AI Visibility Tools for Small Teams: 4 Under $100 (2026)

The Five Questions That Decide Which Tool Fits

• What is the prompt cap on the cheapest paid tier? Otterly’s Lite plan allows 15 tracked prompts and its Standard plan allows 100 (otterly.ai/pricing, checked 16 September 2026); Scrunch’s Core tier allows 125 for $250 a month. A 15-prompt cap cannot hold a real buyer-question set, so treat it as a test rather than a home.
• Which engines are actually included at that price? Four is the common entry figure — typically ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews and Copilot — with Claude, Gemini and Google AI Mode moving to a higher tier. Check the tier table, not the logo row on the homepage.
• How often does it sample? A tool that checks weekly gives you four data points a month, which is thin for a channel whose answers change. Daily sampling on a small panel beats weekly sampling on a large one.
• Does it separate mentions from citations? Being named with no link builds recognition and no traffic. If the dashboard reports one blended number, you cannot tell an awareness problem from an attribution problem.
• Where does the data come from? User-defined prompt panels, opt-in browser panels, scraped chat interfaces and live API runs are four different measurements and they will report four different numbers for the same brand in the same week. Pick a method and hold it constant so your trend line means something.

What We Priced on 16 September 2026

• Otterly.ai — $29/month for Lite (15 prompts, four engines), $189/month for Standard (100 prompts) and $489/month for Premium (otterly.ai/pricing, checked 16 September 2026). The lowest credible entry point in the category, and the widest jump between tiers.
• HubSpot — the AI Search Grader is free and scores five dimensions, but it is a one-time read built from training data rather than a live monitor. Continuous tracking is HubSpot AEO at $50/month, or included with Marketing Hub Pro and Enterprise (hubspot.com/aeo-grader, checked 16 September 2026).
• Promptwatch — free to start, paid plans from $95/month, covering citations, crawler logs and visitor analytics (promptwatch.io/pricing, checked 16 September 2026). The cheapest paid package here that includes what the AI crawlers are doing on your site.
• Ahrefs Brand Radar — starts at $199/month, with a $699/month tier for all models. Prompts are checked daily on each selected platform, and Ahrefs notes that a Claude check consumes 8 checks per update, so the arithmetic of a 30-prompt daily panel is not the arithmetic of a 30-prompt weekly one (ahrefs.com/brand-radar, checked 16 September 2026).
• Scrunch — Core at $250/month: 125 unique prompts, 5 site audits a month, one brand workspace, 5 user licences and four LLMs, with a 7-day trial (scrunch.com/pricing, checked 16 September 2026). Priced for a team that has already decided AI visibility is a reporting line.
• Profound — no public entry price. The pricing page lists a trial with limited credits and a self-serve Agency Growth plan at 400 credits per month per client workspace, and the site banner announces a $180M Series D (tryprofound.com/pricing, checked 16 September 2026). Profound is the tool enterprise teams name first, and it is priced like one.
• Peec AI — Starter, Pro and Enterprise tiers with a free trial, and the prices sit behind a monthly/yearly toggle we could not read from the page, so we are not printing a number (peec.ai/pricing, checked 16 September 2026).
• Semrush — AI Visibility is sold as a toolkit alongside the SEO plans, and Semrush One bundles SEO with AI visibility in one subscription; the pricing page we loaded shows the cost of extra team member access for toolkit seats without a standalone list price (semrush.com/pricing, checked 16 September 2026). If you already pay for Semrush the add-on path is usually the cheapest one. If you do not, it is not a $29 decision.

Step by Step: A 20-Prompt Panel Before You Buy Anything

• Step 1 — Collect 20 real questions. Pull them from sales-call recordings, support tickets and the emails where prospects ask what to use for a job. Mix eight unbranded category questions, five comparisons (“Otterly vs Profound for a small team”), four problem questions and three branded ones.
• Step 2 — Write each one the way a buyer types it, not the way a keyword tool formats it. Store one prompt per spreadsheet row, with columns for engine, mention, citation URL, position inside the answer, and which competitor got named.
• Step 3 — Run the baseline by hand across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Google AI Mode. Twenty prompts across four engines is 80 rows. While you are in there, confirm that robots.txt and any CDN bot rules are not blocking the crawlers those engines depend on — a subscription will happily report on a site that AI crawlers cannot read.
• Step 4 — Wait seven days and repeat the same 80 rows. Only the differences matter. If nothing moves for two weeks, your prompts are too generic or the answer for your category is settled, and paying for daily sampling is premature either way.
• Step 5 — Buy the smallest tier that covers the panel you built. A 20-prompt list does not fit a 15-prompt cap, so Otterly Lite is a test rather than a home; size the tier against the list, never against the price tag.
• Step 6 — Wire the traffic side. In GA4, segment sessions from chatgpt.com, perplexity.ai and gemini.google.com and roll them into one AI referrals group, so the visibility numbers have a traffic counterpart you can defend in a budget meeting — the same approach we used for AI analytics tools for marketing.

Worked Example: $200 a Month for a Three-Person Team (example)

• Otterly Standard at $189/month — 100 prompts and four engines. The right buy if her prompt list is already above 50 and she needs daily refresh. Nine dollars of headroom is not a second tool.
• Otterly Lite plus HubSpot AEO at $79/month — two panels for well under half the budget, but each caps prompts, so the list has to be split deliberately rather than added to.
• Ahrefs Brand Radar from $199/month — the sane choice only if the team already pays for Ahrefs. The $699 all-models tier is three and a half times her entire budget.
• Skip the $250-plus tiers for now. Not because they are weak, but because prompt-level gaps in a 125-prompt programme are not actionable when your list is 20 and nobody owns the follow-up work.

Six Ways Small Teams Waste the First Month

• Buying before the prompt list exists. A tool cannot tell you which questions matter to your buyers. Sales calls can.
• Judging a vendor on a single reading. Answers shift between runs, so ask for a trial long enough to see two full cycles before you form an opinion.
• Counting mentions without citations. A named brand with no link builds awareness and no traffic; keep them in separate columns so you can tell the two problems apart.
• Paying for six engines when three cover your buyers. Conductor’s benchmark data puts 87.4% of AI referral traffic on ChatGPT, so add Perplexity for visible sources and Gemini or AI Mode only where your audience actually is.
• Ignoring the entry-tier prompt cap. Fifteen prompts is a sample and 100 is a programme — Otterly.ai jumps from 15 to 100 prompts between $29 and $189, and that jump is the real price of running a panel.
• Treating this as a replacement for SEO. The two overlap less than people assume, and the search-side mechanics are in our complete guide to AI-powered SEO.

FAQ: AI Visibility Tools for Small Teams