What an AI visibility audit costs.

How much does an AI visibility audit tool cost per month?

Between $20 and $99 a month at the entry tier for the monitoring tools, which is $240 to $1,188 over a year at that tier, and $19 once for this audit. Higher tiers cost considerably more: Otterly’s next plan is $189/mo and Profound’s larger plans are quoted from about $399/mo. A monthly price is the number vendors advertise; the yearly one is the number you pay. The table shows what each entry tier includes and what twelve months of it costs at the monthly rate. Vendors change prices and tiers without notice; the source link is the place to check.

Rankscale and Otterly were checked at the vendor on 2026-09-19; Semrush on 2026-09-13. Two prices come from third-party pages rather than the vendor: Peec's from a review, Profound's from a pricing aggregator, because neither vendor publishes a full price list. Treat those two as reported, not quoted. Twelve months is the monthly rate × 12, before any annual-billing discount.

When is a one-off audit enough, and when do you need a subscription?

A one-off audit is enough when the job is a diagnosis: find out which buyer questions you lose and to whom, fix the site, and re-run in 30 days to see whether anything moved. A subscription is the right tool when the job is tracking: reporting to clients every month, watching a number daily, or following many prompts across many engines over time.

The two products overlap less than their marketing suggests. A monitoring tool re-asks the same prompts on a schedule and charts the trend; the diagnosis is a by-product. A one-off audit stops at the diagnosis and the fixes; there is no trend until you run it again.

To be plain about what Citeshare does not do: there are no dashboards, no daily tracking and no alerts. You get a report page that stays up, an emailed link, and the option to run it again. If you manage AI visibility for several clients, or need to show a chart of the last twelve weeks, buy a subscription.

Set against a monthly price, $19 once can read as the smaller purchase and therefore the lesser one. Compare the year instead. Fixing what an audit finds takes a few weeks, and the result is worth re-measuring two or three times a year, not daily: $19 to diagnose, $38 to diagnose and confirm the fix worked, $57 to check three times — against $240 a year at the cheapest subscription and $348 at Otterly, before anyone outgrows an entry tier. The subscription is the better buy when you will genuinely look at the chart every week. It is the worse one when you will look twice, which is what most small teams do.

What do other one-off audits cost?

Between $249 and $5,000. A monthly subscription is not the only thing to compare against: the closer product is somebody else running the questions once and handing you the findings, which is what agencies and done-for-you services sell. Those are the prices this audit sits against.

The $5,000 end buys human judgement, a named person to talk to and a strategy session; a $19 automated run buys none of those and does not pretend to. What it does buy is the same underlying measurement — real buyer questions, put to the engines repeatedly, with the answers kept — and the fixes that follow from it. Avante puts the wider done-for-you market at $1,500 to $5,000 one-time, and the do-it-yourself route at 30 to 60 hours of your own time.

That is the honest shape of the choice: this is the cheapest way to get the measurement, and the most expensive options are not buying a better measurement so much as a person to interpret it.

What do the engines answer today when someone asks?

We ran the full audit on citeshare.ai itself on 2026-09-13: 20 buyer questions for the category "AI visibility audit tool", each put to ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Grok and Perplexity, 220 answers in all, none failed. Ten of the twenty questions were about cost and alternatives. For each, the table shows the site linked in the most answers, its share of the 11 answers to that question, and the share of answers that linked no product at all.

Citeshare was linked in 0% of the 220 answers about its own category, and named in 0%. Across all twenty questions, 14% of answers linked no product at all. This page exists partly because of that result: the questions above are the ones a buyer asks, and on the day of the audit the engines answered them without us. A page that states the prices plainly, with sources, is the kind of page the engines were linking instead.

Who gets cited for these questions?

Over all 220 answers, nine sites were linked in 20 or more. Most of them sell or review monitoring tools, and the pages the engines linked are largely "alternatives to X" and comparison posts rather than product pages. The share is the number of answers in which the site was linked, out of 220.

The engines differ in whom they lean on. Over its 60 answers ChatGPT linked tryprofound.com in 12 and orchly.ai in 11; Claude linked discoveredlabs.com in 8 and otterly.ai in 7; Perplexity linked geoptie.com in 21 and discoveredlabs.com in 18. Over 20 answers each, Gemini linked geoptie.com in 6 and Grok linked thatmarketingbuddy.com in 7.

Aggregators are counted separately because they are cited for everything: linkedin.com and g2.com were each linked in 23 answers, reddit.com in 21, zapier.com in 10, blog.hubspot.com in 9 and youtube.com in 8. For a small vendor, being discussed on those three is the lever the evidence ranks highest.

What does a $19 audit give you, and what does it not?

It gives you one complete run and the fixes; it does not give you a trend, a dashboard, or a recording of the consumer apps.

• 20 buyer questions × 5 engines. ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity are asked each question three times, Gemini and Grok once: 220 engine runs, every saved answer with its links.
• Losing and open questions, ranked rivals, per-engine breakdown, and a CSV of the whole matrix.
• 14 site checks: crawler permissions, llms.txt, schema, content without JavaScript, freshness and the rest.
• A fixes pack written for your site: answer-first FAQ copy for the questions you are losing, a robots.txt fix, JSON-LD and llms.txt, in that order of expected effect.
• Paid once via Stripe, on your free report; if the audit fails to complete, the payment is refunded automatically.

Two limits apply to every number in it. The engine APIs with web search are a proxy for the consumer apps, not a recording of them: the direction carries over, the exact percentages do not. And every rate is a frequency over runs, never a single answer; with three runs per cell the per-question figures are a direction, and the per-engine and audit-wide figures are the ones to track between re-runs. The methodology gives the error bars.

Method

All engine figures on this page come from audit 16, the full Citeshare audit of citeshare.ai run on 2026-09-13 with the category "AI visibility audit tool" and the competitors Otterly, Peec and Profound confirmed at checkout: 20 questions, 5 engines, 220 answers, 0 failed. The report is public at /example; the models, run counts, definitions of "linked" and "no product", and error bars are on the methodology page. Subscription prices were checked by hand at the linked sources on 2026-09-13, and Rankscale, Otterly and the one-off audits on 2026-09-19. Every price is a quoted figure rather than an estimate, with one exception stated in the table: Rankscale publishes its entry tier as "starting at" $20/mo without a prompt count, so it is a floor, not a like-for-like tier.

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