker measures a gap. If you have not looked at the gap by hand, you won't know whether the dashboard is telling you something useful.
Here is the version I'd run:
- Write 15 to 20 prompts a buyer would actually type. "Best [your category] for a 10-person startup." "[Competitor] alternatives." "How do I [problem you solve]."
- Run each one in ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google (to see AI Overviews). Use a fresh session or a logged-out window.
- Record three things per prompt: were you mentioned, were you cited as a source, and which competitors showed up instead.
- Note which URLs get cited. Those are your real competitors for AI visibility, and they are often review sites and roundups rather than the companies you thought you were up against.
- Repeat once a week for a month. AI answers vary from run to run, so a single check is an anecdote.
Several vendors offer a free no-account check as well, such as the free AI visibility report from Promptwatch, which scans how ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity talk about your brand and checks crawler access. Use it as a second opinion on your manual audit.
What $100 a month actually buys
Price is the least interesting variable here. These are the things that differ between a $29 plan and a $99 plan:
- Prompt count. Cheap plans cap you at roughly 15 to 50 prompts. That is enough for a pre-seed product with one or two use cases, and not enough for several segments.
- Engine coverage. ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews are the baseline. Claude, Gemini, AI Mode and Copilot are often add-ons. Otterly's Lite plan at $29 covers four engines, but adding Gemini, AI Mode and Claude takes it to about $76 a month, according to Geoptie's comparison.
- Sampling depth. AI answers are non-deterministic. A tool that asks each question once a day gives you noisy data. Canlah's write-up makes this point well, and it is worth checking how often a tool actually re-runs prompts.
- Raw answers and citations. Can you read the actual response and the URLs behind a score? If not, you can't act on it.
- History and export. Some cheap tiers limit retention, which matters when you want to show an investor month six against month one.
One piece of first-party data is useful for choosing which engines to care about. Promptwatch Data's average sources per response report shows ChatGPT citing about 5 sources per web-search answer, while Google AI Overviews and Perplexity cite about 10. More sources per answer means more chances for a newer, lower-authority domain to land a citation. Their suggestion is to treat AI Overviews as the beachhead channel and Perplexity as a stable test bench, since its citation count barely moves, so a change in your citations there reflects your content.
Comparison: tools under $100 a month
Prices are the entry points published at the time of the research (vendor-written comparisons from August to October 2026). Confirm everything on the vendor's page.
| Tool | Starting price | Engines on entry plan | Acts on the data? | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Otterly.AI | $29/mo (15 prompts) | ChatGPT, AI Overviews, Perplexity, Copilot | No, reporting only | Cheapest ongoing tracking |
| Geoptie | $49/mo Starter | 4 engines of your choice, Claude included | Yes, audits, recommendations, content | Small teams who want to act |
| Knowatoa | $59/mo | ChatGPT, AI Overviews, AI Mode | Mostly monitoring | Google-heavy categories |
| LLMrefs | $79/mo | Multiple engines, weekly for Claude | Monitoring | Broad engine coverage |
| Omnia | EUR 79/mo | ChatGPT, Perplexity, AI Overviews and more | Yes, briefs from gaps | Teams who want next steps |
| Peec AI | About $80/mo annual, $95 monthly | Multi-engine | Monitoring | Clean reporting at seed stage |
| Promptwatch Essential | $95/mo | All supported models | Partly, actions and Agent Chat | Full-stack baseline |
| Rankscale | $99/mo (credit based) | Configurable sampling | Monitoring | Controlling sampling depth |
| Semrush AI Visibility Toolkit | $99/mo per domain, on top of a Semrush plan | ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, AI Overviews | Classic SEO recommendations | Teams already on Semrush |
| AthenaHQ | Free tier, then $295/mo | ChatGPT, Perplexity, AI Overviews, Gemini, Claude | Partly | $0 baseline before deciding |
The tools, one by one
Otterly.AI: the cheapest honest start
Otterly's Lite plan is $29 a month for 15 daily prompts across ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity and Microsoft Copilot. That is the lowest published paid entry point I found. It reports what is happening and leaves the work to you, which is fine if you have already decided what you'll do about a gap.
Otterly.AI
The catch is that 15 prompts runs out fast, and full coverage costs more than the headline number.
Geoptie: more than monitoring for $49
Geoptie's Starter plan at $49 a month includes monitoring on four engines you choose (Claude included), plus unlimited audit reports, recommendations and content generation. Its Professional plan at $99 adds 100 prompts across 10 brands or clients, white-label reports, and API and MCP access. Note that this is the vendor describing itself, so test it on the trial.
Knowatoa and LLMrefs: mid-priced monitors
Knowatoa starts at $59 a month and covers ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews and Google AI Mode. If your buyers mostly find you through Google, that coverage is sensible. LLMrefs is $79 a month and is one of the options for Claude tracking under $100, though Claude runs weekly rather than daily.
LLMrefs
Omnia: gap data that turns into briefs
Omnia is EUR 79 a month and generates content briefs from your visibility gaps. For a team without a content strategist, that is the useful part. Its case study claims a nutrition SaaS moved from #11 to #2 in AI visibility in under a week. That is one customer story from the vendor, so read it as a possibility, not a benchmark.
Peec AI: tidy monitoring
Peec's Starter plan is about $80 a month on annual billing, roughly $95 on monthly. It is clean and easy to read. It is a monitoring tool, so you still need a plan for the fixes.
Promptwatch Essential: the one with a path upward
Promptwatch Essential is $95 a month ($85 in euros) and includes one project, 50 prompts, 6,000 responses, daily tracking, 500 Agent Credits, and country tracking. It also includes Agent Chat, Brand Narrative (the individual claims AI makes about you), content gap analysis, visitor analytics, weekly site health audits, and MCP and API access. Every supported model is tracked on every plan, Claude included, from the real interfaces of ChatGPT, AI Overviews, Perplexity and others rather than only APIs.
What Essential does not include is the Content Agent, crawler logs and AEO articles. Those start at higher tiers (crawler logs on Professional at $245, the Content Agent on Business at $579). So at $95 you get a real measurement and diagnosis setup with a clear upgrade path, which suits a founder who expects to grow into content automation. There is a 7-day free trial on monthly billing, and annual billing works out to 12 months for the price of 10. Check promptwatch.com/pricing before you commit.
Rankscale and Semrush: the $99 pair
Rankscale is credit based, which lets you decide how deeply to sample inside a budget. It suits someone who understands why sampling depth matters. Semrush's AI Visibility Toolkit is $99 a month per domain on top of an existing Semrush plan, with 25 daily prompts. If you do not already pay for Semrush, it is poor value at this stage.
AthenaHQ: free baseline, expensive next step
AthenaHQ has a free tier (about 300 credits) that gives a real baseline for $0. The next paid step is $295 a month, which is well outside your range. Take the free look, then decide.
Picking by situation
| Your situation | What I'd pick | What you give up |
|---|---|---|
| $0 budget, curious | Manual audit plus AthenaHQ free tier or a free visibility checker | History, exports, stable rate |
| Lowest recurring cost, you will do the work | Otterly.AI at $29 | Prompt count, extra engines |
| No SEO person, want recommendations | Geoptie Starter or Omnia | Depth of data |
| Need Claude coverage | Geoptie, Promptwatch Essential, LLMrefs | Daily sampling on some |
| Want diagnosis now and room to grow | Promptwatch Essential at $95 | Content Agent and crawler logs until you upgrade |
| Already pay for Semrush | Use the toolkit you are entitled to first | Depth |
For a wider look, the directory at bestgeosoftware.com lists more GEO tools by category.
What a pre-seed team should ignore
- Enterprise suites. Profound, Brandlight and Bluefish are built for larger brand teams. A trial is fine, a contract is not.
- Giant prompt libraries. Fifty prompts that mirror real buyer questions beat 500 generic ones. You will not read 500.
- Share-of-voice vanity scores. Early on, whether you are mentioned at all on your ten most important prompts matters more than a percentage.
- Daily dashboard checking. AI answers vary run to run. Look weekly and watch trends.
Turning the data into work
A tracker tells you where you are invisible. Fixing it is the part most budget tools leave to you, so it helps to know what tends to get cited. Promptwatch Data's ChatGPT citation share by content type report (Sep 28 to Oct 4, 2026) found product pages are the most cited type at 22.4%, followed by landing pages at 16.8% and listicles at 13.6%. For commercial prompts like "best CRM for small businesses", those types plus comparisons make up almost 70% of citations.
For a pre-seed startup, that translates into a short to-do list:
- Keep your pricing, specs and positioning complete and factual on product and landing pages. ChatGPT quotes them directly.
- Get listed in the "best of" roundups AI already cites for your category.
- Collect reviews on the sites trusted in your category.
- Publish a plain brand FAQ page.
Also check that AI crawlers can reach your site. A page that bots cannot read cannot be cited. The free Agentic Readiness Check shows which AI crawlers can read you.
A first-month plan
- Week 1: run the manual audit and save the results in a spreadsheet.
- Week 2: start one free trial (Otterly, Geoptie, Omnia or Promptwatch) and load your 15 to 25 best prompts.
- Week 3: compare the tool's output with your manual audit. If it matches, keep it. If it only tells you what you already knew, cancel.
- Week 4: fix the three biggest gaps (usually a thin product page, no roundup presence and a missing FAQ) and re-check.
If the tracker is working you should be able to point to one change that moved a citation. If you cannot, the tool is a dashboard you are paying $50 a month to look at.
Questions founders ask
What is the cheapest AI visibility tool?
Otterly.AI Lite at $29 a month, with 15 daily prompts. ZipTie's Starter preset at about $42.75 is next, per Geoptie's comparison. The free options are AthenaHQ's free tier and free one-off checkers.
Which engines matter most at this budget?
ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews. Add Claude or Gemini only if your buyers use them.
Is it worth paying before product-market fit?
Only if AI search is already a plausible channel for your category, for example B2B software buyers asking "best X for startups." If your buyers do not ask AI for recommendations, a manual audit once a month is enough.
When have I outgrown the budget tier?
When you need more than about 50 prompts, several markets or languages, crawler logs, automated content, or reporting for investors or clients. At that point the jump to roughly $250 to $600 a month is justified by what you get, not by the logo.
Bottom line
Start with the free audit. If you want ongoing tracking for the least money, Otterly at $29 is hard to beat. If you want help deciding what to fix, look at Geoptie, Omnia or Promptwatch Essential. Whatever you choose, verify the price on the vendor's page and cancel in month two if it has not changed a decision.