Compared all 6 AI visibility tools in 2026 — the pricing is way more confusing than it looks

So I went through all the credible AI visibility / AEO tools available right now and the thing that surprised me most wasn't the features — it was how misleading the headline prices are. Quick example: Ahrefs advertises "from $199/mo." Scrunch's entry price is $250/mo. So obviously Ahrefs is cheaper, right? Not even close. If you're tracking one brand across 5 engines with 200 prompts and 3 seats — pretty standard mid-market setup — Scrunch comes out at $417/mo and Ahrefs comes out at $974/mo. The $199 buys you one platform. Five platforms is $699, then you need to add prompt packs on top. This pattern repeats across the whole category. The $29/mo tool (Otterly) lands at $638/mo in the same scenario because Claude, Gemini, and AI Mode are all separate add-ons. Profound requires an enterprise quote at any meaningful scale even though they publish a $99 tier. The other thing worth understanding before buying anything: these tools don't all measure the same thing. Three of them will give you three different share-of-voice numbers for the same brand in the same week, and that's not a bug — it's because they're using completely different collection methods. Profound licenses prompts from opted-in consumer panels (actual demand data). Semrush pulls from a 317M+ prompt clickstream database. Peec and Ahrefs scrape the chat UI directly. Scrunch and Otterly ingest real server/CDN crawler logs. These produce different numbers. They're not interchangeable and you can't compare them across tools. The quick breakdown of who each tool is actually for: Profound — you need to know what people actually type into AI assistants. Only tool with real user demand data. Expensive at scale. Semrush — your SEO already lives there and you want AEO in the same dashboards. No Claude coverage below enterprise though. Ahrefs — you care about YouTube and Reddit as AI feed sources (they index both, nobody else does). Most expensive at scale. Peec — you're an agency billing per client and need a credit formula you can actually forecast. Cleanest billing in the category. Otterly — small team, need multi-client, want API access without enterprise pricing. Watch the engine add-ons. Scrunch — AI tools are describing your products wrong and you want to fix it, not just track it. Only one with real crawler log ingestion plus a remediation layer. One thing I'd add before spending anything: set up Google Search Console's Generative AI performance report, GA4 AI referral segmentation, and check your server logs for GPTBot/ClaudeBot. Takes maybe a week, costs nothing, and tells you whether your problem is actually visibility (AI doesn't mention you), retrieval (it mentions you but doesn't cite you), or crawlability (bots can't reach your pages). Each of those has a different fix, and only the first one is what these tools address. Happy to go deeper on any of the six if useful.