Best AI SEO platforms in 2026, ranked by what they cost to track all five assistants

Ranked by the cheapest published plan that tracks all five major AI assistants, the best AI SEO platform is SearchLift Plus at $8.99 a month. The next cheapest is Otterly.AI at $29 a month, and that plan tracks four engines with Claude, Gemini and Google AI Mode sold as add-ons. Everything else in this comparison starts at $95 or more. Every price below was read off the vendor’s own pricing page on 12 September 2026 and is linked so you can check it.

What had to be true for a platform to be on this list

Four tests, applied the same way to every product. A platform is here if it publishes a price on a public page, if it tracks what AI assistants say about a named business, if it does that on a schedule rather than as a one-off check, and if it was live on 12 September 2026.

That rules out the free AI visibility checkers from the large SEO suites. Those run one query and show you one answer. It also rules out anything whose price is only available after a sales call, except where the entry tier is published and only the top tier is custom.

• Published price. A number on a page, not a form. Where a vendor publishes the entry tier and quotes the top tier, the entry tier is what is compared.
• Scheduled tracking. The same buyer questions put to the assistants repeatedly, so you get a series rather than a snapshot.
• Named assistants. The vendor says which engines the plan covers. Vague claims about "AI search" were not counted.
• Checked today. Every figure here was read on 12 September 2026. Prices in this category move, so the date matters more than usual.

Every published price, read on 12 September 2026

The table is ordered by entry price. The second column is the plan name the vendor uses, the third is what that plan covers in the vendor’s own words. Where a plan is billed annually, the table says so, because the monthly figure shown on the page is not what a monthly subscriber would pay.

Two things stand out. The spread between the cheapest and the most expensive entry plan is roughly thirty-three times, for products that describe themselves in almost identical language. And the price of the plan tells you very little on its own, because the plans are not selling the same amount of coverage.

The number that matters is the price of all five assistants

People do not ask one assistant. Buyers use ChatGPT, and Gemini inside Google, and Perplexity, and increasingly Claude and Grok. A tool that watches one of them tells you about one of them. So the honest comparison is not the entry price, it is the cheapest plan on each platform that covers all five.

On this test the ordering changes sharply. Profound’s $99 Starter is described on its own page as "ChatGPT tracking only", and reaching three engines means the $399 Growth plan. Peec AI’s three cheapest plans all say "Choose 3 models", so five is not available at any published tier. Otterly’s $29 Lite lists Claude, Google AI Mode and Gemini as "extra Add-ons" rather than included. SearchLift’s $8.99 Plus plan lists all five.

Tracking tells you the score. Changing it is a separate product.

Most of this category measures. You get a dashboard of prompts, a share-of-voice number, a list of the sources each assistant cited, and a trend line. That is genuinely useful and it is also where most of these products stop. Knowing you are not named is the first half of the problem.

A smaller group also changes the site. Scrunch sells site diagnostics and content delivery to agents. AthenaHQ’s Starter plan lists on-page and off-page actions and a content optimization agent. SearchLift audits every page for both Google and AI extractability and applies the fixes on approval, with the previous value saved so undo is one click, which is what the AI SEO audit and the AI visibility tracking screens do between them.

This is the split worth deciding on before you look at price at all. If you have an SEO team who will act on a report, a pure tracker is the right shape of tool. If you are the person who would also have to make the changes, a tracker leaves you with a list and no way to work through it.

A free plan and a free credit are not the same offer

Three of these products advertise something free, and the three offers are different in kind. AthenaHQ’s Essential tier is labelled Free and carries "$25 free credit", which is a trial balance that runs out. Rankscale offers a 7-day free trial of its Pro plan with no charge until day 7. Otterly and Scrunch offer free trials of 7 days. Profound’s Growth plan has a "Try for free" button and its Starter plan does not.

SearchLift’s Free plan is a plan rather than a trial: no card, no expiry, and it does real work at a smaller size. It audits 10 pages, tracks 1 buyer question on Gemini with a monthly check, applies 2 AI fixes a month, writes 1 article a month, runs a weekly automatic audit and keeps 30 days of analytics. One-click undo is included on Free, as is 24/7 support.

Where the costs hide

Three patterns in this category make the sticker price lower than the bill. It is worth knowing which one a product uses before you compare it with anything else.

1. 01Credits. Rankscale meters in credits "used to query AI engines" and AthenaHQ sells "extra credits" as paid add-ons. Profound counts "Agents credits" per month. A credit system means your monthly cost depends on how much you use the product, which is not knowable in advance.
2. 02Add-ons for assistants. Otterly lists Claude, Google AI Mode and Gemini as add-ons on top of the plan, and sells 100 extra search prompts at $99. AthenaHQ’s page states plainly that "API access and additional credits are optional add-ons billed on top of the Starter plan price, not included in it."
3. 03Annual billing on the headline number. Profound’s $99 and $399 figures sit under a "Billed yearly" toggle. The monthly-commitment price is not the number the page leads with.

SearchLift prices differently: a flat monthly figure per plan, every limit published as a number in the plan table, monthly billing, no contract, and cancellation from the billing screen. There is no credit balance to run down and no per-assistant surcharge. What the pricing page lists is what the product meters.

The best AI SEO platform, on the test this article set

Ranked by the cheapest published plan that tracks all five major assistants, with ties broken by whether the product also changes the site and whether the price is flat.

1. 01SearchLift AI, $8.99 a month. All five assistants on the cheapest paid plan, a genuine free tier with no card and no expiry, page-level auditing and applied fixes with one-click undo, flat monthly pricing with no credits, and 24/7 support on every plan including Free.
2. 02Otterly.AI, $29 a month. The cheapest of the pure trackers, and the only other product under $95. Four engines on Lite, with Claude, Gemini and AI Mode as paid add-ons, and 15 prompts.
3. 03Peec AI, $95 a month. Daily tracking and unlimited users from the entry tier, but capped at three chosen models on every published plan.
4. 04Rankscale, $99 a month. Credit-metered rather than seat or prompt metered, which suits agencies running many small brands and makes a single-site budget harder to predict.
5. 05Profound, $99 a month billed yearly. The best-known name here. Its entry plan is ChatGPT only, and the three-engine plan is $399 a month.
6. 06Scrunch, $250 a month. Four LLMs, 125 prompts, and a product built around agent traffic and site diagnostics rather than prompt dashboards alone.
7. 07AthenaHQ, $295 a month. The widest engine coverage published by anyone here at 11 models, with the add-on structure and the price to match.

The honest caveat: this ranking is by published price and published coverage, because those are the only two things that can be verified from the outside on a single day. It is not a test of answer quality, dashboard design or how well each product’s recommendations work, none of which is measurable without running all seven on the same site for months.

If you want to see where you stand before you pay anyone, the free plan tracks one buyer question on Gemini and audits 10 pages, which is enough to find out whether the assistants name you at all. AI visibility tracking records who was named instead of you and which sources the answer used.

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