GEO & AI Visibility Tool Pricing: The 2026 Market Benchmark

Direct answer. Entry-tier pricing for AI-visibility / GEO tracking tools spans roughly 17x in 2026 — from Otterly.ai's $29/month Lite plan to Profound's ~$399/month Growth tier — for tools that on paper do the same core job: run prompts against ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Google AI Overviews, then report whether and how a brand gets cited. The spread isn't random; it tracks engine coverage, prompt volume, and which segment of the market each vendor is chasing.

The GEO / AI-visibility pricing ladder (2026)

Consolidating research already published across nqzai's own tool comparisons (Share of Voice, Scrunch AI vs nqzai, Profound vs nqzai) plus fresh research for this benchmark:

Read this table as a ladder, not a leaderboard: a tool at $29/mo and one at $400/mo are not failing or succeeding at the same job — they're built for different buyers. The cheap end optimizes for a solo operator checking one brand's visibility occasionally; the expensive end optimizes for a team running ongoing competitive tracking across a dozen prompts and several named rivals, with SSO, multi-seat, and agency features layered on top.

Where the money is going: market trends

Two 2026 events say more about this category's trajectory than any feature comparison:

• Sitecore acquired Scrunch AI (June 2026). Scrunch stopped being an independent GEO startup and became the AI-search layer of an established enterprise martech stack. That's a consolidation signal — an incumbent buying its way into a category rather than building it in-house, which usually means the incumbent judged the category too important to risk being late to.
• Profound raised a $96M Series C at a $1B valuation (February 2026) and counts Ramp, DocuSign, Figma, Target, Walmart, and MongoDB among its customers. A unicorn valuation this early in a category signals investors betting the AI-answer-citation problem is durable, not a fad that resolves once search engines settle on a stable format.

Pricing itself is bifurcating as a result: a widening budget tier (Otterly, Peec) is absorbing solo operators and small teams priced out of the enterprise tier, while the enterprise tier (Profound, Scrunch's Enterprise plan) is pushing upward on the back of SSO, multi-brand, and agent-analytics features aimed at teams that already have budget allocated to "AI search" as its own line item — not squeezed out of an existing SEO tool budget.

What this means if you're buying

Three practical takeaways from laying the pricing side by side:

• Engine count isn't the differentiator it looks like. Several tools quote "10+ engines" at the top tier but only 3-4 at entry — read the entry-tier row, not the marketing headline, since that's the plan most buyers actually start on.
• "Weighted by prominence" is rare and underpriced relative to its value. Most tools in this table report a raw mention count or citation count. Very few compute whether a brand was recommended versus merely listed versus mentioned in passing — a real difference in what a citation is worth, and one this category mostly hasn't priced or built around yet.
• Subscription-per-category adds up fast. Running one AI-visibility tracker alongside a separate SEO suite and a separate content-optimization tool easily reaches $300-600/month in category-specific subscriptions before any team seats are added — the same stacking problem covered in the AI SEO tools comparison.

Where nqzai fits

nqzai's AI Share of Voice report runs the same core job as the dedicated trackers above — prompts against ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Perplexity plus Google AI Overviews, with a prominence-weighted score and concentration index rather than a raw mention count — priced pay-as-you-go instead of a category subscription, with a free single-engine taste and 1 million free tokens on signup. It doesn't out-depth a dedicated enterprise platform's agent analytics or multi-brand management; the trade is the same one covered across nqzai's other capability comparisons — breadth across GTM workflows against depth on one category alone.

Sources and methodology. Pricing and market-events data compiled 2026-08-31 from each vendor's own pricing pages where reachable, and independent 2026 comparison sites where a vendor's pricing page returned inconsistent figures (noted per-tool where sources disagreed). This is a point-in-time snapshot of a category whose pricing has already shifted more than once in 2026 for several vendors named here — verify current rates directly before budgeting.