Comparison / Pre-testing overview

Five AEO tools compared on published pricing, before we test them

By the VisibilityBench team / Published July 12, 2026 / Last updated July 12, 2026

We set out to build a simple table. Five AI visibility tools, one column for price, one for prompts tracked, one for engines covered. An hour of work, we assumed, and a useful reference for anyone shopping this category.

We could not build it. Not because the tools are complicated, but because published sources cannot agree on what these products cost.

What we are, and what this article is not

This is a paper comparison. We have not subscribed to any of these tools, pointed them at a website, or looked at a single dashboard. Every number below came from a vendor pricing page or a third-party review, and we will tell you which.

We are publishing it anyway for two reasons. It is the honest starting point for a site whose entire premise is hands-on testing, and the act of gathering these numbers taught us more about the category than the numbers themselves.

We are starting a 90-day hands-on test of one of these tools on a real small business website. When we have data, this page gets rewritten and the update log at the bottom will say exactly what changed.

The disclosure that belongs at the top, not the bottom

VisibilityBench plans to earn affiliate commissions, and Airefs runs the most generous program in this category at 30 percent recurring. We have applied to it. That is a financial interest in one of the five tools on this page and you should read everything below knowing it.

Which brings us to the thing we cannot leave out.

While researching this article, the most detailed AEO tool comparisons we found were published by Airefs. Titles like "Top 5 AEO Tools" and "Best Promptwatch Alternatives," on the Airefs blog, ranking Airefs first. They are well written, the data in them is mostly checkable, and they are also marketing. Airefs is the vendor we have the strongest financial reason to promote, and Airefs is running the exact playbook this site exists to counter.

We are naming it because a review site that hides its most awkward fact is not a review site. If a commission ever buys a better verdict here, the site is worthless, including to us.

The real finding: the published prices do not agree

Here is what different sources say about the same products, gathered in July 2026.

Some of this is explainable. Annual billing versus monthly accounts for part of the spread, and these are young companies changing prices quickly. But that explanation is itself the problem. If a reader cannot tell whether Otterly's entry plan tracks 10 prompts or 15, the difference between a usable tool and a useless one, then the published record is not doing its job.

Every number on this page is dated July 2026. Check the vendor's own pricing page before you buy, and do not trust any comparison table that does not tell you when it was written. Including ours.

Airefs

Published pricing: Lite at $24/mo, Pro at $49/mo, Expert at $83/mo, all reflecting annual billing. A 7-day free trial is advertised.

What you get at the bottom tier: one domain, three competitors, 25 tracked prompts, a two-day refresh, seven days of analytics history, and three Reddit keywords. The Pro tier at $49 moves to daily refresh and 90 days of history.

The angle: Airefs focuses on ChatGPT and Google AI Overviews rather than spreading across ten engines, and leans on source-level citation data, showing which specific URLs influenced an AI answer, plus Reddit thread monitoring. The pitch is that knowing why you are not mentioned beats knowing that you are not mentioned.

What we will be checking: whether 25 prompts on a two-day refresh produces enough data to see a trend, and whether the source-level citation data holds up or turns out to be a thin list of Yelp pages you could have found by hand. This is the tool we are testing first.

Otterly

Published pricing: Lite at $29/mo, Standard at $189/mo, Premium at $489/mo. A 14-day free trial with no credit card is widely reported.

The catch worth knowing: Google AI Mode and Gemini are not in the base tiers. Multiple reviews report them as paid add-ons ranging from $9 to $149 per month depending on plan. The headline "six engines" is true after you pay extra for two of them.

The gap between tiers: $29 to $189 is a steep second step. If ten or fifteen prompts is not enough for your business, and for most it will not be, the real price of Otterly is $189, not $29.

Unresolved: sources disagree on whether data refreshes daily or weekly. That is not a footnote. A weekly refresh on a tool you are using to measure the effect of a content change is a materially different product from a daily one.

AIclicks

Published pricing: the vendor site lists Starter at $59/mo (30 prompts, 3 AI platforms), Pro at $189/mo (150 prompts, 4 platforms), and Business at $499/mo. Two third-party reviews report the entry price as $79. A 3-day free trial is advertised, which is short.

The interesting design choice: AIclicks lets you pick which engines to track from a larger pool rather than gating specific models behind higher tiers. If Claude or Grok coverage matters to you on a budget plan, that flexibility is unusual in this category.

The thing to understand before you shop: AIclicks is a software product with a managed-services business attached, with done-for-you packages reported at $1,699 per month and up. That is a legitimate model, and it also means the software is partly a funnel. Judge the software on the software.

A three-day trial is not enough time to evaluate a tool that measures a trend. Plan to pay for at least one month if you want to learn anything real.

SE Ranking

SE Ranking is the most confusing entry on this list, and the confusion is structural rather than accidental.

The company sells AI visibility three ways. There is an AI Search add-on reported at $89/mo, available only to existing SE Ranking customers on top of a base plan that starts around $129/mo. There is SE Visible, a standalone product, whose starting price we found published as $79, $99, and $189 depending on the source and the tier being described. And the underlying SE Ranking suite is a full traditional SEO platform that happens to have AI tracking bolted on.

Engine coverage is disputed. One review from May 2026 states SE Visible tracked only ChatGPT and Google AI Mode at that time, with Perplexity, Gemini, and Claude listed as coming soon. Another source lists six platforms as live. Both cannot be right, and the gap between them decides whether the product is worth buying.

Who it actually suits: if you already pay for SE Ranking for rank tracking and site audits, the add-on is probably the cheapest real AI visibility you can get. If you do not, you are buying a suite to get a feature. SE Ranking's affiliate program pays 30 percent recurring with a 120-day cookie, one of the longest in the category, which we mention because we have an interest in it and you should know that.

Promptwatch

We could not establish what Promptwatch costs.

The vendor's own pricing page says paid plans start from $95/mo. A detailed third-party pricing breakdown lists Essential at $99, Professional at $249, and Business higher again. A different review lists Essential at $74, Professional at $165, and Business at $415, described as annual billing. A competitor's comparison page notes that Promptwatch's tiers do not disclose prompt limits publicly, which matches what we found.

What is consistently claimed: broad engine coverage including ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Perplexity on every plan rather than as add-ons, plus crawler log analysis and content gap detection. A 7-day free trial is reported on the lower tiers.

Our read, and it is only a read: a tool that publishes a price without publishing what the price buys is asking you to book a call. That is a sales strategy, not a defect. But for a small business owner comparing options on a Saturday, it is a wall, and it is the reason Promptwatch is hardest to place on this list.

What none of this tells you

Prices and feature lists are the easy part, and they are close to worthless on their own. Everything that decides whether one of these tools is worth your money is invisible from the outside:

• Does the data hold still? AI answers vary run to run. A tool that reports your visibility jumped 12 percent may be reporting noise. We do not know which of these tools sample enough times to say anything real, and none of them publish their methodology clearly.
• Are the citation sources useful or obvious? Every tool promises to show which sources AI models cite. If the answer is always Yelp and Reddit, you did not need software.
• Do the recommendations mean anything? "Content gap detected" is easy to generate and hard to act on.
• Does moving the number move the business? One review of Otterly notes that user testing has not found a consistent link between increased AI mentions and actual traffic. That is the question under all the other questions, and no vendor is in a hurry to answer it.

Those five questions are what we are testing. The answers will not come from a pricing page.

What we are doing next

We are running Airefs on a real small business website for 90 days. We chose it first for reasons we will state plainly: it is the cheapest entry point in the category, its focus on ChatGPT and Google AI Overviews matches where small business customers actually are, and it runs the affiliate program we have applied to. That last reason is a conflict of interest, not a qualification, which is why the test exists. If the tool does not deliver, the case study will say so, and the commission will be worth exactly nothing to us.

Before you buy any of these, run the free ten-minute check and find out whether you have a problem worth paying to solve.