Key takeaways
- The fairest way to compare GEO tools is monthly price divided by (prompts x engines x runs per month). A cheap plan with 15 prompts can cost more per answer than a mid-tier plan.
- On published pricing, Otterly.AI Premium (about $0.010 per answer) and Peec AI Advanced (about $0.016) are cheap per response. Otterly Lite and Standard, and Peec Starter, sit in the $0.016 to $0.021 range.
- Profound has no public self-serve price anymore, so its cost per response can't be calculated. Be skeptical of old listicles that quote $99, $399 and $499 plans.
- Daily vs weekly tracking, paid engine add-ons, project limits and whether fanouts are counted can all swing the number by 2x or more.
- Cost per response only tells you what monitoring costs. If you want the tool to also help fix visibility, compare what is bundled alongside the tracking.
Why monthly price is the wrong number
Most GEO tool roundups sort by starting price. That is how you end up recommending a $29 plan that tracks 15 prompts as if it were comparable to a $95 plan that tracks 50. They are different products.
What you actually buy is a number of AI answers captured per month. One tracked prompt, run on one engine, once, gives you one answer. A tool that runs 50 prompts on 3 engines every day gives you 4,500 answers a month. Divide the bill by that and you get a unit price you can compare.
Peec AI actually does this on its own pricing page. It has a "Monthly AI answers" row, which it describes as tracked prompts multiplied by active models and tracking frequency. I like that, because it is the only honest way to line these tools up.
The formula I use in this guide:
cost per answer = monthly price / (prompts x engines x runs per month)
All figures below assume daily tracking (30 runs per month), list monthly pricing and no add-ons. They are my estimates from vendor pricing pages, not numbers the vendors publish. Confirm everything on the vendor site before buying.
Why a single response tells you little
There is a second reason to think in volumes rather than single checks: AI answers are noisy. In Promptwatch's data on unique domains per ChatGPT response (Sep 28 to Oct 4, 2026), 47.6% of responses with citations cited 10 or more domains, while only 6% cited three or fewer. Brand-specific prompts behave differently: just 21.3% cited 10 or more domains, with 5 domains the most common count.
The source count also varies by engine. Per Promptwatch's average sources per response data, ChatGPT cites about 5 sources per web-search answer, Google AI Overviews about 10, and Perplexity almost exactly 10 every day. Copilot's average swung from under 2 to nearly 17 within weeks before settling low, so Promptwatch treats it as unstable. A tool that bundles Copilot is tracking a moving target.
The practical upshot: one answer is a sample, not a measurement. You want many prompts, repeated, across engines. That is why cost per answer matters more than headline price.
The ranking, based on published pricing
Here is every plan where I could verify official pricing and compute the number.
| Plan | Monthly price | Prompts | Engines | Answers per month | Est. cost per answer |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Otterly.AI Premium | $489 | 400 | 4 | 48,000 | about $0.0102 |
| Peec AI Advanced | $495 | 350 | 3 | 31,500 | about $0.0157 |
| Otterly.AI Standard | $189 | 100 | 4 | 12,000 | about $0.0158 |
| Otterly.AI Lite | $29 | 15 | 4 | 1,800 | about $0.016 |
| Peec AI Pro | $245 | 150 | 3 | 13,500 | about $0.018 |
| Peec AI Starter | $95 | 50 | 3 | 4,500 | about $0.021 |
| Profound Enterprise | Custom | Custom | Up to 9 | n/a | Not computable |
A few things jump out.
First, the spread is smaller than I expected. Almost everything lands between one and two cents per answer. The cheapest plan per response, Otterly Premium, is about half the price of the most expensive one in the table, Peec Starter.
Second, entry plans are not the bargain they look like. Otterly Lite at $29 is the lowest sticker price anywhere, but at 15 prompts it is a trial-sized dataset. Its per-answer cost is about the same as Standard, so you are not saving per response, you are just capping your spend.
Third, scaling up on Otterly cuts the unit cost sharply, while Peec's improvement from Starter to Advanced is gradual.
Otterly.AI
Otterly.AI tracks ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity and Microsoft Copilot daily on every tier. Lite is $29 a month (about $25 on annual billing) for 15 prompts, Standard is $189 for 100, and Premium is $489 for 400. Extra prompts cost $99 per 100, which is $0.99 per prompt, and Enterprise starts at 1,000 prompts.
Otterly.AI
The catch is engines. Claude, Google AI Mode and Gemini are paid add-ons. If you need Gemini, your four-engine math stops applying and the real cost per answer goes up. Standard and Premium include API, MCP and Agent Analytics.
Peec AI
Peec AI is $95 for 50 prompts (Starter), $245 for 150 (Pro, 2 projects) and $495 for 350 (Advanced, 5 projects, multi-country, Looker Studio). You pick three models on every plan, tracking is daily and users are unlimited. Enterprise is custom, with up to 13 models and an API.
One correction worth making: several third-party roundups list Pro as including 3 projects. The current pricing page says 2. Always trust the vendor page over a listicle.
Profound
Profound is the one you can't rank. The official pricing page now shows a free trial (50 prompts run daily for 7 days on ChatGPT, Gemini and Google AI Overviews, with no custom prompts, export or API) and a custom Enterprise plan covering up to nine engines, ChatGPT Shopping, API, SSO/SAML and SOC 2.
Profound
Older blog posts quote $99, $399 and $499 plans. Those appear to be stale. If you read a table that gives Profound a precise cost per response, ask where the number came from.
Where Promptwatch fits
Promptwatch is the one I would put in a different column. Its plans are priced similarly to the tracker tiers above (Essential is $95 a month for 50 prompts and 6,000 responses, with all AI models included), which works out to roughly $0.016 per response by Promptwatch's own response counts. Professional is $245 for 18,000 responses (about $0.014), and Business is $579 for 42,000 responses (about $0.014). Those are my calculations from published plan limits, so check promptwatch.com/pricing for current numbers.
The response-based count matters because it is a different unit from prompt x engine x day, and it already includes every model on paid plans, with no per-engine add-ons. That makes the comparison closer to apples to apples than it first looks.
But the bigger point is what the money buys besides tracked answers. Most monitoring tools stop at telling you whether you were mentioned. Promptwatch also includes IP-verified AI crawler logs, visitor analytics for AI traffic, weekly site audits, content gap analysis and, on Business, the Content Agent that writes and publishes pages. If you would otherwise buy a tracker plus separate tools for crawler analysis and content, the effective cost per useful outcome is lower than the cost per response suggests.
If you want to browse the wider category before deciding, the GEO software directory lists dozens of options.
What I could not verify
I did not confirm current official pricing for AthenaHQ, Scrunch, Semrush's AI Visibility Toolkit, Ahrefs Brand Radar, SE Visible, Writesonic, Rankscale, LLMrefs or Goodie. Third-party roundups quote figures like $295 a month for AthenaHQ, $300 for Scrunch, $99 for the Semrush toolkit and $79 for Writesonic, but I treated those as unverified claims and left them out of the ranking.
Here is how those tools are generally positioned in the sources I read, without a computed unit price:
| Tool | Quoted starting price (third-party, unverified) | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| AthenaHQ | from about $295/mo | Positioned around ecommerce and many models |
| Scrunch | from about $250 to $300/mo | Persona-level segmentation across multiple engines |
| Semrush AI Visibility Toolkit | from about $99/mo | Add-on on top of Semrush plans |
| SE Visible | from about $99/mo | Five-engine tracking, sold alongside SE Ranking |
| Writesonic | from about $79/mo (annual) | Tracking next to keyword research |
| Ahrefs Brand Radar | from about $199/mo | Sits on top of an Ahrefs plan |
Use these as a shopping list, then ask each vendor for prompts, engines, frequency and add-on costs so you can run the same formula.
Four things that distort the math
Tracking frequency
Everything above assumes daily runs. A tool that tracks weekly gives you roughly a quarter of the answers for the same prompt count, so its cost per answer is about four times higher on the same price. Peec Enterprise, for example, can run daily or weekly. Check which one a plan actually uses.
Paid engine add-ons
Otterly's four included engines are a good deal until you need Gemini, Claude or AI Mode. Each add-on raises the real price. When comparing, count only the engines you would actually use.
Project, country and seat limits
A plan with 150 prompts and 2 projects is not the same as 150 prompts in one workspace. If you are an agency or a multi-country brand, prompts get split across clients or markets and your effective prompt budget shrinks. Peec Advanced adds multi-country tracking, while Otterly charges $99 per extra 100 prompts.
Whether fanouts are counted
ChatGPT often runs several web searches per prompt. Promptwatch's query fanout data shows the average falling from 2.15 fanouts per response in early December to about 1.84 by early March, then returning at exactly 1.0 in April after a data gap. Some tools count the user prompt, others count the fanouts. If a vendor says it tracks "queries," ask which. It could change your unit price by a factor of two.
How to pick, given a budget
- Under about $50 a month: Otterly Lite is the cheapest way to start, but treat the 15 prompts as a pilot rather than a program.
- $95 to $250 a month: Peec Starter and Pro or Otterly Standard are the usual choices. Otterly is cheaper per answer on four engines; Peec gives unlimited users and three models of your choosing.
- $400 to $600 a month: Otterly Premium has the lowest computed unit price on this list. Peec Advanced adds multi-country and Looker Studio. Promptwatch Business adds Content Agent publishing and local targeting at that tier.
- Enterprise engine coverage: Profound is built for up to nine engines, but you have to talk to sales.
Also ask whether you need more than monitoring. If your plan is to find gaps and ship content, a cheaper per-answer tracker still leaves you paying for the other half of the job. For agentic SEO options specifically, the agentic SEO tools directory is a good place to look.
A quick test before you commit
- Write down your real prompt count. Not the aspirational one, the number you will review.
- List the engines you care about and check which are included or add-ons.
- Multiply prompts x engines x 30 (daily) and divide the monthly price.
- Check whether the vendor counts fanouts, prompts or responses.
- Run a 7-day trial and see whether the answers match what you see by hand.
Cost per response is a decent tiebreaker, but not a verdict. A cheap dataset you never act on is the most expensive one. Do the math, then pick the tool whose data you will actually use.