How Much Do AEO Tools Cost in 2026? Every Price, Verified

The short answer

AEO tools in 2026 cost anywhere from nothing to a custom enterprise quote, but the paid entry points cluster in a fairly tight band. From cheapest to most expensive: Otterly.ai starts at $29/mo, HubSpot AEO at $50/mo, Rankshift at around $82/mo, Peec AI at $95/mo, Semrush's AI Visibility Toolkit at $99/mo per domain billed annually, Ahrefs Brand Radar at $199/mo, Scrunch AI at $250/mo on annual billing, and AthenaHQ at $295/mo above a genuinely free tier. Profound, the enterprise flagship, currently publishes a free trial and custom enterprise pricing; the $99 and $399 self-serve tiers it listed earlier in 2026 no longer appear on its pricing page.

The sticker price is the least useful number on any of these pages. What actually determines your bill is prompt volume, which engines you need (several vendors sell Claude, Gemini, or AI Mode as paid add-ons), how many brands or domains you track, and whether seats cost extra. This guide walks through all of it with verified September 2026 numbers.

One honesty note before the table: we run our own client tracking on Peec AI daily, so that vendor we know hands-on. Every other price here is research-based, verified against the live vendor pricing pages in September 2026. For which tool to pick rather than what it costs, see the full best AEO tools guide; for feature limits like update cadence and multi-brand support, see our AEO tool feature comparison.

AEO tool pricing at a glance

Here is the full picture, including what the entry price buys and the costs that do not appear on the headline.

Two rows deserve a flag. Rankshift's tier structure is verified (150, 350, and 850 prompts per day on Starter, Professional, and Business), but its USD prices cannot be re-verified on the live pricing page (the vendor's own blog serves euro prices in some regions), so the roughly $82, $189, and $425 annual figures circulating should be treated as approximate. And Semrush publishes $45/mo as the starting price for extra users on its pricing page while its knowledge base says $99 per subuser, a discrepancy Semrush itself has not reconciled, so get the seat price in writing before you budget for a team.

Cost per tracked prompt: the math vendors avoid

Entry prices are not comparable because they buy wildly different prompt volumes. Dividing price by prompts puts every plan on one axis. All figures below are simple division of the published numbers above.

Three things jump out of that table. First, the cheapest plans carry some of the worst rates: HubSpot's $50 for 25 prompts is $2.00 per tracked prompt per month, and Semrush's $99 for 25 prompts is $3.96, roughly double Peec Starter's $1.90 and nearly triple Otterly Premium's $1.22. Second, per-prompt cost falls as tiers rise, so a scoped 150-prompt program on Peec Pro ($245 for 150 prompts is about $1.63) beats running three cheap 25-prompt subscriptions. Third, Scrunch's $0.71 looks like the bargain, but that division counts only the 350 custom prompts and ignores the 1,000 pre-built industry prompts included alongside them, and Scrunch is a brand-perception platform rather than a pure rank tracker, as our Scrunch AI review covers.

A caveat on the Brand Radar row: its unit is different. The $199 buys 83 prompts per day against a monthly pool of 2,500 checks, and each platform consumes checks at its own rate, so the effective rate depends on which engines you run. And Rankshift, whose dollars we cannot verify, would undercut everything here if the circulating figures hold: 150 prompts per day on a plan around $82 is far below anyone else's rate, which is exactly why we would want the USD price confirmed at checkout before celebrating.

The hidden costs: add-ons, overages, and multipliers

The gap between sticker price and invoice comes from four mechanisms.

Add-on engines. Otterly.ai includes ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity, and Copilot in every plan, then sells Claude, Gemini, and Google AI Mode separately at prices that scale with your tier. On Premium, Claude alone is $439/mo, nearly the price of the $489 plan it attaches to.

Peec runs the same model with different numbers: base plans include 3 AI models of your choice, and each additional model costs $35, $85, or $165 per month depending on tier. A Starter plan tracking five engines is $95 plus two add-ons at $35 each, $165/mo total. The full tier-by-tier add-on breakdown for Otterly lives in our dedicated Otterly.ai pricing guide.

Usage overages. Ahrefs Brand Radar meters everything in checks: 2,500 per month on the $199 plan, with overages at roughly $0.02 per check, and heavier engines consume more checks per update (Claude burns 8). Its Custom Prompts packages ($50/mo for 2,500 extra checks, $100 for 7,000, $250 for 25,000) require a paid Ahrefs base plan, which starts at $129/mo for Lite, so the custom-prompt route is really a two-subscription stack even though the AI Visibility Index itself is now available standalone.

Per-domain and per-seat multipliers. Semrush prices per domain: a second brand or location is another $99/mo, and its PDF reporting is also an add-on ($10/mo for basic, $20/mo white-label). Scrunch charges $25/mo per seat beyond the included 3. On the other side of the ledger, Peec, Otterly, Rankshift, and AthenaHQ all include unlimited seats or members, which quietly saves hundreds a month for larger teams.

Unpriced add-ons. HubSpot's AEO tool is $50/mo standalone, but tracking more than one brand requires its Brands add-on and raising the 25-prompt limit requires an "AEO Answers Limit Increase," neither of which has a published price. AthenaHQ gates API access and extra credits behind paid add-ons on Starter, also unpriced. Anything you cannot price on the vendor page, you should price on a sales call before signing.

What agencies actually pay

Agency economics are different: you need many brands, many seats, and per-client reporting, and only some vendors price for that shape. The dedicated rundown is in our guide to AEO tools for agencies; the pricing mechanics in brief:

• Peec AI has purpose-built agency plans at $245, $495, and $795/mo for 10,000, 25,000, and 65,000 credits, where 1 prompt on 1 model for 1 day equals 1 credit. Credits pool across client brands, each brand gets its own project, and seats are unlimited, so a 40-prompt client and a 200-prompt client draw from one bucket.
• Profound prices agency work at 400 credits per month per client workspace. The base price for that arrangement is not published, so the per-client cost only materializes in a quote.
• Otterly.ai takes the workspace route: Standard ($189/mo) and above include unlimited workspaces as the multi-brand unit, with your prompt allowance shared across them and unlimited team members throughout.
• Semrush is the awkward fit: $99/mo per domain means each client is a separate line item, and the extra-user price is the $45-versus-$99 discrepancy noted above.

The per-prompt math changes at agency scale too. Peec's $495 agency Growth plan is 25,000 credits; run one model daily and that is 25,000 divided by roughly 30 days, about 833 prompts tracked continuously, spread across as many clients as you like. That pooling is why credit models tend to beat per-domain pricing once you pass three or four clients.

Free ways to start

You can establish a baseline without spending anything, and for a single brand that is genuinely worth doing before any subscription. The current free options:

• AthenaHQ Essential is a real free tier, not a trial: a $25 credit worth 300 credits across 5 platforms, with unlimited members.
• HubSpot AEO has a 28-day free trial, the longest in the category, plus two free companion tools: the AEO Grader one-time diagnostic and the market-level AI Search Sensor.
• Rankshift gives 30 days free with no card.
• Scrunch AI offers a 7-day Starter trial with no card; Otterly.ai offers a free trial of roughly a week.
• Profound's free trial runs your 10 prompts once, on ChatGPT only, which is enough to see the interface but not enough to trend anything.
• Ahrefs has a free AI Visibility Checker preview tool, though no paid trial of Brand Radar itself.
• Peec AI does not publish a trial on its pricing page, though third-party writeups report a 7-day one; ask before assuming.

We keep a full walkthrough of the no-budget route, including manual checking workflows, in our guide to free AEO tools.

Key takeaways

• Paid AEO tools start at $29/mo (Otterly Lite) and reach $295/mo (AthenaHQ Starter) at the entry, with most enterprise pricing custom-quoted and Profound now publishing no self-serve price at all.
• Cost per tracked prompt is the honest comparison: from roughly $0.71 (Scrunch Starter, $250 for 350 custom prompts) to $3.96 (Semrush, $99 for 25). Cheap entry tiers often carry the worst rates.
• Budget for the hidden layer: add-on engines (Otterly Premium with all three add-ons hits about $1,226/mo), overages (Brand Radar at ~$0.02 per check), per-domain multipliers (Semrush, $99 each), and unpriced add-ons (HubSpot multi-brand, AthenaHQ API).
• Agencies should shortlist credit-pooling models first: Peec's $245 to $795 agency tiers and Otterly's unlimited workspaces are priced for multi-client work; per-domain pricing is not.
• Start free where you can: AthenaHQ's free tier, HubSpot's 28-day trial, and Rankshift's 30 days cost nothing and will tell you which prompt volume you actually need.
• Annual billing saves 15 percent at Peec and Otterly and 17 percent at Scrunch and AthenaHQ, but only commit annually once your prompt set has stabilized.

Price the program, not the tool

Every number above is a September 2026 snapshot of a category that reprices constantly, so confirm with the vendor before signing anything. The more durable advice: scope your real prompt set and engine list first, then work out the all-in monthly cost for two or three tools, per tracked prompt, including every add-on. That twenty-minute exercise routinely flips the ranking that the sticker prices suggest.

And remember what the spend buys: a scoreboard. Tracking tells you where you stand in AI answers; it does not move you up them. If you want the baseline before committing to any subscription, an AI visibility audit from AEO Labs measures your citation share across engines and tells you exactly which tier, of which tool, your program actually needs.