Here is a comparison worth sitting with. The tool that tells you whether ChatGPT mentions your brand will, in the median case, cost you more than your CRM, your email platform and your entire design stack combined.
That is not a rhetorical flourish. We price-checked 252 business software tools for this benchmark on 11 September 2026 and keep every figure under version control, verified against the vendor’s own page on a recorded date. When we sorted the dataset by category, one sat so far above the rest that we re-ran the numbers twice assuming we had made a mistake.
AI search and GEO tools have a median entry price of $99 a month. Across every other category we track, the median is $19.99.
Five times. And it is the category we are in, which makes this an awkward thing for us to publish and an easy thing to check.
It is not a couple of enterprise outliers
That was our first assumption. It was wrong. This is the median, not the mean, computed only from monthly-billed plans whose price the vendor publishes on its own site — 22 tools in this category, 195 across the dataset as it stood on 11 September 2026. The enterprise quote-only products were excluded entirely.
Here is the ladder:
| Tool | Entry plan | Free tier |
|---|---|---|
| MaxAEO | $15/mo | No |
| Rankscale | $20/mo | No |
| Otterly.ai | $29/mo | No |
| Peec AI | $70/mo | No |
| Nightwatch | $79/mo | Trial only |
| Profound | $99/mo | No |
| Trakkr | $100/mo | No |
| Ahrefs Brand Radar | $129/mo | No |
| Semrush AI Visibility Toolkit | $165.17/mo | Limited free account |
| Scrunch AI | $250/mo | No |
| Athena HQ | $295/mo | Yes, permanent |
| Goodie AI | $399/mo | No |
| Evertune | $800/mo | No |
Fifty-three times between the floor and the ceiling, for products that describe themselves in nearly identical language: watch what the models say about your brand.
The number that bothered us more
Price we could live with. This is the part that should give you pause.
Five of the 34 AI search tools we track offer a free tier. Fifteen percent. Across all 252 tools tracked at the time it was 141, or 56 percent. Every project management tool in our dataset has one. Every productivity tool. All of them.
So this is the category where you are least able to find out whether the thing works before you pay — and most likely to be paying $99 a month for the privilege of finding out.
It gets thinner on inspection. Nightwatch and Mentionova list free access; both are time-limited trials. Gumshoe gives you a sample audit. Ahrefs Brand Radar’s “free tier” is an Ahrefs account, which does not include Brand Radar. Read strictly, permanent and genuinely usable free access exists at Athena HQ and Authoritas. Two, out of thirty-four.
Why it is priced this way
Three reasons, and none of them require anyone to be acting in bad faith.
The cost base is real. These tools fire prompts at ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity on a schedule, and every check is a metered API call. A product tracking 200 prompts across four models daily is buying a serious amount of inference before it has paid a single engineer. Free tiers are expensive here in a way they simply are not for a to-do list.
The category is eighteen months old and sells upward. Not to a practitioner picking a $12 writing assistant, but to a director with a six-figure budget who has just been asked by a CEO whether the company shows up in ChatGPT. Prices anchored to that conversation, and nothing has pulled them back down.
Nobody can comparison-shop. Every vendor counts something different — prompts, brands, competitors, models, “credits”. A $79 plan tracking 100 prompts and a $99 plan tracking 500 are not the same purchase, and almost nothing on the market makes that legible. Without comparison there is no price discipline, and without price discipline the number drifts upward.
What we would actually do
Do not buy annually yet. Packaging in this category is moving fast enough that a twelve-month commitment at today’s rates is a bet on a market that has not settled. Take the monthly penalty. It is cheap insurance.
Count prompts, not dollars. Normalise every quote to cost per tracked prompt per month before you compare anything. The ranking rearranges itself considerably when you do, and a couple of the expensive tools stop looking expensive.
Start at the bottom of the ladder. MaxAEO at $15 and Rankscale at $20 are real products. If your question is “does ChatGPT mention us”, they answer it. The $99-and-up tier buys competitive tracking and attribution, which is genuinely worth having — once you know you have a problem worth tracking. Not before.
Every price verified from the vendor’s own pricing page on a recorded date. Quote-only products and annual-billed enterprise plans are excluded: those figures are third-party estimates, not published prices. Full software pricing dataset.
The AI visibility tax: the category selling AI search help is the most expensive in software. DigiJaws, 2026. https://digijaws.com/reviews/ai-visibility-tool-pricing-benchmark/