From Free to $4,500 a Month: The State of AEO Tools in 2026
Funding is booming, prices run from free to $4,500 a month, and the AI answers every tool measures change from one run to the next.
Funding is booming, prices run from free to $4,500 a month, and the AI answers every tool measures change from one run to the next.
Data from each company’s own site (prices as published on November 3, 2026), Search Shift’s own test of September 26, 2026, and the sources named in each row.
- Medium: From Free to $4,500 a Month: The State of AEO Tools in 2026
- RankControl, an AI SEO and AEO platform
- Google Doc
- Google Sites: AEO Tool Prices by Shelf, and the Answers They Measure
Prices by shelf and tool
| Shelf or tool | What the post says | Source | Data from |
|---|---|---|---|
| Add-ons from suites | Add-ons from big SEO and marketing suites (Semrush, Ahrefs, Similarweb, HubSpot): self-serve entry from free to $99 a month, enterprise suites at quote-only prices | Each company’s own site | November 3, 2026 |
| Standalone trackers | Standalone AI visibility trackers (Profound and a crowd of smaller tools): about $20 to $295 a month, custom enterprise plans at the top; Across all self-serve plans, standalone trackers run roughly $20 to $500 a month. | Each company’s own site | November 3, 2026 |
| Content tools | Content tools that added tracking (Surfer, Jasper and others): about $39 to $82 a month for the tracking, quote-only business tiers above that | Each company’s own site | November 3, 2026 |
| Tools that also do the work | Tools that also do the work (trackers that write and publish): prices vary widely at both ends | Each company’s own site | November 3, 2026 |
| Semrush | Semrush’s AI Visibility Toolkit runs $99 a month on its own. | Each company’s own site | November 3, 2026 |
| Ahrefs | Ahrefs bundles basic prompt tracking into its paid plans. It sells standalone custom prompts from $50 a month, an AI visibility index at $199, and a $699 tier that adds Claude. | Each company’s own site | November 3, 2026 |
| Similarweb | Similarweb, which only sold its AI product on custom quotes earlier this year, now lists self-serve tiers from $99 to $542 a month. | Each company’s own site | November 3, 2026 |
| HubSpot | HubSpot bought an AEO startup and turned it into a free grader and a $50-a-month add-on. | Each company’s own site | November 3, 2026 |
| One enterprise SEO suite | one enterprise SEO suite publishes base plans from $2,500 a month, and its Enterprise tier from $4,500, before its AI module, which is priced by quote. | Each company’s own site | November 3, 2026 |
| Cheapest standalone tracker | The cheapest tracker we found starts at $20 a month on credits. A well-funded rival charges $95 for 50 prompts on three engines. | Each company’s own site | November 3, 2026 |
| Profound | Profound used to list self-serve plans starting at $99 a month. It no longer lists a self-serve paid plan at all, and past a seven-day trial everything is a custom enterprise quote. | Each company’s own site | November 3, 2026 |
| Surfer and Jasper | Surfer sells a dedicated AI tracking tier for $82 a month on annual billing. Jasper keeps its GEO features on its custom-priced Business plan. | Each company’s own site | November 3, 2026 |
| RankControl | RankControl costs $400 a month on one plan, with a 7-day free trial. RankControl’s AI visibility tracker tracks citations across 7 AI engines: ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini, Grok, Google AI Mode and Google AI Overviews. It checks up to 50 buyer questions every week | Each company’s own site | November 3, 2026 |
| Claude and Grok | Ahrefs adds Claude only at its $699 tier. Profound doesn’t list Grok on any plan. | Each company’s own site | November 3, 2026 |
Funding and deals
| Number | What the post says | Source | Data from |
|---|---|---|---|
| $20 million | Series A, June 2025: $20 million, valuation not disclosed | Profound funding history, as the post lists it | June 2025 |
| $35 million | Series B, August 2025: $35 million, valuation not disclosed | Profound funding history, as the post lists it | August 2025 |
| $96 million | Series C, February 2026: $96 million, valued at $1 billion | Profound funding history, as the post lists it | February 2026 |
| $180 million | Series D, September 2026: $180 million, valued at $1.8 billion | cmswire.com article | September 2026 |
| $330 million | That’s roughly $330 million raised in about 15 months. The Series D announcement named customers including Walmart, Zoom and Figma, and claimed more than a third of the Fortune 100. | Profound funding history, as the post lists it | September 15 |
| 3,600 to 8,100 | US searches for “profound ai” climbed from about 3,600 a month in December 2025 to around 8,100 a month through the spring and summer of 2026. | Search interest, as the post gives it | December 2025; the spring and summer of 2026 |
| April 28, 2026 | Adobe completed its acquisition of Semrush on April 28, 2026 | pulse2.com article | April 28, 2026 |
| October 31, 2025 | HubSpot announced on October 31, 2025 that it was buying XFunnel, an AEO startup, and rebuilt it into a free AI Search Grader and a paid tracker. | HubSpot announcement, as the post gives it | October 31, 2025 |
| $21 million | Smaller trackers kept raising too, including one European startup that closed a $21 million Series A in November 2025. | The post names no single source | November 2025 |
Answers that change between runs
| Number | What the post says | Source | Data from |
|---|---|---|---|
| 3 runs, 2 with no tool | On September 26, we asked OpenAI’s model (the one behind ChatGPT), with web search turned on, the most basic question in this market. We asked it three times: “How do I track my brand in ChatGPT?” Twice, it didn’t name a single tool. Only the third run named one vendor. | Search Shift test | September 26 |
| About 70% | We ran five AEO buying questions three times each through OpenAI’s model and Perplexity, then measured how much the named tools overlapped between runs. Overall, the named tools overlapped about 70% between runs, 58% on OpenAI’s side and 82% on Perplexity’s. | Search Shift test | Not dated in the post |
| 78% / 74% | Best AEO tools for a B2B SaaS company: 78% on OpenAI, 74% on Perplexity | Search Shift test | Not dated in the post |
| 33% / 83% | How do I track my brand in ChatGPT: 33% on OpenAI, 83% on Perplexity | Search Shift test | Not dated in the post |
| 58% / 73% | Best AI visibility tracker for agencies: 58% on OpenAI, 73% on Perplexity | Search Shift test | Not dated in the post |
| 100% / 100% | Profound vs a named smaller rival: 100% on both | Search Shift test | Not dated in the post |
| 22% / 78% | Cheapest way to monitor brand mentions in AI answers: 22% on OpenAI, 78% on Perplexity | Search Shift test | Not dated in the post |
| Under 1 in 100 / 1 in 1,000 | SparkToro’s study, published on January 27, 2026, had 600 volunteers run the same 12 prompts across ChatGPT, Claude and Google’s AI. The odds of getting the same list of brands twice were under 1 in 100. The odds of the same list in the same order were closer to 1 in 1,000. | SparkToro study | January 27, 2026 |
| Less than 3% / 11 to 13% | Ahrefs’ Glen Allsopp tracked more than 1,300 commercial prompts a day for 28 days, over 70,000 responses on ChatGPT and AI Overviews. Two random days produced an identical full brand list less than 3% of the time. Even brands recommended on 80% or more of days still changed 11 to 13% of the time from one day to the next. | Ahrefs (Glen Allsopp) | Not dated in the post |
| About a quarter | Semrush’s own research found that only about a quarter of cited domains (websites an answer names as sources) overlapped when ChatGPT answered the same prompt in minimal and high reasoning modes. | Semrush research | Not dated in the post |
| About 30% | In August 2026, the founder of one small tracker described on Reddit how about 30% of their Perplexity requests had been rate-limited, meaning Perplexity turned them away. | Reddit post by the founder of one small tracker | August 2026 |
- Reference: https://medium.com/@thesearchshift/from-free-to-4-500-a-month-the-state-of-aeo-tools-in-2026-99fcf92e781d
- Reference: https://rctrl.com
- Reference: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1b8slsG39so0hK1ZwgNqOuLV64RmFoPbbegoDSoy4rVY/edit?usp=sharing
- Reference: https://sites.google.com/view/search-shift-notes/aeo-tool-prices-by-shelf
- Reference: https://www.cmswire.com/digital-experience/profound-nabs-180m-to-scale-ai-marketing-platform/
- Reference: https://pulse2.com/adobe-completes-acquisition-of-semrush-expanding-brand-visibility-and-ai-search-capabilities/amp/
- Reference: https://sparktoro.com/blog/new-research-ais-are-highly-inconsistent-when-recommending-brands-or-products-marketers-should-take-care-when-tracking-ai-visibility/
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