Two tools, two kinds of number, and most teams buy the second expecting it to behave like the first.
A rank tracker asks a search engine a query from a chosen location on a chosen device and writes down where you appeared. Run it again an hour later and you will usually get the same answer. The number is a position, it is comparable with last week’s, and a change means something happened.
An AI answer tracker sends a prompt to a language model and records whether you were mentioned or cited. Run it again an hour later and you may get a different answer, with nothing having changed on your site or anywhere else. There is no position. What you have is one sample from a distribution, and a single sample is not a measurement.
That difference governs everything: what the tools can tell you, how they are priced, and how badly the usual dashboards mislead. This piece covers both categories, with published prices and limits taken from vendor pages on 2 November 2026, and the arithmetic that tells you whether a prompt allowance is a measurement or a decoration.
Why AI answer tracking is priced in prompts
Rank trackers charge by tracked keywords, because a keyword is a cheap, repeatable lookup. AI answer trackers charge by prompts, because every prompt is an API call to a model, and because the useful unit is not the prompt but the prompt run repeatedly.
This is the part no vendor dashboard makes clear. If a model mentions you in six runs out of ten for a given prompt, your visibility for that prompt is roughly sixty per cent, with an error bar that depends on how many times you ran it. Ten runs is a rough estimate. One run is a coin flip reported as a fact.
So when you compare plans, the question is not how many prompts you get. It is how many prompts multiplied by how many runs each, divided by how often you want the figure refreshed. Do that arithmetic before you look at the price.
The arithmetic, with an invented requirement
The prices below are verified from vendor pages; the requirement is made up to show the method.
Suppose you want to track 40 commercially meaningful prompts, across 4 assistants, re-measured weekly, with 10 runs per prompt so that the proportion means something. That is 40 times 4 times 10, which is 1,600 checks a week, or roughly 6,900 a month.
Now look at what the plans below actually include. Most of them are an order of magnitude short of that, which does not make them useless. It means you are choosing what to give up: fewer prompts, fewer assistants, less frequent measurement, or fewer runs per prompt and therefore a noisier number. Vendors present the allowance as a feature count. It is really a statistical budget, and the honest move is to decide which dimension you are sacrificing rather than discovering it later.
Our own position on building this yourself, where the run count is your choice rather than a plan limit, is in how to build a GEO monitoring tool with AI APIs, and the free manual version is in how to track brand mentions in ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini for free.
The established SEO suites, with AI tracking bolted on
Ahrefs
Published plans on 2 November 2026: Lite at $129 a month, Standard at $249, Advanced at $449, and Enterprise at $1,499 with an annual commitment required. A Starter plan is listed at $29 and there is a free tier.
Rank Tracker allowances are 750 tracked keywords on Lite, 2,000 on Standard, 5,000 on Advanced, and from 10,000 on Enterprise. Worth noting carefully: the comparison table lists update frequency as weekly on every plan, including Enterprise. If you need daily positions, this is not the product, whatever you pay.
AI visibility is a separate product called Brand Radar, listed from $199 a month on top, described as a way to “Track your brand’s AI visibility in AI search”. The AI prompt check allowances are 150 a month on Lite, 300 on Standard, 600 on Advanced, and from 2,500 on Enterprise. Against the invented requirement above, even the Enterprise allowance is a third of what weekly ten-run measurement of forty prompts across four assistants would need. The pricing page lists “Platforms” in the comparison table without naming them, so confirm which assistants are covered before buying.
SE Ranking
The best value of the three we could verify, and the only one where AI tracking is included rather than sold separately. Published plans: Core at $103.20 a month, shown struck through from $129.00, and Growth at $223.20 from $279.00. The page carries an “Annually Save 20%” toggle, which suggests the lower figures are the annual rate, though the page does not say so explicitly. Enterprise is “Custom limits and pricing”.
Keyword tracking is 2,000 keywords tracked daily on Core and 5,000 daily on Growth, with extra keywords from $22.40 and $32 respectively. Daily rather than weekly, which is a real difference from Ahrefs for anyone who needs to see a drop the morning it happens.
AI tracking is included on both plans at 25 prompts daily across 5 AI engines. A standalone AI visibility add-on starts from $71 a month in tiers of 75, 200 and 1,000 prompts, covering, in the page’s words, “AI Overviews, AI Mode, Gemini, ChatGPT, Copilot and more”. There is also an AI Search API from an additional $45 a month on annual billing.
Note the unit difference: 25 prompts daily included is a meaningfully different offer from a monthly check allowance, because daily measurement of a small prompt set is how you build a run-rate rather than a snapshot.
Semrush
We could not verify Semrush’s current pricing for this reference. Its pricing page returned a bot challenge rather than content when we tried to read it on 2 November 2026, so rather than repeat figures from a third party blog post that may be stale, we have left it unverified. Check the page yourself. The same caution applies to any list quoting Semrush numbers without saying when they were read.
The rest of the rank tracking field
AccuRanker, Nightwatch, Wincher, Advanced Web Ranking and Serpstat all compete here, generally on update frequency, location granularity and per-keyword price rather than on anything conceptually different. If rank tracking is the job, the questions worth asking are: how often does it check, can it check from a specific Indian city rather than just the country, does it separate mobile from desktop, does it record the full results page including the AI summary and the panels, and does it export by API so the number can live in your own reporting rather than theirs.
That last point matters more than the dashboard. The reporting pipeline described in the automated reporting piece on this site works only if every tool can hand over its numbers.
The AI-native trackers
A newer category built only for this, usually with better prompt handling and sentiment analysis than the suites, and usually without any traditional rank tracking at all.
Otterly.AI
Published plans: Lite, Standard at $189 a month, Premium at $489, and a custom Enterprise tier. Search prompt allowances are 15 on Lite, 100 on Standard, 400 on Premium, and from 1,000 on Enterprise. Extra prompt packs are $99 per 100 prompts a month on Standard and Premium.
One thing to flag, in the same spirit as our guest post marketplace review: the pricing page displayed two different sets of figures for the same plans when we read it, $29, $189 and $489 in one place and $25, $160 and $422 in another, without explaining which applies. Most likely a monthly against annual toggle, but the page does not say, so confirm at checkout.
Coverage on all plans is ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity and Microsoft Copilot, with Claude, Google AI Mode and Gemini as paid add-ons. Features include brand visibility, sentiment analysis and citation source tracking, which is the one genuinely useful output in this category: not whether you were mentioned, but which pages the assistant cited, because those are the pages to study.
Read the Lite tier honestly. Fifteen prompts, measured once each, is a demonstration rather than a measurement programme.
The others
Profound, Peec AI, Scrunch, Evertune, Rankscale, AthenaHQ and a growing number of others occupy this space, with pricing that is frequently on request and feature sets that change monthly. We have not verified their current figures and will not repeat them second hand. Two questions separate the serious from the rest: how many times is each prompt run before a number is reported, and does the tool tell you the citation sources or only the mention. A vendor that cannot answer the first question is selling you single samples.
What neither category can tell you
This is where most measurement programmes go wrong, and it applies to both halves of this market.
Personalisation and context. An assistant’s answer depends on the conversation it is in, the user’s history where that applies, and the exact phrasing. A tracker measures one phrasing in a clean session, which is a reasonable proxy and not the same thing as what your buyer saw.
Volume. Nobody knows how many people asked a given prompt. A rank tracker at least sits alongside search volume estimates; in AI answer tracking there is no denominator at all. A prompt you are winning may be one nobody asks.
Causation. You will see the number move and you will not know why, because the model changed, the retrieval changed, a competitor published something, or it was variance. This is why single-run measurement is actively harmful: it manufactures movement that demands explanation.
Revenue. Neither tells you whether any of it produced business. That connection is the attribution problem, and the model to use is in how to calculate SEO and GEO ROI, with the awareness side in how to measure brand awareness from AI search.
The comparison
All figures as published on each vendor’s own pricing page, read 2 November 2026.
| Tool | Type | Published price | Keyword tracking | AI prompt allowance |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Ahrefs | Suite, AI as add-on | $129 / $249 / $449 / $1,499 annual | 750 / 2,000 / 5,000 / from 10,000, weekly updates on all plans | Brand Radar from $199: 150 / 300 / 600 / from 2,500 checks a month |
| SE Ranking | Suite, AI included | Core $103.20 from $129, Growth $223.20 from $279 | 2,000 / 5,000 tracked daily | 25 prompts daily, 5 engines, included; add-on from $71 for 75 / 200 / 1,000 |
| Semrush | Suite | Not verified, page returned a bot challenge | Not verified | Not verified |
| Otterly.AI | AI-native | $189 / $489, second set shown as $160 / $422 | None | 15 / 100 / 400 / from 1,000 prompts; extra packs $99 per 100 |
| Build your own | AI-native | API usage only | None | Whatever you choose, which is the point |
How to choose
- Write down the prompts that matter commercially. Most businesses find ten to forty, not hundreds, and the list is answerable by hand rather than by tool.
- Decide the run count you need per prompt for the number to mean anything. Ten is a reasonable floor; one is not a measurement.
- Multiply prompts by assistants by runs by frequency. That total, not the plan name, is your requirement.
- If the requirement exceeds every affordable plan, cut assistants or frequency before cutting run count, because a noisy number is worse than a less frequent one.
- For rank tracking, check update frequency and city-level location before price. Weekly updates on an enterprise plan is a real limitation.
- Require API export from anything you buy, so the numbers land in your own reporting.
- Insist on citation sources rather than mention counts, because the cited pages are the only actionable output.
- Reconsider building it. At the volumes serious measurement needs, API calls to the models are often cheaper than a plan that still rations your runs.
What is a waste of money
A fifteen-prompt tier bought for a measurement programme.
Any AI visibility number derived from a single run per prompt, whoever reported it.
Paying for an AI add-on when you have not yet written down the prompts that matter.
Tracking five thousand keywords when forty of them affect a decision.
A dashboard whose numbers cannot be exported into the report leadership actually reads.
Buying the suite’s AI module because you already have the suite, without comparing its allowance against the standalone tools.
If someone has shown you an AI visibility chart and nobody can say how many runs are behind each point, get in touch.
Last verified: 2 November 2026. We review this page quarterly, and pricing in this category changes faster than that, so treat every figure as the date it was read.
Sources. ahrefs.com/pricing, seranking.com pricing page, otterly.ai/pricing, all read 2 November 2026. semrush.com/prices returned a bot challenge rather than page content on the same date and is therefore recorded as unverified.