What AI SEO tools actually cost

Every published price, in one table

Entry plan and the most expensive tier you can buy without talking to a salesperson. Anything above that is quoted, and quoted prices are not comparable.

Three metering models, three ways to overspend

Metered by prompt

Visibility trackers charge for the questions they ask on your behalf. Otterly.ai gives fifteen prompts at $29 and four hundred at $489. Semrush publishes fifty prompts a day on its Starter tier at $199, a hundred on Pro+ at $299 and two hundred on Advanced at $549.

This is honest pricing for genuinely metered work — every prompt is a real query run against a real model, daily. The overspend happens when a team tracks two hundred loose prompts instead of twenty buying ones, and pays for the noise every day for a year.

Metered by document

Content tools charge for output. Surfer counts documents: 120 on the $49 Discovery tier, 360 on Standard and Pro. Frase counts articles and audited pages: ten articles and fifty audit pages at $39, a hundred articles and a thousand audit pages at $239. Clearscope caps drafts at twenty a month on both paid tiers.

The overspend here is the reverse: teams buy a big allowance and use a fraction of it, because editing capacity, not generation capacity, is the real constraint.

Metered by project and seat

Suites charge for scope. Semrush at $139 covers five websites and five hundred keywords; extra users start at $45 a month each. Ahrefs runs from $29 to $1,499 on the same axis. The overspend is seats: a five-person team on a suite priced per seat can double its bill without changing what it does.

What the sticker price leaves out

• Engines. Otterly.ai sells Google AI Mode and Gemini as add-ons from $9 a month on Lite, and Claude from $29 on Lite to $439 a month on Premium. Frase puts Perplexity on its middle tier and Claude and Gemini on its top one. Surfer tracks ChatGPT only on its $99 Standard plan; all five engines with a daily refresh start at $182. If a specific engine matters to you, that engine, not the plan name, is what you are buying.
• Prompt packages. Ahrefs sells custom prompt tracking separately, from $50 a month on top of a plan. Otterly.ai adds a hundred prompts for $99 a month.
• Overages. Frase charges $5 per extra article, $0.50 per audit page and $0.25 per AI prompt on Professional, and less on Scale — but only if you switch pay-as-you-go on, which is off by default. Its entry tier simply stops at the limit. That is the right default and worth checking for on any tool you buy.
• Seats. Semrush from $45 a month each, Frase at $29. Otterly.ai and Clearscope include unlimited users, which is a real saving for a team of four and irrelevant for a team of one.
• Hosting and reports. Frase bundles a CMS free to 100,000 page views, then $19 or $99 a month. Semrush prices its better reporting at $20 a month. Small, but they are the line items that make a $139 plan a $250 invoice.

A worked example: three sites, two people

Take a common shape: a small agency or a multi-brand company with three websites, two people who need logins, and a real interest in whether ChatGPT and Google AI Overviews mention their clients. Published list prices, no discounts, monthly billing where offered.

• Tracker plus content tool: Otterly.ai Standard at $189 a month for a hundred prompts, plus Frase Professional at $103 a month billed yearly for five sites and three seats. About $292 a month, and both jobs are covered.
• One suite: Semrush Pro+ at $299 a month covers fifteen websites, a hundred daily prompts and classic SEO, plus $45 for a second seat. About $344 a month for one login and no separate content workflow.
• Cheapest credible: Otterly.ai Lite at $29 for fifteen prompts, plus Frase Starter at $39 billed yearly. About $68 a month — genuinely useful, but one site and one seat on the Frase side.

The gap between the cheap answer and the comfortable answer is roughly four times the money for perhaps twice the coverage. That is the trade the pricing pages are designed to obscure, and it is the reason to write down your prompt list before you shop rather than after.

For reference, Edition House — our product — is £15 a month for analysis and one experiment, and £199 a month for the plan that adds compliance scanning. It answers a different question from the trackers above; the regulated-firms comparison sets out where it fits and where it does not.

When a vendor will not print the number

Profound is the notable case on this list. Its plan structure is published in detail — Starter tracks ChatGPT only with 50 prompts, 1,500 responses a month, Growth covers three engines with a hundred prompts and nine thousand responses a month, Enterprise reaches up to nine engines with API access and SSO — but the prices themselves render as an animated counter rather than text.

Review sites quote figures for it. This post does not, because we could not read them at the source, and repeating a number we could not verify is exactly the habit that makes comparison pages untrustworthy. Check the vendor’s page before budgeting.

The wider point holds for everything here. Prices in this category move fast: SE Ranking retired its cheaper tiers, Semrush renamed its whole plan line-up around AI search, and several trackers have repriced within a year. Every figure on this page carries the date it was read for that reason.

Use the data

The table above is not hand-typed prose. It is a dataset, and it is published as one at /data/ai-seo-tool-prices in JSON, with the vendor page every figure was read from, the date it was read, and a null price where a vendor does not print one.

Quote it, reproduce it, or point an assistant at it. The only condition is attribution and a link. We publish it this way because a price table without its method is a claim, and a claim you cannot check is one an answer engine is right to ignore.