Key takeaways
- Siftly's free tier is a decent starting point (100 responses/month, 2 engines), but its first paid jump to $79/month still only covers 3 engines, and Gemini and AI Mode are locked behind the $249 Growth plan.
- Otterly.AI is the cheapest paid entry at $29/month, AthenaHQ has a permanent free tier, and LLMrankings.io costs nothing for basic tracking.
- Watch the engine list, not the headline price. Several "budget" tools gate Gemini, Claude, and Google AI Mode behind add-ons that can double your bill.
- ChatGPT cites roughly 5 sources per response, so the competition for each citation slot is brutal. Trend data over time matters more than any single visibility snapshot.
- For teams that want monitoring and the ability to act on it, Promptwatch's $95/month Essential plan covers all major AI platforms, which is rare at this price.
Why look beyond Siftly in the first place
Siftly is a solid product. Its free plan gives you 100 tracked responses per month across ChatGPT and Google AI Overviews, 10 prompts, weekly refreshes, and competitor tracking. That's more than most free tiers in this category offer.
The problem starts when you outgrow it. The Starter plan at $79/month bumps you to 4,500 responses, daily refreshes, and adds Perplexity, but that's still only 3 engines. Want Gemini and Google AI Mode? That's the Growth plan at $249/month. Claude requires Enterprise pricing. If you're a bootstrapped SaaS team watching every dollar, that staircase gets steep quickly.
There's also a structural issue worth naming: Siftly's paid plans bundle a lot of content production (8 GEO-optimized blog posts per month on Starter, 30 on Growth). That's great if you want content generation included. But if you already have a writing process, or you use a separate content tool, you're paying for output you won't use. A leaner tracker might serve you better.
One more thing before we get to the alternatives: understand what you're competing for. ChatGPT cites about 5 sources per web-search-triggered response, roughly half the ~10 sources Google AI Overviews typically pulls, according to Promptwatch's analysis of average sources per response across engines. Five slots. That's the whole game. When an AI engine names only a handful of brands, being in that set is the new page one, and a tool that shows you when you're in or out of it is worth paying for.
The best free and low-cost Siftly alternatives
1. Otterly.AI: the cheapest legitimate paid option
At $29/month ($25 billed annually), Otterly's Lite plan is the lowest entry price in the category, and it's not a crippled demo. You get 15 prompts across four engines: ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity, and Copilot. Setup is simple, the dashboard is easy to read, and exports work fine for a weekly check-in.
The catch is the add-on structure. Google AI Mode, Gemini, and Claude each cost extra on Lite, and 15 prompts runs out fast if you're tracking competitors alongside your own brand. The jump to Standard at $189/month is where the value math gets harder. For a solo founder or a two-person team validating whether AI search even matters for their category, though, $29 is hard to beat.
Otterly.AI
2. AthenaHQ: the best permanent free tier
Most "free" offers in this space are 7 or 14-day trials. AthenaHQ's Essential plan is genuinely free, forever, with 300 credits per month, coverage of 5 platforms (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, Gemini, Copilot), unlimited team members, and even an AI agent for content recommendations.
300 credits is real but limited usage. You'll get a feel for where you stand and whether buyers in your category are getting shortlists from AI answers, but you won't get deep daily trendlines. The paid jump is steep, $295/month for Starter ($245 billed annually), so think of the free tier as a diagnostic rather than a long-term monitoring solution.
3. Promptwatch: monitoring plus the ability to act on it
Here's the thing most budget trackers don't solve: knowing you're invisible doesn't make you visible. Promptwatch is the option on this list that tries to close that loop at a price a bootstrapped team can stomach.
The free Explore tier covers 10 prompts on ChatGPT. The Essential plan at $95/month includes 50 prompts, 6,000 responses, and tracking across all major AI platforms, ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, Grok, DeepSeek, Copilot, Mistral, Meta Llama, Google AI Overviews and AI Mode, with a 7-day free trial. Compare that to Profound's $99 Starter, which tracks ChatGPT only, and the coverage-per-dollar difference is significant.
What separates it from the cheaper options here is the diagnostic layer: AI crawler logs showing when ChatGPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot and 400+ other agents actually visit your site and what errors they hit, citation analytics showing which of your pages get cited, Reddit and YouTube citation tracking, and content gap analysis that turns visibility gaps into briefs. Its Content Agents can then write and publish GEO-optimized articles to WordPress, Webflow, or Framer. If your team has no dedicated SEO person, that last part matters more than you'd expect.
4. Peec AI: solid European option with an engine cap
Peec AI's Starter plan runs $95/month (€89, or about $80 billed annually) for 50 prompts, daily tracking, unlimited seats, and an MCP server included. The 7-day trial needs no credit card.
The limitation to know about: you pick 3 engines on any plan, and adding a 4th costs $35/month on Starter, $85 on Pro, $165 on Advanced. More money buys you more prompts and projects, never more engines included. If your buyers live in ChatGPT, Perplexity, and AI Overviews, that's fine. If you need Gemini or Claude too, budget for the add-on before you commit.
5. AI Peekaboo: all five engines on the entry plan
At $50/month, AI Peekaboo's Starter plan checks 40 prompts every 2 days across 1 brand, and unlike Otterly or Peec, it doesn't hold engines hostage on the cheap tier. All five engines are included from day one. The $100/month tier moves to daily checks and adds Looker Studio integration.
Two caveats: there's no published free trial, and 40 prompts checked every other day is modest. But if engine coverage without add-on fees is your priority, this is one of the cleanest pricing structures in the category.
6. SE Ranking: best if you also need classic SEO tools
If your budget has to cover traditional rank tracking and site audits alongside AI visibility, SE Ranking bundles everything in one subscription. There's a 14-day free trial with no card required, plus a free AI visibility checker limited to 5 checks per day if you just want a taste. For a bootstrapped SaaS team that can't justify three separate subscriptions, consolidation is its own form of savings.
7. Semrush AI Visibility Toolkit: the $99 add-on, plus a genuinely free checker
The standalone toolkit costs $99/month per domain with no free trial, which is a strange combination. What is free is Semrush's AI Search Visibility Checker: 3 checks per day, no registration, ChatGPT only. It's a lead magnet, but it's a useful one for a weekly manual check if you're not ready to pay anything yet. If you already pay for Semrush, the toolkit is bundled into higher tiers and worth switching on.
8. LLMrankings.io: free for the absolute basics
LLMrankings.io has a free plan with no credit card required: 2 brand domains, 10 keywords, weekly updates, covering ChatGPT and Gemini only. Paid tiers start around $10/month. It's shallow, but for a pre-revenue founder who wants to know whether ChatGPT mentions their product at all, it costs nothing and takes 10 minutes to set up.
Comparison table
| Tool | Cheapest paid plan | Engines at entry | Free option | Main limitation |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Otterly.AI | $29/mo | 4 (ChatGPT, AIO, Perplexity, Copilot) | Trial | 15 prompts; Gemini, Claude, AI Mode cost extra |
| AthenaHQ | $295/mo | 5 on free tier | Permanent free tier (300 credits) | Steep jump from free to paid |
| Promptwatch | $95/mo | All major platforms | Free tier (10 prompts) + 7-day trial | 50 prompts on Essential |
| Peec AI | $95/mo | 3 (your choice) | 7-day trial | Extra engines are $35-$165/mo add-ons |
| AI Peekaboo | $50/mo | 5 | None | 40 prompts, checked every 2 days |
| SE Ranking | Bundled in SEO subscription | Varies by plan | 14-day trial, no card | AI visibility tied to the broader suite |
| Semrush AI Toolkit | $99/mo per domain | Varies | Free checker (3 checks/day, ChatGPT) | No trial on the paid toolkit |
| LLMrankings.io | ~$10/mo | 2 (ChatGPT, Gemini) | Free plan (2 domains, 10 keywords) | Weekly updates only, very shallow |
Traps to avoid when shopping on price
I've looked at a lot of pricing pages for this category, and the same patterns keep burning bootstrapped teams.
The engine-gating trap. Otterly's $29 plan and Peec's entire pricing ladder cap engine coverage and charge per-engine add-ons. Profound's $99 Starter tracks ChatGPT only; Perplexity and AI Overviews require the $399 Growth plan. Always read the engine list on the cheapest tier, not the marketing page's headline claim. A tool that "covers 9 engines" but gives you 1 at your price point is not a 9-engine tool.
The credit cliff. AthenaHQ's free tier and Otterly's Lite plan both have usage caps that feel fine in week one and constrict by week three. Before you commit, count your actual needs: your prompts, plus competitor prompts, times refresh frequency, times engines. Then check what happens when you exceed the cap. Some tools throttle gracefully; others push you into a tier that costs 3-6x more.
The snapshot fallacy. This one is less about pricing and more about how you use any of these tools. AI citation behavior is volatile. In August 2026, Reddit's share of ChatGPT Search citations collapsed from roughly 3.8% to 0.5% in a matter of days, an 86% relative drop, after ChatGPT changed how it constructs search queries. Google's AI Overviews and AI Mode showed only gradual Reddit declines over the same window. If you'd taken a single visibility snapshot in mid-August, you'd have drawn completely wrong conclusions about where to invest. Whatever tool you pick, insist on daily or weekly trendlines, and treat any one-off number with suspicion.
The "cheap tool, expensive habits" problem. A $29 tracker that only monitors still leaves you doing the optimization work by hand. Factor in the cost of your time. Sometimes a $95 plan that generates content briefs and publishes optimized articles pays for itself against the hours you'd spend manually.
What to actually optimize for, once you're tracking
A budget tool tells you where you stand. A little first-party research tells you where to aim.
Product pages dominated ChatGPT's citation mix in July 2026 at roughly 33% of all citations, nearly double their share from March. Listicles were the fastest-growing format, and comparison pages and how-tos remain relatively low-competition citation slots for smaller brands. For a bootstrapped SaaS team, that translates to a concrete content priority list: make your product pages genuinely informative, publish "X vs Y" comparison pages, and write how-tos that answer the questions buyers actually type.
Also pay attention to how AI searches now work. ChatGPT's fanout queries have gotten shorter and more keyword-like, dropping from around 117 characters in December to about 53 by April 2026. Your headings should mirror that phrasing: short, front-loaded, query-shaped. And since August 8, 2026, ChatGPT Search has been using the site: operator at scale, jumping from under 1% to roughly 17% of fanout queries overnight, which changes which of your pages get pulled into answers. Tools that show you crawler logs and per-page citation rates, like Promptwatch does, make this visible; pure mention-trackers don't.
If you want to browse the full category beyond the picks here, the GEO software directory at bestgeosoftware.com maintains a current catalog with pricing and feature breakdowns.
How to choose
Match the tool to your stage, honestly:
- Pre-revenue or validating: LLMrankings.io's free plan or AthenaHQ's free tier. Spend $0 until you know AI search matters for your category.
- First real budget, solo or tiny team: Otterly.AI at $29/month, or AI Peekaboo at $50 if you need all five engines without add-on fees.
- Ready to act on the data: Promptwatch Essential at $95/month, because it covers every major platform at that price and includes the content tooling to fix what the monitoring finds.
- Already paying for an SEO suite: switch on SE Ranking's or Semrush's AI visibility features before adding another vendor.
The cheapest tool on paper is rarely the cheapest in practice. Count engines, prompts, refresh rates, and what happens when you grow. And whatever you choose, start now. Those five citation slots in a ChatGPT response are filling up with someone's brand. Better yours than your competitor's.