Best AI Search Visibility Tools for Startups (2026 Prices)

Short answer: Start with the free checks: HubSpot's AI Search Grader, Bing Webmaster Tools' AI Performance report, Search Console and a 20-prompt spreadsheet. Pay for a tracker only when you have a prompt set worth watching every week. The sensible first paid tools for a bootstrapped startup are Geoptie ($49/mo), LLMrefs ($79/mo), Peec AI ($95/mo) or Semrush's AI Visibility Toolkit ($99/mo), depending on which AI engines matter to your buyers.

Every price and limit below comes from the vendor's own pricing page, checked on 11 Nov 2026. The recommendations are ours and are marked as such.

TL;DR#

• $0 stack: HubSpot AI Search Grader (free one-time check), Bing AI Performance (Copilot citations), Search Console, GA4 referrers and a spreadsheet.
• Under $50: Rankscale Essentials at $17/mo (yearly only), Geoptie Starter at $49/mo for 15 prompts, HubSpot AEO at $50/mo.
• Under $150: LLMrefs $79/mo, Peec AI $95/mo, Semrush AI Visibility Toolkit $99/mo, Am I On AI $100/mo.
• Team budgets: Scrunch from $250/mo, AthenaHQ Starter $295/mo, Ahrefs Brand Radar AI from $199/mo, Profound on custom pricing.
• Measure share, not rank. AI answers change from run to run, so track how often you appear across many prompts.

Disclosure: ZeroRaised publishes this comparison and is a launch site for bootstrapped products. There are no affiliate links in this post, and ZeroRaised has no commercial relationship with any vendor listed. Prices are as shown on each vendor's page on 11 Nov 2026 and can change.

What these tools actually do#

An AI visibility tool, sometimes sold as a GEO (generative engine optimization) tool, sends a list of prompts to AI assistants such as ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude, Copilot and Google's AI Overviews and AI Mode. It then records whether your brand is mentioned, which competitors appear, what sources get cited and, on some tools, the sentiment of the answer.

That is all monitoring. None of these tools make an AI recommend you. The work that changes answers is the content and distribution work covered in our guide to optimizing for AI search answers. This post only covers how to measure it without overspending.

Comparison table (prices checked 11 Nov 2026)#

Otterly.AI's pricing page showed euro prices to us on 11 Nov 2026 and says "Prices are in USD or EUR, excluding tax", so check which currency you are billed in.

The tools, briefly#

Free: HubSpot AI Search Grader and Bing AI Performance#

HubSpot's grader describes itself as "a free, one-time check". It asks GPT-5.4 mini, Perplexity and Gemini about your brand and scores you out of 100 across sentiment, presence quality, brand recognition, AI share of voice and market competition (HubSpot). Run it once to see what the models think you are. If they describe you wrongly, that is a content problem worth fixing before you pay for tracking.

Microsoft announced AI Performance in Bing Webmaster Tools as a public preview on 10 Feb 2026. It "shows how publisher content appears across Microsoft Copilot, AI-generated summaries in Bing, and select partner integrations", with total citations, cited pages and grounding queries, though Microsoft notes the data "represents a sample of overall citation activity" (Bing Webmaster Blog). On 13 Oct 2026 Microsoft added a Topics Portfolio beta that groups those grounding queries into topics (Bing Webmaster Blog). This is the only first-party citation data in this list, which makes it worth setting up even if you never pay for anything.

Under $50: Rankscale, Otterly.AI, Geoptie, HubSpot AEO#

Rankscale is credit-based. Essentials shows $17/mo and is "Yearly only", with 120 credits, up to 480 answers and 2 brand dashboards. Pro is listed at $99/mo for up to 4,800 answers, with a lower price shown for yearly billing. Its FAQ says a query is "typically 0.25 credits per engine per prompt" (Rankscale). The page says "17+" engines but does not name them, so confirm your engines in the trial.

Otterly.AI Lite is €29/mo for 16 prompts (2,000 credits a month) across 4 of its 7 engines, with one workspace and three recommendations a week. Standard is €189/mo for 120 prompts and adds API and MCP access. Every plan includes unlimited brands, competitors and team members, and there is a free trial. Its FAQ explains the maths: "One credit is one prompt checked once on one AI engine", and each Claude answer counts as 3 credits (Otterly.AI). Lite plans cannot buy extra credit packs, so 16 prompts is a hard ceiling.

Geoptie Starter is $49/mo for 15 monitoring prompts and 2 brands. Each brand tracks any four of seven engines: ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini, Microsoft Copilot, Google AI Mode and Google AI Overviews. Professional is $99/mo for 100 prompts, and annual billing gets 2 months free (Geoptie). No free trial is mentioned.

HubSpot AEO costs $50/month and HubSpot says no HubSpot subscription is required. It tracks ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini. It is also included in Marketing Hub Pro and Enterprise (HubSpot).

$79 to $100: LLMrefs, Peec AI, Semrush, Am I On AI#

LLMrefs has one paid plan, "All in One", at $79/month, marked "Limited time only". The page says it tracks "500 prompts" across ChatGPT, Google AI Overview, AI Mode, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude, Grok, Copilot and Meta, with unlimited team members and projects and a 7-day free trial (LLMrefs). The FAQ also talks about keyword limits, so check how prompts are counted in the trial.

Peec AI Starter is $95/mo: 50 prompts, 3 models of your choice from ChatGPT, AI Mode, AI Overviews, Copilot, Gemini and Naver AI, one project, one country and unlimited users. Extra models are $30/mo on Starter, and Peec says "We offer a 15% discount for customers who choose annual billing" (Peec AI). Perplexity and Claude are listed only on Enterprise.

Semrush AI Visibility Toolkit is $99 per month as a standalone toolkit with 1 project, 25 prompts for Prompt Tracking, and 50 more prompts for $60 per month. Semrush's knowledge base says "No, the AI Visibility Toolkit does not offer a free trial" (Semrush KB). If you already want Semrush for keywords, its paid SEO plan is $139 monthly and includes prompt monitoring (Semrush pricing).

Am I On AI Pro is $100/month for up to 150 prompts across ChatGPT and Google AI Overview, with a 7-day trial (Am I On AI).

Team budgets: Writesonic, Ahrefs, Scrunch, AthenaHQ, Profound#

Writesonic bundles tracking with its AI writer. Starter is $79/mo billed annually for 50 prompts on ChatGPT, Gemini and AI Overviews. Ahrefs lists Brand Radar AI "from $199/mo", and its Lite plan ($129/mo) includes "150 checks on AI prompts". Scrunch Starter is $300 month-to-month and comes with 3 users. AthenaHQ Starter is $295/month and covers eleven models. Profound shows no prices, only a free trial and custom Enterprise plans.

Our read: these are good products for funded marketing teams. For a startup under about $10k MRR, the money is usually better spent on the content and launches that change the answers.

What these tools cannot tell you#

AI answers are not a stable ranking. In research published on 28 Jan 2026, SparkToro and Gumshoe.ai had 600 volunteers run 12 prompts through ChatGPT, Claude and Google's AI a combined 2,961 times. Rand Fishkin's conclusion: "there's a <1 in 100 chance that ChatGPT or Google's AI, if asked 100X, will give you the same list of brands in any two responses", and it is "more like 1 in 1,000 runs before you'd see two lists in the same order" (SparkToro).

The same post found that "Users almost never craft similar prompts, even when they have the same intent", but that a stable set of brands still tends to appear. Its suggested metric is "visibility % across dozens to hundreds of prompts run multiple times". SparkToro also notes it has not proved that visibility percentage is the best metric.

What this means for you (our read):

• Ignore any "position 2 in ChatGPT" number. Watch your share of answers over a month.
• One run of one prompt is noise. A tool's value is in running many prompts many times.
• Your prompt list is a guess about what buyers type. Real prompts vary more than any tracker's list.
• No tool sees inside a user's chat history, memory or personalization.

The $0 manual method#

Before paying, run this for one month. It takes about an hour a week.

1. Write 20 prompts. Our split: 5 category prompts ("best invoicing tool for freelancers"), 5 problem prompts ("how do I chase late invoices automatically"), 6 comparison prompts against your 2 or 3 main competitors, 2 "alternatives to [competitor]" prompts and 2 prompts with your brand name.
2. Make a spreadsheet with columns for date, engine, prompt, mentioned (Y/N), competitors named and URLs cited.
3. Run each prompt 3 times per engine in a logged-out or fresh session, across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Google (for AI Overviews and AI Mode). Score mentions as a percentage, not a position.
4. Check Search Console. Google says AI Overviews and AI Mode traffic is "included in the overall search traffic in Search Console" and reported "within the "Web" search type", with no separate filter mentioned (Google Search Central). Watch impressions on the queries behind your prompts.
5. Check Bing AI Performance for citations and grounding queries.
6. Check GA4 referrals. Our tip: filter session source for chatgpt.com, perplexity.ai, gemini.google.com, copilot.microsoft.com and claude.ai to see which pages AI users land on.
7. Ask new signups "How did you hear about us?" with "ChatGPT or another AI" as an option.

If you are also doing classic search work, our SEO guide for bootstrapped startups covers the Search Console basics.

Decision table by budget#

This is our editorial advice, based on the prices above.

Worked example: a $0 month, then a $49 tool#

This is an illustrative example, not a real company. A solo founder runs a $3k MRR scheduling tool for tutors.

• Month 1, $0. 20 prompts, 4 engines (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Google), 3 runs each, once a week. That is 20 x 4 x 3 = 240 checks per week, or 960 for the month. Too many to do by hand, so they cut it to 1 run per engine each week (80 checks) and do 3 runs in week 4 only. Suppose the brand appears in 9 of 80 week-one answers (about 11%), all on comparison prompts, and never on category prompts.
• Month 2, $49. They move the 15 most useful prompts into Geoptie Starter on ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and AI Overviews, which tracks them without the spreadsheet. The hour a week saved goes into a comparison page and two guest posts aimed at the category prompts.
• Decision rule. If category-prompt share is still near 0% after three months, the problem is content and mentions, not tracking. Do not upgrade the tool. Fix the content.

Frequently asked questions#

What is the best free AI search visibility tool?#

For a one-off snapshot, HubSpot's AI Search Grader is free and checks how GPT-5.4 mini, Perplexity and Gemini describe your brand. For ongoing data, Bing Webmaster Tools' AI Performance report shows citations of your pages in Copilot and Bing's AI summaries, and Google reports AI Overviews and AI Mode traffic within Search Console's Web search type. AthenaHQ's Essential plan is also free with a $25 credit.

What is the cheapest paid GEO tool for a startup?#

Of the tools we verified on 11 Nov 2026, Rankscale Essentials is cheapest at $17/mo billed yearly only. Otterly.AI Lite is €29/mo for 16 prompts on 4 engines. Geoptie Starter is $49/mo for 15 prompts across any four of seven engines, and HubSpot AEO is $50/mo with no HubSpot subscription required.

Can these tools tell me my ranking in ChatGPT?#

Not in a meaningful way. SparkToro's January 2026 study found AIs almost never give the same list in the same order (under 1 in 1,000 runs). Rand Fishkin argues that visibility percentage across many prompts and repeated runs is a reasonable metric, while a single ranking position is not.

How many prompts should a startup track?#

Our read: 15 to 30 prompts is enough for most early startups. Cover the category question, the problem question, comparisons with your two or three main competitors, and one or two prompts with your brand name. Geoptie's 15-prompt Starter plan or a spreadsheet handles that.

Do I need Semrush or Ahrefs for AI visibility?#

Only if you already pay for them or need their SEO data too. Semrush's standalone AI Visibility Toolkit is $99/mo with 25 prompts and no free trial. Ahrefs Brand Radar AI starts at $199/mo, though Ahrefs' paid plans include a small number of AI prompt checks. Cheaper dedicated trackers cover most startup needs.

Get mentioned where AI looks#

Our read: tracking only pays off once there are pages on other sites that mention you, and a launch listing is one of the easiest to earn. Run through our product launch checklist, then submit your product to ZeroRaised for free. For more no-VC growth guides, join the ZeroRaised newsletter.

Sources#

All last checked 11 Nov 2026.

• HubSpot AI Search Grader, last checked 11 Nov 2026
• HubSpot AEO and AEO Grader, last checked 11 Nov 2026
• Bing Webmaster Blog: Introducing AI Performance in Bing Webmaster Tools Public Preview, last checked 11 Nov 2026
• Bing Webmaster Blog: Introducing Topics Portfolio (Beta) in AI Performance, last checked 11 Nov 2026
• AthenaHQ pricing, last checked 11 Nov 2026
• Rankscale pricing, last checked 11 Nov 2026
• Otterly.AI pricing, last checked 11 Nov 2026
• Geoptie pricing, last checked 11 Nov 2026
• LLMrefs pricing, last checked 11 Nov 2026
• Peec AI pricing, last checked 11 Nov 2026
• Semrush AI Visibility Toolkit knowledge base, last checked 11 Nov 2026
• Semrush pricing, last checked 11 Nov 2026
• Am I On AI pricing, last checked 11 Nov 2026
• Writesonic pricing, last checked 11 Nov 2026
• Ahrefs Brand Radar, last checked 11 Nov 2026
• Ahrefs pricing, last checked 11 Nov 2026
• Scrunch pricing, last checked 11 Nov 2026
• Profound pricing, last checked 11 Nov 2026
• Google Search Central: AI features and your website, last checked 11 Nov 2026
• SparkToro: AIs are highly inconsistent when recommending brands or products, last checked 11 Nov 2026