An AI visibility audit costs anywhere from nothing to about $10,000 in 2026, across three honest bands: free audits, which are lead magnets, from agencies and from tools like Knowatoa, Goodie AI and Rank Prompt; tracking subscriptions running roughly $29 to $500 a month from Otterly.AI, Semrush, Profound, Peec AI, AthenaHQ and Scrunch AI; and one time paid agency audits running roughly $1,000 to $10,000, with most productized versions between $997 and $5,000. Semrush publishes its AI Visibility Toolkit at $99 a month for 25 tracked prompts, Otterly.AI publishes a $29 Lite plan covering 15 prompts, and Ahrefs prices Brand Radar at $199 per platform per month or $699 for all platforms on top of a $129 base subscription. Most businesses spending under about $2,000 a month on marketing should start with a free audit plus a $99 tool, because the gap between tiers is not data quality, it is how many prompts get tested, how many engines get queried, and how many human hours turn the output into a prioritized fix list.
What are you actually buying when an AI visibility audit is free?
A real but shallow snapshot, paid for with your contact details and a sales call. Free audits are lead magnets. That is not an accusation, it is the business model, and it works because the report is genuinely useful.
The mechanics are standardized. Widget platforms like Insites, MySiteAuditor and SEOptimer sell white label versions to agencies, which embed a form, run an automated scan, email the PDF, and route the lead to a rep. Vendors do the same directly: Knowatoa offers a free instant audit plus a limited ongoing free tier against ChatGPT, Goodie AI runs a one time free assessment, Rank Prompt checks whether ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini name your brand with no signup, and Am I On AI shows a score preview with full results email gated.
What you reliably get: whether your brand is named at all on a handful of buyer questions, which competitors show up instead, which sources got cited, and usually a scan of schema and crawler access. What you do not get: enough prompts to be statistically meaningful, repeat runs of the same prompt, or a human who has looked at your category. A free audit answers “am I invisible.” It does not answer “what do I fix first.”
That is a fair trade if you go in knowing it. The mistake is treating a free scan as a baseline, because the prompt set is too small for the number to mean anything six months later.
What are the four price tiers for an AI visibility audit in 2026?
The market sorts into four tiers, and the jump between them is prompt volume, engine coverage and analyst hours.
1. Free lead magnet audit: $0
A one time automated scan, typically 3 to 20 prompts on one or two engines, delivered in minutes to 48 hours. Offered by agencies, including the one on this site at /audit/, and by Knowatoa, Goodie AI, Rank Prompt and Am I On AI. Use it to confirm whether a gap exists.
2. DIY tool subscription: $29 to $500 a month
Self serve platforms that track a fixed prompt set on a schedule. Otterly.AI publishes $29 Lite for 15 prompts, $189 Standard for 100 and $489 Premium for 400. Semrush sells its AI Visibility Toolkit standalone at $99 a month for 25 prompts across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Google AI, with Semrush One bundles from $199. Peec AI starts near $95 a month for 50 prompts and three models, then $245 and $495. Profound’s reported ladder runs $99 Starter for ChatGPT only and $399 Growth for three engines, though its pricing page is demo led, so treat those as reported rather than posted. Scrunch AI, acquired by Sitecore in June 2026, starts near $250 for Core, AthenaHQ lists $295 self serve, and Evertune has been reported at $800 for Pro.
3. One time paid agency or consultant audit: $997 to $10,000
A scoped, dated deliverable with a human analyst. Productized audits cluster at $997, $1,497 and $1,997 with 5 to 7 business day turnarounds, and freelance one time audits run $500 to $800 in 3 to 7 days. Agency pricing scales with site size: roughly $2,000 to $3,500 for a 100 page site and $5,000 to $7,500 for a 1,000 page site, per 2026 audit pricing guides from WebFX and SEOProfy. Multi market and regulated categories push past $10,000.
4. Ongoing monitoring plus remediation retainer: $1,000 to $10,000 a month
Here you are no longer buying an audit, you are buying the fixes. Entry AEO programs run $1,000 to $2,500 a month, mid market $3,000 to $8,000. Enterprise platforms sit above that on software alone: third party contract data puts Conductor near $24,000 to $60,000 a year and up, BrightEdge at $36,000 to $120,000, and seoClarity in the $50,000 to $100,000 band. Conductor, BrightEdge, seoClarity and Similarweb publish no list pricing, so those are quote based. The retainer math is in how much does GEO cost.
Why do two audits with the same name differ by $9,000?
Because the deliverable is not standardized and the cost driver is analyst hours, not software. Published methodologies describe 36 to 70 analyst hours across domain metrics, keyword gap work, competitor content review, visibility measurement and content recommendations.
Multiply that by rates. Ahrefs’ survey of 439 providers put the average consultant at $171.18 an hour against $98.90 for agencies and $71.59 for freelancers. Forty hours at $150 is $6,000 before margin. Five hours of running a tool and exporting a PDF is $750. Both get sold as an AI visibility audit.
The second driver is prompt volume, the closest thing this category has to a quality proxy. Independent analysis puts a credible audit for one market, one language and four to six named competitors at 40 to 120 prompts. Below 30, noise swamps signal and one hostile answer swings sentiment by ten points. Repetition matters as much as breadth: a 25 percent visibility rate measured over 72 answers carries a 95 percent confidence interval near plus or minus 10 points, tightening to about 5 points at roughly 300 answers. Evertune’s published research makes the same point.
What must a credible AI visibility audit contain?
Nine things, at minimum. If a sample report is missing more than two, you are buying a screenshot and a sales call. Use this as your scope checklist before you sign anything.
- Prompt set size and selection method. How many prompts, how many repeat runs each, and how they were chosen. Buyer intent questions pulled from sales calls and search data beat prompts invented by the auditor. Expect 40 to 120 for a single market.
- Named engine coverage. Which systems were queried: ChatGPT, Google AI Mode, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini, Microsoft Copilot, Grok, Meta AI. “AI search” with no list means one engine.
- Share of voice against named competitors. Your mention rate next to three to six specific rival brands, not an abstract score out of 100.
- The citation source list. Which URLs and publications the engines actually cited. This is the roadmap for earned media, and it is the section free reports skip most often.
- Crawler access and robots.txt review. Explicit allow or disallow status for GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, PerplexityBot, ClaudeBot and Google-Extended. Robots.txt analysis across Cloudflare’s network in 2026 found GPTBot blocked by roughly a quarter of top sites. Plenty of brands are invisible because a developer pasted a blocklist in 2024. The tradeoffs are in should you block AI crawlers.
- Schema coverage. Which structured data types exist, which are broken, and which are missing on money pages.
- Entity consistency. Name, address, phone, founder, service list and description matched across your site, Google Business Profile, Wikidata and the major industry directories.
- Sentiment and accuracy check. What the engines say about you when they do name you, including outdated or wrong claims.
- A prioritized fix list with owners and effort. Ranked by impact, assigned to a role, with an estimate. An audit that ends in observations instead of a task list is a report, not a plan.
If you want a no cost starting point before pricing any of this out, run the free AI visibility audit and use the output against this checklist.
How long should an AI visibility audit take?
Between 3 and 15 business days, depending on tier. Productized audits publish 5 business day turnarounds at $997 and 7 business days at $1,497 and $1,997. Freelance audits land in 3 to 7 days. Agency audits on large sites run 10 to 15 business days, because the prompt runs alone take several days when each prompt repeats across five or more engines.
Anything promising a real audit in under 24 hours is an automated scan. Fine at $0, suspicious at $2,000. Get the delivery date in writing, and ask whether a walkthrough call is included, because most credible providers add 45 to 60 minutes and that call is where the fix list gets understood.
When is paying for an AI visibility audit the wrong call?
When you already know the answer, or when you cannot act on it. Three cases where the free tier is the right stop.
You are under roughly $2,000 a month in total marketing spend. A $2,000 audit that eats the quarter and produces a fix list you cannot execute is worse than free. Start with a free scan plus a $29 to $99 tool such as Otterly.AI Lite or the Semrush AI Visibility Toolkit, and put the money into fixes.
Your site blocks AI crawlers or has no schema. You do not need 120 prompts to learn you are invisible when GPTBot is disallowed in robots.txt. Fix the file, wait 60 days, then measure.
You are not changing anything for six months. Visibility data decays fast, so an audit shelved until next fiscal year is a sunk cost.
Paying makes sense in the opposite conditions: budget to execute, competitors being named instead of you, deal values high enough that a few AI referred clients pay for the year, or a board that needs a defensible baseline.
What does it cost to fix what the audit finds?
More than the audit, always, and that is the number that should drive the decision. Diagnostic spend only makes sense against a realistic remediation budget.
Remediation falls into three buckets: technical work (schema, crawler access, entity cleanup) at roughly 10 to 30 hours of specialist time, content work building answer formatted pages at a per page cost, and earned media, the expensive part, because third party citations are what most engines weight when choosing which brands to name. Entry AEO retainers at $1,000 to $2,500 a month generally cover the first bucket and part of the second. The third is where retainers climb, which is why our service tiers separate technical AEO from press driven citation work.
A practical rule: budget the audit at no more than 10 to 20 percent of what you will spend on fixes over the following six months. If that puts your audit budget under $1,000, take the free one.
Not ready to spend anything yet? Get the free audit, no cost and no commitment, then revisit paid options once you know the size of the gap.
Frequently asked questions
Is a free AI visibility audit worth doing? Yes, with clear expectations. Free audits from Knowatoa, Goodie AI, Rank Prompt and agency widgets tell you whether ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Mode name your brand, and which competitors appear instead. They run small prompt sets on limited engines and exist to start a sales conversation. Use one to confirm a gap exists, then decide whether it justifies a paid audit with a human analyst.
How many prompts should an AI visibility audit test? Between 40 and 120 for a single market, single language, and four to six named competitors, with each prompt repeated multiple times. Below 30 prompts, response noise overwhelms signal. Above 200 you are buying precision you cannot act on. Semrush’s AI Visibility Toolkit tracks 25 prompts at $99 and Otterly.AI Standard tracks 100 at $189, so the tool tiers map roughly onto that credibility threshold.
Can I just buy a tool instead of an audit? Often yes. If someone in house can read the data and act on it, a subscription to Otterly.AI, Peec AI, Semrush or Profound delivers the measurement layer for $29 to $500 a month. What tools do not give you is prompt selection judgment, competitor context and a sequenced fix list. Our platform by platform comparison is in AI visibility tracking tools.
Do enterprise platforms like Profound and Conductor publish prices? Not consistently. Profound’s public pricing page is demo led, and Conductor, BrightEdge, seoClarity and Similarweb are quote based with no posted rates. Third party contract data puts Conductor near $24,000 to $60,000 a year and BrightEdge at $36,000 to $120,000, but those are reported deal sizes rather than published prices, so treat them as directional and insist on a written quote.
How often should I re run an AI visibility audit? Quarterly for measurement, monthly for tracking. AI answers shift with model updates and competitor publishing, so a one time audit ages within roughly 90 days. The practical pattern is a paid deep audit once or twice a year, with a $99 to $300 monthly tool such as Semrush, AthenaHQ or Scrunch AI running continuously in between so you see movement instead of snapshots.
What is the difference between an AI visibility audit and an SEO audit? An SEO audit measures rankings, crawlability and backlinks against Google’s index. An AI visibility audit measures whether ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude and Google AI Mode name and cite you in answers, which depends on citation sources, entity consistency and AI crawler access rather than blue link position. They overlap on technical foundations and diverge on measurement.
So what should you actually pay?
Nobody was ever made more visible by an audit. The audit is the invoice for finding out, and the useful test is whether the document changes what your team does on Monday. A $997 report with 60 tested prompts, a citation source list and nine ranked tasks with owners beats a $6,000 deck with a score out of 100 and no next step. Ask for the prompt count, the engine list and a sample fix list before you pay anyone.
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